He’d just given away his grandmother’s pasta maker. He’d given it to her.

She’d love it. She’d use it for ever. The memories… She and Sarah, Raff and Ben, messing round in Gran’s kitchen.

If it wasn’t for this man, Ben would still be here.

How long did hate last?

For the last ten years, every time she’d looked at Raff Finn she’d felt ill. Now… She looked at Sarah and at the pasta maker. She thought of Mrs Fryer’s vitriol. She thought that Ben had been Raff’s best friend. Ben had loved him.

She’d loved him.

She couldn’t keep hating. She just…couldn’t.

She felt sick and weary and desperately sad. She felt…wasted.

‘Hey, Abby really isn’t well,’ Raff said and maybe he’d read the emotions-maybe it was easy because she was having no luck disguising them from herself, much less from him. ‘Maybe we should go, Sares, and let her recover.’

‘Do you really have a headache?’ Sarah put her hand on her arm, all concern. ‘Does it bang behind your eyes? It’s really bad when it does that.’

Did Sarah still have headaches? Did Raff cope with them, take care of her, ache for his little sister and all she’d lost?

Maybe she should have invited Raff to her wedding.

Now there was a stupid thing to think. She might be coming out the other side of a decade of bitterness but her parents…they never would. They knew that Raff had killed their son, pure and simple.

Philip would never countenance him at their wedding. Her parents would always hate him.

Any bridges must be her own personal bridges, built of an understanding that she couldn’t keep stoking this flame of bitterness for the rest of her life.

They were watching her. Sarah’s hand was still on her arm. Concerned for her headache. Sarah, whose headaches had taken away so much…

‘Not a headache,’ she whispered and then more strongly, ‘it’s not a headache. It’s just… I’m overwhelmed. I loved making pasta with you guys when I was a kid. I can’t believe you’re giving this to me. It’s the most wonderful gift-a truly generous gift of the heart. It’s made me feel all choked up.’

And then, as Sarah was still looking unsure, she took her hands and tugged her close and kissed her. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

‘Raff, too,’ Sarah said.

Raff, too. He was watching with eyes that were impassive. Giving nothing away.

He’d given her his grandmother’s pasta maker.

He’d killed her brother.

No. An accident had killed Ben. A moment of stupidity that he’d have to pay for forever.

She took a deep breath, released Sarah, took Raff’s hands in hers and kissed him, too. Lightly. As she’d kissed Sarah.

On the cheek and nothing more.

She went to release him but he didn’t release her. His hands held for just a fraction of a second too long. A fraction of a second that said he was as confused as she was.

A fraction of a second that said there could never be idle friendship between them.

No longer enemies? But what?

Not friends. Not when he looked at her like… Like he was seeing all the regret in the world.

She had to do something. They were all looking at her- Raff, Sarah and Kleppy. Wondering why her eyes were brimming-why she was standing like a dummy wishing the last ten years could disappear and she could be seventeen again and Raff could be gorgeous and young and free and…

And she needn’t think anything of the kind. In eight days she was marrying Philip. Her direction was set.

Eight days was all very well, but what about now?

Now she closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, gave herself that tiny respite to haul herself together-and then she put on her very brightest smile.

‘Let’s make pasta,’ she said, and they did.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HE SHOULDN’T have given the pasta maker away if it made him feel like this.

This was a bad idea and it was getting worse.

He was sitting at Abby’s kitchen table watching Sarah hold one end of the pasta dough as Abby fed it through the machine. Watching it stretch. Watching Sarah hold her breath, gasp with pleasure, smile.

Watching Abby smile back.

He could help-Sarah kept offering him a turn-but he excused himself on the grounds that all Abby’s aprons were frilly and there was no way Banksia Bay’s cop could be caught in a rose-covered pinny.

But in reality he simply wanted to watch.

He’d forgotten how good it was to watch Abby Callahan.

Had she forgotten how to be Abby Callahan?

For years now, he’d never seen her with a hair out of place. Now, though, she was wearing faded jeans, an old sweatshirt smudged with flour, bare feet.

He remembered her in bare feet.

Abby. Seventeen years old. She’d laugh and everyone laughed with her. She could tease a smile out of anyone. She was a laughing, loving girl.

She’d been his girlfriend and he’d loved it. They just seemed to…fit.

