Hold On to Me (38 page)

He wound his fingers around a shredded edge of carpet and tugged. It gave way with a satisfying tear. So Stella had talked to Anna. Had she revealed details about her past? It was none of his business, he knew, what Stella talked about with her doctor, but he was crazy with missing her and even just talking to Anna about her would go halfway to making him feel better. When Stella broke up with him, she'd said she had to get her life sorted out. How long would that take? He had no fucking clue and she hadn't given him one. So the house renovation was taking the place of her—and of sex. And what a woeful substitute it was turning out to be.

Another strip of carpet gave way under his grip and sling-shotted Luca backwards. With an echoing thud he fell, half on his arse, half on his right shoulder. He lay on the floor for a minute, coughing up the dust, getting his breath back. When he pressed his palm to the exposed hardwood floor to get a purchase to stand, there was a twinge. He turned over and used his left side, then stood and did a circle with his right arm, slowly and cautiously. He'd be fine.

Well, his arm would be fine, anyway.

He propped his fists on his hips and took a good look around the front room. His thoughts drifted back to the night Stella had told him her story. They'd stood right about where he was now, considering the wallpaper. He'd watched her standing there, his heart almost bursting out of his chest with pride at having a house of his own and having her in it. That night, he'd thought they were at the beginning of something. He'd felt good in about a million different ways at having her in his life.

That fucking wallpaper. He'd planned to get rid of it until Stella told him she liked it.

Last time he'd been dumped, he'd got a tattoo. For a fleeting moment, he thought about getting another one. But it wasn't ink he wanted permanently on his body. It was Stella Ryan.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?' Stella slung her handbag over her shoulder and clutched her car keys.

‘Hells yeah,' Molly replied with a smile as she planted her elbows on the front counter of Style by Stella and threw the owner a beaming smile. Today she was wearing black platform wedges, black leggings and a Japanese-inspired grey smock she'd designed and made herself. She looked stunning. ‘You go and do what you've got to do up in Adelaide, Stella. Didn't I prove the other day when you were sick that I can handle the shop?'

Stella looked at her protégée with great pride. ‘Yes, you did.'

‘I love it when you're not here. I can close my eyes and pretend it's
my
shop!'

Stella laughed out loud. She understood the feeling exactly. She'd experienced the same sensation when she'd worked in other people's boutiques in Sydney.

‘If you need anything, call me. I might have my phone off for a little while but leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And if a pipe bursts or something terrible happens, you know where Summer is. And call Courtney if it's police-level serious. She's primed and ready to spring into action if we need her.'

‘I'll remember. Now go,' Molly urged her. ‘Everything will be fine.'

‘Right.' The kid would handle things here until she returned in the early afternoon. She could do this. She was trying to learn how to trust people. She wouldn't have thought it was possible to leave her shop in someone else's hands until she'd been ill and Luca had organised everything so well. It had been a small step but an important one.

‘See when you get back.' Molly waved as Stella turned to leave.

Stella tried to ignore the quiver of nerves in her chest. ‘Bye, Molly.'

An hour later, Stella had pulled up outside a modern office building in one of Adelaide's inner suburbs. She gave her name to the receptionist and didn't have to wait long before a door opened and a tall, slim woman emerged with a folder in her hand.

‘Stella?'

Stella looked up from the gossipy magazine she'd been trying to read and allowed herself a nervous smile before she stood, smoothed down her skirt with quivering fingers, and followed the sensible heels into the closest office.

It was raining on the first Monday in February in Port Elliot, a drizzling and sombre indicator that the best of summer was almost over. School holidays had ended and when the families left, the grey nomads arrived, and then the locals emerged once again and filled the coffee shops and the supermarkets, the chemist and the butcher shop. The pace of life got a little slower, much to everyone's relief after a busy few months, and there was a sense in Port Elliot that there was room to breathe again.

Stella stood in the doorway of her shop, her arms crossed, inhaling the smell of the rain from the quiet street. It had been a dry January and everyone was glad of the reprieve. She was glad of it in another way too. She'd had her most successful summer ever. Turnover was up thirty per cent, and she'd managed to bank enough to give her a buffer to survive a quiet winter. It wasn't all downhill from there, either—she knew that. If the weather was kind at Easter, the town would be full of people again, and long weekends and school holidays would bring more crowds too.

Today should have felt like an ending, but Stella let herself feel that it was the beginning of something new. Molly had returned to school, but was going to be working on Sundays in Style by Stella. Stella's psychologist had suggested it, as a way of letting go, of learning to trust other people, of giving herself a break from the seven-day-a-week workload of owning her own business.

It was a start. A good start. And she was looking forward to having a day off each week. She wasn't yet sure what she would fill it with; since she and Luca had ended things, she wasn't sure if it was right to want to spend it with him, no matter how much she wanted to.

But she wasn't ready yet to invite him back into her life. She had work to do on herself, on resolving her past and the mysteries of her childhood. She'd continued seeing her psychologist and had been doing some reading and some hard thinking and things were starting to feel like they were falling into place. She felt on firmer ground. It wasn't in her power to change her history but perhaps it was in her power to try to understand it.

She needed to get to the bottom of what had happened to her and she felt ready to do that now, with the help of her psychologist. It was time to confront her demons so she could bury them. The time for running was over. That's why she'd requested a copy of her files from the state government department that had responsibility for child protection. Officially, in government-speak anyway, the Minister had been her guardian until she'd turned eighteen; and there were files filled with every detail on her life up to that point.

When she closed the shop for the day and sauntered home, she saw a thick, yellow envelope on her front doormat, clearly too bulky for her letterbox. She knew immediately what it was.

