7. Chapter Five

Chapter Five

“Hey, watch it kiddo!” Ollie’s breath escaped her in a huff as her nephew barrelled directly into her abdomen as she balanced an oversized bowl of salad on her way out the door. He squealed as his older sister chased after him, escaping out into the evening air, his dad bellowing after them to slow down.

Family dinner was shaping up to be as epic and chaotic as always. Ollie had imagined that after the buzz of her returning home had faded, everything would quiet down.After all, her siblings had their own homes to run and their own dining tables to gather around, even Nico who as a single bloke shared a house with two of his old mates from school. And yet, every other night it seemed, her parents hosted everyone. Her brothers and sister, her brother and sister-in-law, as well as their accumulated five children (six, if you counted the one kicking Pia in the ribs) would all join in to gather around the huge wooden table on the west side of the deck and eat a feast while the sun went down.

There was still a very specific gender split in her family that made her wild. Her mother in the kitchen, her father outdoors. It was a split her siblings had replicated, the women arriving with food - more food - and the men all relaxing back with beers and conversation as the food was placed before them, then their plates cleared after they were done. Ollie wasn’t sure if it was because she was gay, the youngest, or because she just wasn’t a small-town girl anymore but she was the only one it seemed to really bother.

She didn’t shirk her own responsibilities to help out because she was also the only one on holiday, but it irked her to see her brothers happily accepting being served while the women rushed around attending to everyone’s needs. She was pretty sure that if Nonna still had her legs under her she’d be up fussing too.

“You need to sit down,” Ollie finally snapped, watching Pia juggle a complaining child around her knees while she placed a loaded serving bowl on the table. “I’ll take her,” she gestured to Rosa. “Or better yet, her father could help out.” She glared at her brother-in-law. James instantly leapt into action, quickly the doting dad and the helpful husband but it made her nuts knowing he had to be asked. “Mama, sit down,” she said in exasperation as her sixty-eight-year-old mother bustled back and forth. “Nico, go and get the bloody salad spoons.”

Her brother gave her an exaggerated salute as he got to his feet and her family all exchanged obvious glances. Ollie rolled her eyes.

“So,” said Matty, his tone over-the-top casual. “How was your day, Viola? ”

Ollie glared at him.

“It was lovely, thank you, Matteo. And yours?”

“Wonderful, thank you for caring. I worked my arse off in the hot sun. What did you do with your day?”

“Chores,” she bit back, “and errands.” She blinked and blurted out, “I saw Lara Bennett at the general store.”

“Ah,” piped up Nico as he returned to his seat. “That explains your mood.”

“What does that mean?”

“You always hated her, right?”

“Plus, she’s a real piece of work,” added Matty’s wife Natasha, picking up her wine glass and sipping to emphasise. “Enough to ruin anyone’s day.”

“That store,” her mother huffed, a clear signal she was on her way up to a soap box. “Eight dollars for a bottle of passata? It’s almost like she doesn’t want any locals buying from her at all! You know I was there last week,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “and I overheard her telling Kimberley Evans that her husband running off to Sydney on her was her own damn fault. What a thing to say! She and Lara used to be friends, but I’ll tell you what: there’s a lot of women in this town who say you can’t trust your husband around her.”

“That’s true enough,” Nico’s grin spread, his eyes going bright. “Remember that bar fight over her? There was a full on brawl down at the Ribbonwood pub after that bloke from the school tried to hook up with her.”

“He was the high school principal,” Natasha explained to Ollie, “and married with kids.”

“I mean,” Ollie scrunched up her face, “he sounds like a real charmer.”

“He got arrested after that brawl. Lost his job as well as his wife,” her father chimed in solemnly, his eyebrows lowered.

“Let that be a lesson to him.” Her mother gave him a threatening look as if her adoring husband of forty-five years were about to leap up from the table to join a bar fight over a woman half his age. He scoffed at her and her eyes softened. “That’s not the only marriage Lara’s wrecked either.” Her mother wasn’t doing a great job of hiding her glee as she geared up to breathlessly detail yet another scandal.

Just like that, the table erupted into Lara Bennett stories. As the blazing pink sunset settled around the hills, the delicious meal shrank and the tales flew. Lara Bennett had ruined the general store, she’d seduced married men, she’d bite your head off as soon as talk to you, she’d ruined Robyn Lowe’s life, insulted Myrtle Jenkin’s elderly husband, plus she’d basically killed a man.

