32. Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty

Ollie awoke in her own bed, slightly disorientated for a moment. No warm body beside her, unless you counted the dachshund that had somehow found his way behind her knees. She tried to stretch and he imitated her, contorting his small entirely odd body and stumbling up over the covers to lie down again with his head on her chest. Ollie huffed out a sigh, but also found herself gently patting his silky soft ears. Was she… attached to Rocco? Surely not.

Ten days. That was how long she had left before it was time to board the plane back to Melbourne. Yesterday morning she’d spoken with Cherie, who’d called her again as she’d been just about to sit down for lunch out on the deck, watching a trio of black cockatoos shrieking and spreading their huge wings in the old fig tree. Cherie had asked if she was ready to come back to work and Ollie had stared wide-eyed over the vines, her stomach clenching. Cherie couldn’t ask her directly if she’d sought the help she’d suggested and Ollie didn’t tell her that she hadn’t. She’d been too busy running full tilt into a beautiful woman instead. There’d also been other minor things to contend with, like her Nonna’s death, her family’s wholehearted overtaking of her life, reconnecting with old friends and wandering through the rainforest, remembering how to breathe.

Was that help? Did it count?

Was Ollie ready?

She had to be.

“Shit Rocco,” she whispered to him. “You’re only small. I’m pretty sure you can fit in my carry-on luggage.”

She paused on her way down the hall, standing for a moment to look into her Nonna’s bedroom. The hospital bed was gone, replaced once more by the neatly made single bed her grandmother had slept in for decades. Portia was curled up at the foot-end, alone. Ollie’s eyes filled with tears. She came over and gently petted the ageing moggy who squinted her yellow eyes and purred.

It was another glowingly sunny morning when she took a plate of toast out onto the deck. Matty was already sitting in his favourite spot, a loud man taking a quiet moment, his eyes gazing out on miles of green. She nodded at him and he tried to trip her up as she walked past. Ollie was too fast, reflexes honed from a lifetime of being the youngest sibling, and she swatted him instead .

They sipped in companionable silence, watching a pair of emerald doves busybody their way around the grass together. She thought about Lara, probably in her stupidly pretty kitchen right now, sipping her own coffee while trying to organise Tilly out the door. The two of them had come for Sunday night dinner again the other night, now that the extraneous Gabriellis had finally retreated from whence they came. There’d been several sets of eyes on the two of them as Ollie couldn’t stop herself from holding Lara’s hand, wrapping an arm around her shoulder, dropping a kiss into her hair. Unlike Sadie and Nico though, no one went out of their way to tease them. Ollie supposed that was probably something to do with the look on her face. If Lara came again this weekend, it would be for the last time.

“Jesus, did somebody die or something?”

Matty and Ollie traded appalled glances as Nico pushed his way out the screen door.

“Sensitive as always, mate,” Matty sighed.

“I just didn’t picture you two as the silent meditation type.” Nico plonked himself opposite them. “Doing a spot of mindfulness are we? Downward dog?”

“Just enjoying the peace and quiet.” Ollie shot her brother a look. “At least, we were. ”

“Not much more of that for you,” Nico observed. “Don’t know how you live in Melbourne,” he shuddered. “Nightmare.”

“Oh yeah,” Ollie said drily. “Amazing food, fantastic night life, beautiful parks, incredible culture… not that you’d know what that was.”

Nico grinned at her.

“Ribbonwood Pub does a great steak,” he said easily. “Couple of good mates, a beautiful woman, what the fuck else do you need?”

Ollie opened her mouth to retort and she found it closing again. For fuck’s sake. Sometimes Nico had a point.

“Got you there,” Matty pointed at her. “You going to be okay?” His voice came out low and gentle.

Ollie glared down at her coffee cup.

“Yep,” she said shortly. She leaned back in the sunshine, closed her eyes and thought of her favourite cafe on Lyon Street, the new wine bar that had opened half a block from her house, the gourmet pizza joint that now delivered twenty-four hours a day. UberEats, street festivals, food vans, arthouse cinema. The NGV, the MCG, Midsummer Pride. She thought of everything she loved about her life there. Eventually she realised it had all faded from her brain as she listened to the bird chorus.

By mid-afternoon Ollie felt a bit like she was going to burst right out of her own skin. What did you do with ten days left, when you couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to say goodbye? She imagined herself back in Melbourne, texting Lara from the tea room at work. She couldn’t imagine not speaking with her, hearing updates on her day. But that wouldn’t be right. Would it? Should they cold turkey it? Close the door gently on their way back to their real lives, a chapter closed? She couldn’t fathom it either way.

She grabbed her hat and went for a walk around the winery. The vines were starting to get leafy and lush and the sun was baking down on her bare limbs, adamantly tanned now despite her precautions.

“Ollie!” Her mother’s voice rang out from the distance and her head snapped up. There was something off in her high-pitched tone.

When she looked up, she saw her mum with Pia, coming down a row of vines together. Pia stopped still and grabbed an end post, doubling over in pain. Ollie ran.

“Fuck.” Pia gritted her teeth, her face sweaty. “Oh my god.”

