CHAPTER
3
Eight long hours later, on the drive home from the Mediflight West hangar, Kirsty had to pull over by the servo on Gatnick Road and face facts.
Hadn’t she spent a lifetime believing that fate would trip her up if she let it catch her? And now it had. The plane crash was her fault. The man being soangry—she rubbed her hand over the purpling bruise on her wrist—her fault, too.
There’d been an easy solution: don’t stay too long in one place. Which was easy—easy—to do when you were an outback pilot. And not just easy but fun! And adventurous!
Crops always needed dusting, mail always needed to be dropped into remote stations. And people who lived hours and hours away from major hospitals were always in need of a plane when they were trapped under combine harvesters or bitten by snakes or had heart attacks after one too many curried sausages at their local pub.
Two years, three … that’s the longest she’d ever let herself stay anywhere before. She’d make some friends and have the occasionalsix-month fling with a lonely grazier, or an outback medic, or a smiling-eyed country copper.
But she’d always had her eye on the horizon.
Until now.
She closed her eyes and tried to pinpoint when she’d failed. Was it buying her little cottage? Loving her job with the medical rescue team? Having the seventy-year-old grandfather John Mann as her bestie? She’d settled down and the years had cranked over, and she hadn’t even noticed how badly she’d been tempting fate.
The family curse had brought some super bad shit with it this time.
The crash landing … bad. The angry face of Shaun Ullrich as he manhandled her, the frightened face of his wife, the long wait in the shade of the ute with a new baby while John found them a ride—with a competent pilot this time—back to town … all bad.
Her hands had shaken again when she’d forced herself onto the plane John had found. She’d stared at them as though they belonged to someone else. A result of concussion, perhaps. Or tendon damage from where Ullrich had grabbed her. Only … that didn’t explain why she’d had a tremor earlier, after her mother’s phone call.
When they finally arrived back in Port Augusta base to the news the Air Traffic Safety Bureau would be investigating the crash, the long face of her boss, Mike, was bad too.
‘You’re grounded until the ATSB is done,’ he had said, then shut his door in her face.
The baby was fine, so that was one silver lining. A boy, big enough to slap a cap on and send to school, according to Carys. The mother wasn’t totally fine … she’d been in trouble enough to warrant a mid-air saline drip and a lights-and-sirens ambulance to the hospital for surgery the second they touched down … but she wasgoingto be fine.
Why wasn’t that enough?
The rise of nausea was so quick she barely got her ute door open before she retched into the gutter. She looked up to find the neon from the fuel price sign flickering through the spots in her vision.
This was so not her. This was so not normal. Shit, shit,shit.
She grabbed her phone, stabbing her passcode in three times before her trembling fingers managed to find the right digits, and hit up an internet search for answers.
Low blood sugarsaid the first website.
Or a panic attacksaid the second. As if!Or stroke, or carbon monoxide poisoning; probably fatal.
She leaned back in her seat and pictured the chocolate she had in her naughty stash behind the brown rice in her pantry. That’d fix low blood sugar, because, really, what else would it be?
Curses weren’t real.
She muttered it out loud to make it true: ‘Curses aren’t real.’
When she finally made it home, chocolate wasn’t the only thing waiting for her. Her mother was seated at the kitchen table reading aFamily Circlemagazine that she’d propped up against the African violet Kirsty had grown from a leaf off the plant at work. Two knitting needles were raised like she was about to conduct an orchestra, and a mishmash of coloured wool spilled from a Vinnies bag beside her.
Oh right. The break-in. The police. The mystery letter.
‘Back from work so soon!’ Terri said brightly, her eyes skittering up to Kirsty’s face, then back to the magazine. ‘Cup of tea, sugarplum?’
Kirsty narrowed her eyes. Her mum had that look—that wide-eyed, guilty-as, about-to-do-a-runner look. ‘I’ll boil the kettle,’Kirsty said. ‘Then maybe you can tell me why the police caught you breaking into my house.’
That was the way their relationship worked: mother and daughter in reverse. She wondered what she would have said if her mother had noticed that Kirsty looked wrecked. ‘You still having milk, Terri?’