‘Fell off.’
‘Geez, you okay?’
‘Small fracture.’
‘That’s no good.’
‘No.’
Was that a mild hint of sarcasm? Nathan couldn’t be sure. She seemed a bit young for that. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Be careful. I guess we’ll see you later.’
The girls nodded and, after a glance towards Harry, ran back to the exercise yard.
‘They seem a bit stunned by everything,’ Nathan said as Sophie picked up the horse’s reins with her good hand. ‘Her arm doesn’t seem to have put her off, at least.’
‘No.’ Harry’s eyes were on the driveway. ‘Well, you know Sophie.’
He didn’t really, Nathan thought as they pulled away. They passed Ilse and she raised her hand in a wave.
They drove in silence while the homestead fell behind them. Harry took the road route rather than cutting across the paddocks and Nathan could hear the stones pinging off the bodywork, louder and more frequently than yesterday. Harry drove faster than Nathan tended to, but then again, most people did.
Nathan had been barely twenty-one when his dad had had the crash. He’d been practically living with Jacqui by then, at her suggestion, in the same house he now called home. It had felt very different then, the novelty still shiny and new, and the sex still on tap. Jacqui was good to look at and even better in bed and for a long time he’d loved her for it. Cameron had been away studying an agribusiness course, and Bub was still a little kid.
It had been the completely unremarkable nature of the accident that had shaken Nathan as much as anything. Carl and Liz Bright had been driving back from town, like they had a hundred times. A cow had stepped onto the track and Carl had swerved, like he’d also done a hundred times.
This time, though, he’d been too slow, or the car had been moving too fast, or he’d been too sharp with the wheel, or not sharp enough, and he’d clipped it. The car had rolled and come to rest upside down. Carl had been pinned between the steering wheel and the roof. Liz was knocked unconscious and had woken up in the dark to find herself bleeding from the head and her husband bleeding to death. She’d used the radio to call for help. It had taken forty minutes for the first person to arrive and another thirty for the ambulance. Roughly four hours had elapsed from the time of the accident to either of them receiving basic medical attention. Not one other car had passed by in all that time.
Nathan had been asleep with Jacqui when the call had come through. She’d made the right sympathetic noises as he’d pulled on his shirt and shoes, while also managing to convey on some level that she was a little pissed off he was leaving her in the middle of the night for a drama involving his own family. It was funny how high and bright the red flags flew in hindsight, Nathan often thought.
Liz was already in the back of the ambulance when he’d finally arrived. A younger Steve Fitzgerald had been on duty, and had taken Nathan aside to explain the situation. Carl was still pinned, but there was no urgency to free him. He was well and truly dead. But it hadn’t been quick and wouldn’t have been painless, Nathan had later overheard Steve whisper on the radio to dispatch. The bloke might have had a chance if someone had come by to raise the alarm sooner.
Inside the ambulance, with a blanket around her shoulders despite the heat of the night, Liz was almost unrecognisable under the crust of blackened blood.
‘She was lucky,’ Steve had said. ‘She’ll heal.’
Nathan had looked at his mum, dazed and battered, and thought she looked far from lucky. Then he had looked inside the twisted metal wreck of the car, and from that day forward had driven a few kilometres per hour slower than was strictly necessary.
Nathan heard Harry grunt and looked over. The man’s face hadn’t changed.
‘You right?’
‘Yeah,’ Harry said. ‘I was just thinking about that time you and Cam ran away to the stockman’s grave when you were kids. Remember?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
Xander leaned forward. ‘What was that?’
Harry looked at him in the mirror. ‘You’ve never heard this story?’
Xander shook his head. Harry glanced at Nathan, who shrugged.
‘I wasn’t going to tell him, was I? It was a bloody stupid thing to do.’
‘Yeah. It was,’ Harry said. ‘But you were only kids. What were you, twelve?’
‘Eleven. Cam was nine.’ Nathan felt his insides twist at the memory of his brother, his dusty legs sticking out from below a loaded backpack.
‘Why were you running away?’ Xander said.