“Oh wow.” Ollie took her arm, her smile spilling out and her anxiety spiking simultaneously. “She’s on her way? ”

“I thought it was just back pain,” Pia groaned. “So I tried to walk it off. Then this,” she gestured down. Her shorts were soaked through with her broken waters.

Ollie and her mum helped Pia gingerly make her way down the row, but they’d barely taken five steps when Pia gripped them tight for balance and panted through another contraction. Ollie whipped out her phone to look at the stopwatch. Another few steps and it was happening again. Less than a minute apart.

“Hey mum,” Ollie said, trying to keep her voice light. “Want to call an ambulance?”

“ Fuck,” Pia gasped. “No fucking way.”

Ollie handed her mother her phone and she very smartly walked away as she called 000. Ollie and Pia made it as far as the old fig tree and out of the baking sun before she dropped to her knees, an unholy sound coming from her as everything about her began to push, like it or not. Ollie’s heart began to race, her hands shaking. She concentrated extremely hard on keeping her voice level as she ordered her mum into the house for every towel they had and some hand sanitiser.

“Hey,” she said, approaching her sister, “this might be a bit weird for all of us, but- ”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Ollie!” Pia glared at her as she panted. “This is my third baby and you’re a doctor. Do what you gotta do.”

“Okay,” said Ollie a second later, her voice so calm she scared even herself, “I can feel the head,” she announced.

Pia nodded ferociously, then dropped down onto her hands and pushed again, her face filled with fury and determination and Ollie got down beside her. Her mum rubbed Pia’s back, making soothing sounds; she’d been there for every other grandchild, but never in a goddamned paddock. Ollie’s fingers went numb with sudden terror. She wasn’t in any way an obstetrician but she’d done a rotation in birth suite as a resident. She could already count the ways this could go wrong. Shoulder dystocia, her mind raced, cord wrapped around the neck. Her vision blurred, postpartum haemorrhage, her sister bleeding out in the fucking grass before her eyes, Ollie helpless to do anything to stop it.

She heard a voice calmly counting out loud to ten, coaching her sister through each push and realised it was her own.

“Good work, honey, almost there,” said Dr Gabrielli encouragingly, while Ollie tried not to pass out.

Barely two minutes later, she was clutching a slippery baby and quickly pulling it up to her sister’s chest. The baby was purple. Normal, Dr Gabrielli reminded her. Perfectly normal. The little hands were moving, Pia sobbing, Ollie rubbing the baby’s back briskly with a towel, the small mouth opening, cord still pulsing, the skin slowly turning pink before her eyes as her lungs breathed in oxygen for the first time, a baby’s cry.

“Oh my fucking god! ” Her brothers were suddenly there. “Someone call Jimmy-”

Ollie looked down and realised she was already massaging her sister’s belly, trying to help it contract, looking at the blood on Pia’s thighs, trying to calculate, a towel under her, damp but not soaked. Time seemed to jump sideways and a paramedic materialised from nowhere.

Pia straight up refused to go to hospital.

“My sister’s a doctor,” she said, her eyes flashing. “I know how to look after a damn baby and you just said my vitals were all fine. Pretty sure women have given birth in paddocks since the beginning of time.”

“And died, ” Ollie pointed out before she could stop herself. The entire family looked at her, horrified.

“Ollie.” Pia eyeballed her directly, a solidly older-sibling expression on her face. “Tell me like my sister who’s done a thousand years of training. Do I need to be admitted to hospital right now? Does she? Or can we just call it a damn home birth and go cuddle up together in the peace and quiet while we get to know Alessandra? ”

Everyone gazed at the tiny baby, now latched firmly to a nipple, appetite clearly identifying her as a Gabrielli.

Her dad - who Ollie hadn’t even noticed arrive - starting sobbing.

Between them all they got Pia and Alessandra up to the house, tucked in a bed, Ollie calling Pia’s midwife to come check them out as a compromise, James running in the door like a man having a heart attack, wrapping his arms around his wife, crying in shock and joy and despair all in one.

They all tiptoed out to give them some space. Ollie washed her hands, stared at her startled face in the bathroom mirror, then dizzily found herself back down in the garden under the fig tree. The bloodied towels were all gone, nothing to say anything monumental had just happened there except a little flattened grass. Her knees practically gave out and she sat down, hard.

“What am I doing? ” She looked down at the place her niece had just arrived onto the planet, Gabrielli blood on Jinibara soil, everyone’s sweat and tears, love and fear, grief and joy all combined until Ollie didn’t know whose feelings were whose, whose hand it was that had come down to gently rest on her back as she rubbed her sister’s belly, whose tears had soaked her shoulder, whose hand had gripped hers when the ambulance arrived.

She thought of her Nonna’s last breath, of her mother looking older every Christmas, the tears streaking down her dad’s stubbled cheeks. She thought of fairy crowns made of daisies and dandelions, of the gentle fuzz of soft newborn hair on the niece whose very first breath she’d gotten to see. She thought of a huge bonfire, surrounded with women who might snipe at each other in public but who had each other’s backs no matter what. She thought of Lara, the heat and sweetness of her kiss as she leaned out her front door yesterday morning to say goodbye, the laughter in her eyes as Ollie kept trying to leave and kept finding one more reason to kiss her again.

