Lily looked up at him, smiling past her son’s rumpled curls.
‘It’s not just me?’
‘I do love Doug and Rosa.’
‘How about that?’ she whispered, and smiled at him.
It was enough. He sank to his knees and stooped to kiss her. But she had her arms full of child and his kiss went awry, as it had to in these crazy circumstances, but, then, he knew his intention.
And maybe she did, too. For she was still smiling, her eyes full of unshed tears but the beginnings of joy not far behind.
‘I need you,’ he told her. ‘Lily, I’ve always needed you. I’ve just been too stupid to see. But what happened today… We’re a family. I know I don’t deserve a second chance but I’m asking you for one. I want to marry you. I want to adjust our lives so we can be together. But I never want to be apart again.’
‘Oh, Ben…’
‘Will you come and live on our island?’ Benjy asked, absorbing Ben’s words and heading straight to what mattered most.
‘Yes,’ he said, and watched as Lily’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Ben, we can’t ask you…’
‘You’re not asking. I’m telling. I’m coming home.’ He bent forward and kissed her on the nose, and then, more surely, he kissed her on the mouth. When they finally broke away they were all smiling and Benjy’s was the biggest smile of all.
‘Kisses are yucky but I liked that,’ he said.
‘Great,’ Ben told him. ‘It’s good that you like it because I intend to kiss your mother just like that every day for the rest of our lives. Once first thing in the morning, once just before we go to sleep and a hundred times in between.’
‘We have a happy ending,’ Lily whispered.
‘I don’t believe in endings.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘I think this morning…’ he told her as he gathered woman and child into his arms and held them tight. ‘I think this morning is a happy beginning. Benjy, do you know what a phosphorescent tide is?’
‘No,’ said Benjy, puzzled.
‘It’s when the lights go on in the sea,’ he said. ‘In shallow water it might happen once in a lifetime. Your mother and I saw it but you missed out. So I’ve decided. I need to come back to your island so we can watch out together for phosphorescent tides. I have a feeling that when we’re around, the concept of once in a lifetime is ridiculous. We’ve been given a second chance, and from now, from right at this minute, we’re going to take any chance we’re given.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE first anniversary of the insurrection on the island could well have been a day of sadness, but the islanders of Kapua had never looked on death as a final farewell. Funerals were a time of celebration, of affirmation of the power of life. They were a thanksgiving for the joy of life itself.
But the shock of the attempted coup had thrown the islanders off course. The funerals twelve months ago had been blurred with horror. Now, a year later, the islanders wanted to do it better. They’d come to terms with their losses in their own way, and they wished to right a wrong-to celebrate the lives of those they’d lost and to turn mourning into a peaceful acceptance and a deep thankfulness for lives well lived. Those killed by Jacques’s accomplices had been loved, and that love would live for ever in the hearts of those left behind. And of those to come.
That was the gist of the words spoken by the island’s pastor on this day of remembrance. Everyone on the island was there. The soft sea breeze blew gently across the graveyard, and the scent of frangipani mixed with the salt from the sea.
Lily stayed in the background, with Benjy by her side. On the other side of Benjy, holding his hand, letting the child lean against him, stood his father. Her husband.
Ben and Benjy. Her family.
She listened to the pastor’s words, and let the peace of acceptance drift into her heart. ‘Thank you for loving me,’ she told Kira, and she glanced across at her husband and she smiled. ‘And thank you for bringing Ben back home to me.’
For Ben was truly home now. He was an accepted islander. Lily’s husband. Benjy’s father. The islanders had accepted him into their hearts with nothing but pleasure.
And why would they not have? In less than a year Ben had transformed the medical set-up on the island. There were remote clinics on each of the outer islands, with rapid transfer available to the main base on Kapua. And the base at Kapua was wonderful. The tiny hospital had been extended to double its size. Lily was based there now, as were two interns on rotation from Sydney. And Sam… That had been a coup in itself. For when the time had come for Sam to leave he’d looked long and hard at the island-and at Pieter’s pretty teacher daughter-and he’d decided that maybe Kapua wasn’t such a bad place to put down roots.
So there were now five doctors on the island, and maybe there’d be even more when the new wing of the hospital opened. The obstetric wing.
It was magic, Lily thought as she continued to listen. From an island with basic medical facilities, they were moving fast to be state of the art.
Her island home had become even more of a paradise.
Not that they stayed there all the time now. In the few days after Doug’s heart attack, when Lily and Ben and Benjy had been marooned, caring for a newborn foal but with little else to do but talk, and nothing to talk about but their future, they’d worked it out. Doug and Rosa would be grandparents to Benjy. They’d been practically all the parents that Ben had known and grandparents couldn’t be left out of the equation of this embryonic family. Therefore four times a year they’d spend at least a week at the farm, and four times a year Doug and Rosa would be flown out to the island to spend as long as they wanted there.
They were there now. After his double bypass Doug looked and felt wonderful. Doug and Pieter had struck up a fast friendship, and Doug and Gualberto were as thick as thieves. Many more of the islanders would end up as visitors back at the farm, Lily thought happily. Her world had been extended and was about to be extended even more.
But first… There were ghosts to be laid to rest. First loves to be acknowledged.
The pastor had finished speaking now. Flowers had been laid on each grave, and the islanders were drifting away. There’d be a celebration on the beach tonight, but for now individual families needed time to themselves to assimilate all they’d felt that day.
Rosa and Doug were moving from the graveyard, too, but before they left Rosa reached into her capacious bag and produced a box. She smiled across at Lily, in her eyes a question, and Lily left her husband and son to take the box from her.
‘What is it?’ Ben asked as she returned.
She looked up at this wonderful man she loved with all her heart, and she thought, Was this the right thing to do? She’d done it without asking. She and Rosa had done it without talking to him about it because they knew this would hurt. They wanted the hurt to be brief but they also knew that unfinished business must be completed before moving forward.
‘It’s Bethany’s ashes,’ she said, and she saw his face become blank with shock.
‘Bethany…’
‘Rosa said you weren’t permitted to go to her funeral. She said as far as she knew your parents hadn’t ever told you where she was. Doug remembered a fight when you were about eight-you asking what had happened and your father saying to leave it, the dead were best forgotten.’
‘Doug and Rosa always thought it was wrong,’ she whispered. ‘Only they never knew what to do-how to broach it with you. But after we married, Rosa talked to me about it. She knew that Bethany had been cremated. She knew her ashes had been left in a memorial wall at a huge Sydney cemetery. She’d always hated the thought. So…’ She faltered a little then, looking at the blankness on his face, hoping she’d done right.
‘We wrote to the accountant who was the executor of your parents’ estate,’ she whispered. ‘We asked if we needed your permission but he said you’d never been involved-that as far as he knew you didn’t even know where Bethany’s ashes were. But he was happy to sign a release form. Because we thought…Rosa and Doug and I thought that you should bring Bethany home. We thought maybe you could scatter her ashes here. Or maybe you could scatter them at the farm. Wherever. But we thought we’d like to help you to do that.’ She faltered. ‘Ben, If you want us to take the ashes back to Sydney then we will. But Rosa and Doug and I thought…we thought this might be right.’