But then they’d grown up. Sort of.

One heated weekend. Angry words. The car. The debutante ball. Incredibly important to teenagers.

Abby had started dating Philip. She and Philip had broken up, and then Sarah had started going out with him.

He hadn’t liked that, either. Maybe he’d acted like a jerk, making Abby pay. He’d assumed they’d make it up.

But then… The tragedy that turned Abby from a girl who’d dreamed of being a dress designer, who lived for colour and life, into a lawyer who represented the likes of Wallace Baxter.

A lawyer who was about to marry Philip Dexter.

No.

He came close to shouting it, to thumping his fist down on the flour-covered table.

He did no such thing. There was no reason why she shouldn’t marry Philip. There was nothing Raff could put his finger on against the guy. Philip was a model citizen.

He didn’t like him.

Jealous?

Yeah. But something else. A feeling?

A feeling he’d had at nineteen that had never gone away.

‘Why did you and Dexter stop going out?’ he asked as the pasta went through a third and final time.

She didn’t lift her head but he saw the tiny furrow of concentration, the setting of her lips.

‘Abby?’

‘Just ease it in a little more, Sarah.’

‘Ten years ago. After your debut. Why did you break up?’

‘That’s none of your business. Now we put this attachment on to cut it into ribbons.’

‘I know,’ Sarah said, crowing in triumph as she found the right attachment. ‘This one.’

‘It’s just I’ve always wondered,’ Raff said as Sarah tried to get the attachment in. They both let her be. It’d be easier to step in and do it for her-her fingers were fumbling badly-but she was a picture of intense concentration and to step in now…

They both knew not to.

‘You know I only went out with Debbie Macallroy to get back at you,’ he said.

‘So you did. Childhood romances, Raff. We were dumb.’

Really dumb. Where had they all ended up?

‘We did have fun before the crash,’ he said gently. ‘We were such good friends. But then Philip… First you and then Sarah. But you didn’t fall in love with him then. You ditched him.’

‘I’ve changed. We both have.’

‘People don’t change.’

‘Of course they do.’


Of course people changed. She had, and so had Philip.

She didn’t look up at Raff; she focused on the sheets of pasta, making sure they were dusted so they wouldn’t stick in the final cutting process.

She thought back to Philip at nineteen.

He’d been rich, or rich compared to every other kid in Banksia Bay. He had his own car and it was a far cry from the bomb Ben and Raff were doing up. A purple Monaro V8. Cool.

Every girl in Abby’s year group had wanted to go out with him. Abby didn’t so much-she was trying hard not to think she was still in love with Raff-but she’d needed a partner for her debut, all Raff thought about was his stupid car, and Sarah had bet her she wouldn’t be game to ask him.

For a few weeks she’d preened. Her friends were jealous. Philip danced really well and her debut was lovely.

But what followed…the drive-in movies… Sitting in the dark with Philip… Not so cool. Nothing she could put her finger on, though. It was just he wasn’t Raff and that was no reason to break up with him.

But finally…

They’d gone for a drive one afternoon, heading up Black Mountain to the lookout. She hadn’t wanted to go, she remembered, and when they’d had a tyre blowout she’d been relieved.

She hadn’t been so relieved when they realised Philip’s spare tyre was flat. Or when he thought she should walk back into town to fetch his father-because he had to look after the car.

‘No way am I trudging back to town while you sit here in comfort,’ she retorted. ‘You’re the dummy who didn’t check his spare.’

Not so tactful, even for a seventeen-year-old, but she was reaching the point where she wanted to end it.

Philip left her. Bored, she tried out the sound system. His tapes were boring, top ten stuff, nothing she enjoyed.

She flicked through his tape box-a box just like the one that graced her bedside table, beautiful cedar with slots for every cassette. His grandpa really was great.

Boring cassettes. Boring, boring. But, at the back, some unmarked ones. She slid one in and heard the voice of Christabelle Thomas, a girl in the same class as her at school.

‘Philip, we shouldn’t. My mum’d kill me. Philip…’

Enough. She met Philip and his father as she stomped down the mountain, fuming.

‘You were supposed to stay with the car,’ Philip told her.

‘I didn’t like the music,’ she snapped, and held up the tape and threw it at him through his father’s car window. ‘Put the ripped up tape in my letterbox tomorrow or I’m telling Christabelle.’