Unnoticed-or maybe noticed but unobtrusive-Jake’s arm came around her waist.

‘Fatso will have to win,’ Susie was saying. She lifted Rosie out of her baby sling and perched her small, wrinkled person on top of the pumpkin. Cameras went wild. ‘Oh, Angus, do you mind very much?’

Angus was glowering at his friend. ‘Of course I mind,’ he barked at Ben. ‘Whippersnapper. That’s eight out of twenty times you’ll be beating me. You wait until next year!’

Next year.

Kirsty blinked. This from a man who just weeks ago had intended to die.

‘It’s a date, then,’ Ben said. ‘Same time next year, Angus Douglas, and it’s a bottle of your best Scotch against one of Maggie’s fruit cakes that I’ll beat you again.’

‘Done.’

General laughter. Angus slapped his friend on the back and they headed to the refreshment rooms-probably for one of Angus’s whiskies.

Laughter being the best medicine?

Tomorrow being the best medicine.

‘It’s time for the mother-daughter sack race,’ someone announced over the loudspeaker.

Jake’s hand dropped from her waist.

He moved over to where Alice and Penelope were admiring the pumpkins. ‘Let’s go find a lemonade, girls,’ he told them.

All around them women were sorting themselves into groups. Kirsty watched for a few minutes. This seemed to be a general mother-daughter sack race, the only rule being that mothers and daughters had to be in the same sack.

The sacks were piled high, a huge assortment of weird-sized sacks.

The mother-daughter combinations were extraordinary.

There were ancient mothers with almost-as-ancient daughters. One mother had three daughters. One mother had five daughters! Mavis was there, Kirsty saw in astonishment. She’d been wheeled along in a wheelchair. Now someone was frantically cutting holes in a sack for her wheelchair, and Barbara was preparing to climb in with her. There was also Barbara’s daughter and two more grandkids Kirsty hadn’t seen before.

‘Hey, I can do that,’ Susie said. She’d come in her wheelchair-only because she still needed a walking stick and she couldn’t carry Rosie or stay upright very long without it. ‘I’m a mother, and if Mavis can do it, so can I.’

‘Yahoo!’ someone yelled-it was Mrs Grey from the post office, wielding a vast pair of scissors. She picked up a sack and prepared to chop wheel holes. ‘You and Rosie’ll knock ’em dead, girl.’

Susie and Rosie would race.

Mother and daughter.

Kirsty went to help-and then she paused. There were lots of people helping Susie.

She looked across the fairground and saw Jake retreating.

He was leaving. He was taking his girls to the lemonade stall so Penelope and Alice would ask no questions.

Questions like why didn’t they have a mother?

He wouldn’t push, she thought. He had a twin by each hand, gripping hard, and the slumping of the girls’ shoulders said they were aware of what was happening and they hated it.

If she called out…

Could she?

Why not? Why on earth not?

The rest of her life started now.

‘Alice,’ she yelled. ‘Penelope!’

They turned. They all turned.

Alice and Penelope looked hopeful.

‘Do you girls want to come in a sack with me?’ she yelled-and every person there knew exactly what she was saying. Every person in the fairground knew their local doctor, and almost every one of them wished for exactly this.

Jake was standing motionless. Expressionless. She dared give him no more than a fleeting glance but in that moment she knew she’d crossed some invisible line, and there was no going back.

‘You’re not our mother,’ Alice called, straight to the point like any four-year-old should be.

‘No, but a mother-daughter sack race is fun,’ Kirsty called back. ‘So I thought…I could be a friend who’s a sort of mother-when-you-need-me.’

How about that for a declaration? she thought, breathless. Even her twin was hornswoggled. Susie and her chair were halfway into her sack. Susie sat with her mouth open, and the twins stared with their mouths open, and Kirsty thought, There are far too many twins.

There’s too much emotion.

But not for long. People were starting to cheer. Someone- Ben?-hauled an extended-family sack from the pile, and the twins dropped their father’s hands and ran. They dived into Ben’s proffered sack, whooped around the bottom for a bit and then stood, sack pulled to their chins, with a gap left in the middle.

‘This is your place,’ Penelope told Kirsty. ‘In the middle.’

‘That’s where all the best mothers go,’ Susie said softly from beside her. ‘Jump right in, Kirsty, love. Heart and all.’

So she did. The next minute she was in the sack with the twins, lined up in a row stretching right across the fairground.

The assortment was stunning. There were womenfolk from Rosie’s age to Mavis’s age, and everything in between. Mothers of all shapes and sizes.

Alice and Penelope were beaming and beaming, but not Kirsty. Kirsty stared straight ahead while Jake stared at the ground. Kirsty caught a glimpse of Angus patting him on the shoulder, and all of a sudden she felt like crying.

There’d been enough tears.

‘Go!’

They were off. Jumping, running, wheeling, tumbling, mothers and assorted daughters, up to four generations in the one sack, all making their way any way they knew how to get to the finish line.

The menfolk were roaring encouragement and advice. Angus had forgotten all about his lack of oxygen, his dicky heart, and he was cheering fit to burst.

Kirsty and Penelope and Alice were concentrating. ‘We have to jump in step,’ Kirsty gasped at their third tumble. There were some fast movers here but the fastest were being handicapped in all sorts of ways: dogs racing across their paths-including Boris!-people falling over; an ex-marathon runner and her sprinter daughter being held back by the local blacksmith who simply darted over and stood on a corner of their sack until his wife and kids passed them by.

‘We’re jumping, we’re jumping,’ the twins were yelling. ‘Watch us jump, Daddy.’

‘Go on,’ Kirsty heard herself scream. ‘We can do this.’

She could do this.

Of course she could. And of course they did. They reached the finish maybe eighteenth, maybe nineteenth, but gloriously in the middle of the pack and not at the back. They watched in a muddle of sacks and contorted bodies and frantic laughter as someone rushed forward and proclaimed Susie and Rose-Susie and Rose!-as the winners. In their chair they’d been out front by a mile, and second were Mavis and Barbara and assorted granddaughters. Someone was laughing and saying that next year the wheelchairs had to be nobbled, but not this year. This year the wheelchairs were the winners.

There were more winners than wheelchairs.

Kirsty lay on the ground and hugged her girls to her and Boris bounded over and licked her face, and she wondered how she could feel any more of a winner than she did right now.

Then Jake was there.

He was crouching down, lifting her out of the puddle of children and sack and dog-doctor performs incision of sack with precision and style-hauling her against him and laughing and kissing her and smiling his pride and his joy for all to see.

‘We didn’t win, Daddy,’ Alice was saying.

‘We didn’t win,’ echoed her twin. ‘But we jumped really high.’

‘Don’t you worry about winning,’ Jake told his daughter in a voice that was none too steady. ‘There’s always next year.’

And then in front of the entire population of Dolphin Bay, in front of these people who would be part of their lives for ever, Dr Jake Cameron kissed Dr Kirsty McMahon.

Two became one.

Or…two became part of this wonderful, muddly assorted population that was what you called life.

For ever.

Marion Lennox

Marion Lennox was born on an Australian dairy farm. She moved on-mostly because the cows weren’t interested in her stories! Marion writes for the Medical Romance™ and Harlequin Romance® lines. In her non-writing life, Marion cares (haphazardly) for her husband, kids, dogs, cats, chickens and anyone else who lines up at her dinner table. She fights her rampant garden (she’s losing) and her house dust (she’s lost!). She also travels, which she finds seriously addictive. As a teenager, Marion was told she’d never get anywhere reading romance. Now romance is the basis of her stories; her stories allow her to travel, and if ever there was one advertisement for following your dream, she’d be it!