“What am I doing? ” She gripped her own shoulders and squeezed, her eyes gazing up into the enormous fig tree, the entwined branches, the shade it had provided for generations before her. She squeezed her eyes closed, Melbourne and Ribbonwood flipping like polaroid snaps through her brain.

She was in the farm ute before she even knew she was going to do it.

Her heart raced as she drove the twists and turns of the back roads, not even a grind of the gears now, fully acclimatised. She couldn’t get there fast enough, cursing the tight bends and single track road, Lara’s voice repeating like a soundtrack. What am I going to do without this? I like you. I don’t let people in my bed. You’re so fucking beautiful. What the fuck Ollie, what have you done to me?

When she reached the house the afternoon was fading into early evening, sunset hitting and reflecting pink light off the glass, soft warm glow spilling from the windows, Lara’s car in the carport. She was already opening the door when Ollie pulled up - the ute was hardly subtle - and she looked surprised. Surprised and beautiful, a gleam in her eyes as Ollie stumbled up onto her porch, staring at everything she could ever want .

“Can’t stay away, huh?” Lara smirked at her, a question in her eyes.

“No,” Ollie breathed. She tugged Lara just outside her front door and kissed her with intense softness. “Lara,” her voice was almost a whisper as she pulled back just enough to speak. “I can’t even begin to describe the day I just had but… fuck, I’ve figured it out, all of it. I… can’t leave,” she told her, still slightly shocked at the words spilling out her mouth, trying to reel back from any big confessions but still meaning every damn word. She met Lara’s eyes and caught the startled expression in their blue depths. She raced on. “I can’t leave Ribbonwood. Everything I’ve ever wanted is here. I’m not going to go back to Melbourne; I don’t want to do it…. I don’t know what this means for us, but I want to stay and figure that out.”

“What do you mean you’re not going?” Lara had gotten very still. “You live in Melbourne, that’s where your life is. You can’t just stay here-”

“I can.” Ollie shook her head. “Lara… Pia just had her baby, I helped her birth right there at home.” Lara blinked at the segue and she tried to explain. “My family… they’re everything. I don’t want to miss out on their lives.” She let her hands run down Lara’s arms. “And,” she met her eyes, “I don’t want to miss out on this.”

“Ollie.” Lara stepped back, Ollie’s hands suddenly holding air. “You’re emotional, it’s clearly been a big day.” Her eyes were large, wary. “Everything with your grandmother… your job… it makes sens e.” She shook her head. “But you don’t belong here. We both know that.”

Ollie started to feel cold. Lara’s limbs were stiff, her expression absolutely the opposite of thrilled.

“I’m not… I’m not trying to push you for something Lara,” she said. “I just want to give us the time to work this out- to give it a chance and see where it could go.”

“We don’t need time for that,” Lara told her, her face shutting down completely. “This is everything it was ever going to be, Ollie. A fling.”

Ollie stared at her for several long seconds. She saw the slight tremor in Lara’s fingers.

“I don’t believe you,” she said slowly. “I know it’s more than that. We both know it’s more.”

“No.” Lara shook her head. Ollie caught the tears shining in her eyes. “I don’t do what it is you’re asking for. I don’t want a relationship, that’s not who I am or what my life looks like.” A tear spilled down her cheek and she wiped it away, roughly. “I’m never going to do that again,” she whispered.

“ Lara. ” Ollie’s heart was cracking. “Those are two different things. What your marriage was and what we would be-”

“The only reason I let you talk me into this in the first place was because you were leaving.” Lara’s tone grew short. She took a sharp breath. “Ollie, you’re… god, you are a once in a lifetime thing, believe me I know that.” Her blue eyes glimmered with tears. “But this only happened because you were just passing through.”

Ollie stared at her, unable to believe how fast her hopes were crumbling. This couldn’t be happening. She could almost see Lara’s defences rebuilding; she had to break through, make her see.

She took a step closer again.

“Lara-”

“Soccer.” Lara put her hand out imploringly, her eyes scrunching tightly closed and Ollie froze still.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s my safe word.” Lara’s voice was low as she opened her eyes. “Please just stop, I need you to stop.”

Ollie stood very still, her hands at her side, her eyes on the ground. When she looked up, Lara had stepped away, her hand already on her front door handle though her eyes were still fixed on Ollie’s face.

“Lara,” Ollie said. “I’m always going to respect what you want.” She could barely find her voice. “But this is goodbye, you know that right?”

Lara watched her for a beat, her face pale. Then she moved. Her hands were in Ollie’s hair and she was kissing her, long, tender, slow. Ollie kissed her back, so convinced this couldn’t be it, that Lara felt everything she felt. She could taste it in her kiss, in the longing, the feeling she was so sure could one day be love if Lara would just give them a chance . She kept her eyes squeezed closed as Lara let her go. When she opened them it was on the front door closing. She heard the faint click , as Lara locked it behind her.