She stared at it for a moment, her name typewritten on a white label, stuck at an angle on the envelope, then slowly bent to pick it up.

Stella Marie Smith.

That was her name. Her birth name. She hadn't been known by it since she'd adopted Auntie Karen's last name when she'd moved to Middle Point and become Stella Ryan. That had been a way of leaving her past behind, or so they'd thought at the time. But it was her name, and it encapsulated a past that was buried deep in her, in every cell in her body, in every smile and in every tear she'd ever shed.

Stella held the bulging envelope in her hands, and felt the weight of the secrets within it.

It was time she found out the truth.

The papers were new and white, photocopied records of the originals. Stella had unpacked them on her dinner table, not before pouring herself a glass of wine. She figured she would need it. She slowly sat, squared the pile in front of her, and began to read.

The first page, on departmental letterhead, said simply,
Thank you for your request. Please find copies of the requested information enclosed
. There was a signature underneath which was nothing but a scrawl, as if no one wanted to put their name to such a sad account.

She'd tried to keep in mind something her psychologist had said: that everyone has a reason for how they behave, even if they don't know it at the time. Stella had never been generous enough to her own mother to see that was as true for her as for anyone. She wanted to find out and was hoping those reasons would be somewhere in her file.

As Stella turned the pages, minutes became hours and it felt as if she were reading the story of a complete stranger. Because she was. She found herself putting together the pieces of her mother's story. Her mother was Rebecca Marie Smith. Stella hadn't remembered she'd been given the same middle name. Rebecca, or Bec, as she was described in the files, had been taken into care when she was six, rescued from her own dreadful, abusive family. Stella could barely read the words for the tears that were flooding her eyes. Bec Smith had been sexually abused by her stepfather, so viciously she'd been taken to hospital and immediately whisked away from her own mother once the doctors saw the brutal evidence of her injuries. After that, the poor, damaged girl who would become her mother had been in and out of twenty foster homes; had been pregnant for the first time at thirteen, although she'd lost the baby, and that seemed to have been the catalyst for placing her in a group home with other teenage girls too troubled for anyone to take on.

Stella lifted her eyes from the pages, didn't want to fight the ache in her chest and the thudding pain in her head. She hadn't known any of this. Why hadn't she? She turned the pages, looking for clues. There were copies of child protection notifications from Stella's school, reporting her failure to attend. Others noted the fact she hadn't eaten breakfast; that her clothes were dirty. Stella's gut clenched at those memories, and she felt the humiliation and the shame of those school days as if they were yesterday.

She turned page after page of categorised neglect. And then, when she was almost done, there was a copy of a handwritten note from her mother.

Stella wouldn't have recognised her mother's handwriting—she'd never had diaries or sick notes signed—but there it was,
Bec Smith
. The writing was childlike, indicative of someone who'd never learnt to write properly, and the sight of it broke Stella's heart.

She was asking for Stella to be taken into care. The dates coincided with her mother's suicide attempt, just after her father had been sent to jail when Stella was ten years old.

I've tried to be a good mother, but too much has happened. She won't have a chance if she stays with me
.

There were more pages and Stella read them all, her eyes hurting with the strain, her teeth and jaw aching as she clenched them tighter with every revelation. She found the last page. That was how the story of her childhood ended.

And that's when the tears flowed like rain and everything she thought she knew flipped and collapsed in on itself.

It was a file note, made eighteen years before, when Stella was just eighteen. Her memory drifted back to that time. She'd been working at the Middle Point general store and saving as much as she could to escape to Sydney. Karen had been diagnosed with cancer and between school and work and caring for her beloved aunt, there was no time for anything else.

No time to be told what had happened to Bec Smith.

Mother Rebecca Marie Smith, deceased. Overdose. Next of kin is carer Karen Ryan.

Auntie Karen had never told her. No one had told her. She'd always believed her mother had run off to Darwin. But she'd been dead for eighteen years.

Stella shuddered, cried out, and began to sob. She dropped her head into her crossed arms and wailed. Her shoulders shook and her tears spilled onto the copy of the file note. She cried for Bec, the mother she'd always hated, always blamed, had always been ashamed of.

Until now.

Now she could see that her mother had saved her. The woman she'd always believed had abandoned her had put her out of harm's way, had made sure she was in a safe place: had loved her enough to give her up. She may have been young but she knew what she needed to do to break the cycle of dysfunction and abuse and had made the heartbreaking decision to give up her own child.

Stella finally looked up at the clock. It was one in the morning.

‘I love you, Mum,' she whispered. ‘Thank you.'

Two weeks later, there was a
Sold
sticker on the sign out the front of Ian and Lee's former café.

And its proud new owner was standing in the middle of the shop with a smile so bright it rivalled the pounding February sunshine beaming down from the damaged roof.

Well. Perhaps ‘shop' was too generous a term. It was still a concrete floor open to the elements, bounded by the walls of her shop and a gravel driveway on the other side, with plywood sheeting at the front. There were some steel girders in place of the burnt-out rafters to secure the walls and the rear stone needed some serious repointing. There was no front door to speak of: Stella had simply walked in through the gap in the rear wall leading from the shared toilets.

But whatever state it was in, it was hers.

She felt ready to take this step now, to do something brave and bold. Stella had decided to take her summer profits from Style by Stella and turn them into a down payment on much more than a building.

She was investing in herself. And in the little seaside town that had welcomed her back all those years before, nurtured her and supported her. It had been a long road and there were still moments in which she thought too much about why she shouldn't, but Stella felt ready now to take hold of her life, to treasure the gift her mother had given her. The gift of a safe place to be. And of her everlasting love.