Page 10 of A Matter of Trust

It came back to her age. She’d been sixteen and he’d dumped her without giving her a chance to explain. At nineteen he’d been the older one. The ‘grown-up’. Maybe she hadn’t had a choice once he’d abandoned her. The familiar blackness nudged at the back of his mind.Not this time.He steadied his breathing.

Gabby opened her mouth as if to ask another question and stopped suddenly, her eyes shifting away, dropping to her schoolwork.

His mother hurried into the breach looking oddly anxious, her fingers twisting the tea towel in her hands. ‘This is my son, Morgan. You can call him Doctor Cavanaugh.’

‘Morgan will be fine. Doctor Cavanaugh is such a mouthful.’

After her initial caution, Gabby seemed happy to chatter as she worked on her sums. Edward stayed quiet, his brows drawn together in concentration. At the end of the half hour, taking an Anzac biscuit from the plate his mother offered, Morgan was surprised how much he’d enjoyed the time with the children.

His parents surprised him too, with their obvious fondness for Becca’s children. His mother had barely tolerated ‘that Bujold girl’. His father wasn’t so surprising. He’d always been kind to the small Becca when she’d hung around on the fringes of Morgan’s group of friends. He’d had a few classmates as friends but they’d fallen away once he went to boarding school. The ones that had stuck were Dan and his mate Ben Smith and Ben’s older brother Shane. The Smith boys lived on the other side of town but they’d all known each other forever because of Dan and Becca living across the road and the Smiths being related to the Maiden kids.

It had all changed with the accident. Ben and Shane had gone to Gatton to study agriculture whereas Morgan was in Brisbane because of his interest in tropical medicine at the faculty there. Dan and Becca had been lost to him because of their betrayal.

He pushed away the memories to focus on Gabby, who was asking him questions about Africa. The boy had vanished somewhere with Ned, heading out the back door. Morgan could sense his mother hovering.

‘If you’ve got something to do, I’m quite okay, Mum.’

‘If you’re sure. I should bring in the washing.’

He wasn’t used to seeing his mother nervous. It made him wonder again as he watched the animated little face explaining about her plans for high school next year. He vaguely remembered her birthday would have been somewhere about now. His parents had come down to Brisbane once his uni exams were finished and they’d travelled to the Sunshine Coast for the holidays. He’d desperately needed the break after the stress of the previous six months.

His parents hadn’t mentioned Becca, but he’d bumped into Jeanette and her mother on the beach with her toddler and they’d been updating him with the local news. Twelve years ago. His throat hitched at the thought of what that toddler would be going through now. Jeanette was a strong woman. She’d had to be. But seeing her teenager so badly injured must be heartbreaking.

He couldn’t imagine how he’d cope. Gabby had fallen silent after his mother left the room and he wondered if she was nervous, left alone with a stranger. A family friend by proxy. Her mouth pursed in concentration; she was doodling on a scrap of paper.

‘Do you want to be left alone, Gabby?’

‘No.’ The sharp answer surprised him, along with the way the pencil scratched across the paper onto the tablecloth.

She was looking at him again with that narrowed gaze. ‘Did you know my mother at school?’

‘I was older than her. We weren’t in the same class.’

‘Where you in Dan’s class then?’

‘I’m older than Dan and your mother.’ It seemed disrespectful for her to call her father by his first name, but it wasn’t his business.

‘But you did know her then.’

‘Yes.’

She was fiddling with her pencil again, flipping it over and over between the fingers of her left hand. ‘Did you know my dad?’

There was something in the way she avoided his eyes that screamed caution. ‘I’ve known Dan pretty much my whole life. I remember him as a little kid before he and his mother came to live with your mum.’

‘He’s not related to us, you know. His dad died before he was born. Then his mum married Mummy’s uncle. He died too. Like …’

She stopped again, a pink flush washing over her pale skin. Like his. No freckles, only a chalky paleness he knew burnt and peeled in the hot Australian sun. He’d had problems with it in Africa, long before the skin condition took hold which had been one of the reasons for him coming home.

Maybe that was why she didn’t call him Dad. Because she knew he wasn’t.

‘What did your mum tell you about your birth dad?’

‘Nothing, really. She said I looked like him. Just exactly like him.’ Her pale lashes fluttered as she peeked up at him from under them. ‘I always wanted to meet him.’

Morgan bit his tongue. He’d learned a few interesting curses while working overseas. Not something he needed to introduce to this child.His child?His heart pounded like a drum, hard and fast. He gulped down the coil of barbed wire in his throat.

‘You need to talk to your mother about it.’

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