Words escaped Mason. They flitted through her mind, back and forth, swept up in an emotional storm, failing to snag and catch, failing to land where she could bring them out into the open. She’d felt like this when she’d sought out the counsellor on the farm. She’d known that she needed to talk about it, to open up her grief, but the words had become clogged in her heart and chest. She’d tried so hard to stop blaming herself. That had been the work of the best part of two years. Wondering if she’d done something wrong, if the fall had caused it, if she’d caused the terrible loss of their child.
Consciously and practically, she knew that it was highly possible it had not been anything she’d done. Consciously. But her deepest fears would sometimes run free, waking her in the middle of the night—terrible pain and fear wracking her body with tremors—her body knowing enough to feel pain and loss, but her mind taking a second to catch up. To remember. And then would follow the avalanche of guilt—how could she have forgotten, how could she have to struggle to remember?—drenching her with ice-cold sweat and tears.
With each passing day, month and finally year, her grief had become a thread woven into her very being, the fabric of who she was. But it was a secret thread, invisible to the naked eye, known only to her...and to Danyl.
Unconsciously, her fingers picked at the skirts of the beautiful dress, and she almost started when she felt Danyl’s hands lie over hers to stop them. She stole a glance at his profile, looking out to the public gardens and the palace before them. His jaw was clenched as tightly as the knot in her stomach.
‘We need to...to talk about it. Because, Mason, I really can’t move on until we do. I’ve tried, I really have, but seeing you again...when you approached us in that club...’ The unspoken accusation lay heavily between them. Why did you do it? Why did you come back?
‘I had no choice,’ she said into the warm night air about them, shifting her hand in his. ‘We were going to lose the farm and you were the only people who might be insane enough to take a risk on a jockey who hadn’t ridden internationally in almost ten years. Especially with my reputation.’
‘A reputation that will now be cleared.’
Mason allowed herself to take that in. Even though it was unlikely that anyone would care, all these years later, she felt...vindicated. Harry would be cleared too. He’d struggled for a while after Rebel’s death, but through hard work and with head down he’d managed to rebuild his stables and reputation. But her? She’d hidden in the Hunter River Valley. She’d hidden from the world where she thought she’d be safe from prying eyes. But she hadn’t been safe from the past.
‘What will happen to Scott, do you think?’ she asked Danyl.
He drew in a breath. ‘I’ve passed the information on to the Racing Commission, who will probably look into it. The police may even want to investigate, though defamation is a civil matter, purposefully harming the horses... That could be criminal.’
Mason sighed, a little of the hurt leaving her chest. ‘I’d not really thought of it like that. I... I was...’
‘We weren’t the only ones who could have uncovered him. Just the first. And we were a little preoccupied at the time.’
‘But those first months...’
‘That is what I was talking about. We were...happy,’ he said, so sadly that it cut her to the quick.
‘We were naïve,’ she retorted, then regretted it. It had been an automatic response built from years of self-defence.
‘Do you really feel that way?’ Danyl asked, turning to her as if to try and read the truth from her.
‘In a way,’ she said, looking down at their hands, entwined. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, fighting the tears that rose unbidden to the backs of her eyes, ‘sometimes it doesn’t feel real. I remember the snatches of happiness, and think...we could never have been that happy. It couldn’t have really felt like that. Because how can a person live like that? Feeling that constant level of...? They’d explode, wouldn’t they?’ She turned to him. ‘And then I think that maybe it was like that. But only because it...’ She searched for the words. ‘It was like candyfloss. Impossibly sweet, so very delicate and ephemeral. It could never have lasted because there was nothing deeper, no solid layer beneath to support it.’
* * *
A wound Danyl thought had healed opened up in his chest. Not the one that covered his grief over their child, but the one that contained all the memories of his short time with Mason, the one where he’d buried his love for her, and cemented over the top. That same love was thrashing around in the bottom of the well, begging, shouting to be let out, crying to be heard.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said, hoping she didn’t hear the begging tone in his voice. ‘Don’t undermine what we had. You know it was more than that.’
‘Really? And how would I know that? We were children, Danyl. So young, and so naïve. As if to think that we could meet, fall in love and live happily ever after.’
Fury ripped through him as her words tore apart their past. ‘The only thing that stopped us was you leaving.’
‘How could I stay?’ she demanded, as angry as he felt. ‘Our grief—’
‘Our grief? Ours?’ he all but spat. ‘You held your grief as if it was your own. As if you were the only one who had the right to it. You left me and I couldn’t share my grief, or provide you with comfort. I couldn’t do anything.’
‘I left because it was too much!’ Danyl caught the silvery trail of tears tipping over her cheeks. ‘I couldn’t open up the way I felt, I couldn’t open up those gates, because I was afraid that once they were open I’d never be able to close them again.’
‘Perhaps they shouldn’t have to be closed.’
‘Closed or open, we couldn’t have stayed together bound solely by grief. Grief instead of love. We were so young. I had my career and you had—no, have a country.’
The same powerlessness he had felt all those years ago rushed over him, his thoughts, his skin, pulling at the hairs on his arms. He’d felt so lost. Supposedly able to protect a country, but not his child, and not the woman he loved.
‘We lost a child,’ Danyl said, turning to her, desperately wanting her to see, to feel what he was trying to say.
‘We didn’t lose him, Danyl.’ Her words held the ache of grief and hot anger. ‘He isn’t waiting somewhere for us to find him! He died, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’