“Wait, what? ” Ollie interrupted. “What did she do to Mrs Lowe?”

“There’s a lot of gossip in this town,” her mother said primly as if she wasn’t one of Ribbonwood’s most active participants, “but that one was the worst of it.”

“What happened?”

“Poor Robyn,” her mother shook her head woefully. “It was years ago now. Lara took against her - no idea why - but she told everyone who’d listen that Robyn was carrying on out of town having an affair with a younger man. Her husband was humiliated,” she sighed. “He up and left her, just straight up abandoning her and her two children, just like that. And then,” she paused for dramatic effect,“it wasn’t even true. She’d been in Silverbloom Hospital the entire time, the poor woman. Sick in hospital and completely unable to defend herself.”

“Wow.” Ollie shook her head. Lara really was a piece of work. God, but what a devastatingly attractive one all the same… No, shit, Ollie, think of Mrs Lowe’s sweet face. Mrs Lowe had looked so much older than her years, deep creases on her face that Ollie didn’t remember from back when the kind teacher had taken the time to change Ollie’s life. Was it simply the natural progression of ageing or was it something else? What would possess anyone - even Lara - to do something like that? As she licked the last of the sauce off her fork, she realised her accusation back in the general store had been correct: some things never did change. Once a mean girl, always a mean girl

A child’s shriek broke her from her thoughts and her head jerked up. She turned sharply toward the corner of the deck where the kids had all scampered off to play. Her spine stayed stiff while Pia heaved herself to her feet to go and investigate. Ollie made herself stay in the chair until she heard her sister’s calm voice soothing over a squabble.

“Not so fussed on the killing a man part of the story?” Matty asked, his eyebrows raised. “That tracks.”

Ollie snorted.

“I mean that one definitely sounds like an exaggeration,” she scoffed.

“No, she basically did,” Nico piped up. “Josh Rees was a stand-up guy. She might not have actually murdered him but it was a death from a thousand cuts kind of situation for sure.”

Ollie rolled her eyes. She knew enough of how her brothers saw relationship dynamics to recognise a specific viewpoint when she heard one. Plus she’d heard about that back when it had happened. Josh Rees chose to get behind the wheel while drunk. It was a terrible tragedy but it was on him and him only and the only blessing was that he hadn’t taken anyone else with him.

“It just goes to show you,” Matty said, his tone grave, “that she was like that from the start. You were a good girl in high school, Ollie; you recognised her for what she was. A real-life femme fatale. Seducing a grown man, that’s not a normal thing to do, is it?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Pia returned to the table. “Sorry, Nonna-” she hastily apologised. “But that’s a load of bull. Lara Bennett might be a lot of things, but back then she was a child. And that man took advantage of her.”

Silence rang out. Ollie felt her fist grip tight around the stem of her wine glass, the sound of a fork clinking against a plate absurdly loud in the night air.

“She was hardly a child-” Nico started.

“Oh yes she bloody well was,” Pia snapped. “Sure, she was technically the age of consent - barely - but I work with seventeen-year-olds every day and I’m telling you, they are clear as mud, children . What kind of adult man would go after a high school girl?”

Ollie’s stomach clenched. She too worked with adolescents and her sister was right. She remembered the rumours, the snide insinuations, the names Lara got called.Some of them from her. All the nasty words, the blatant stares, all directed at a seventeen-year-old girl, not the adult man who-

“He groomed her,” Ollie said slowly.

“Of course he did,” Pia bit out. “These days that’s what we’d call it. Back then, she was just a precocious slut.”

“Pia!” her mother protested. “That’s enough-”

Pia’s eyes flashed.

“No,” she said. “What if that was Aria?” she asked Matty, watching him flinch as she referred to his ten-year-old daughter. “Would you say an adult man who tried to sleep with her in just seven years’ time was a stand-up guy?”

The table fell silent. Both Matty and Nico looked violently unsettled. Matty glared out towards where the children were playing and Nico took a solid swig of his beer.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Pia’s voice was sharp.“She no more ‘seduced’ him, than I bloody did. He was a straight up predator.She also didn’t kill him, but if she had, I’d have backed her. ”

“Keep that one in mind, Jimmy,” Nico tried to joke to his brother-in-law to lighten the mood, but no one laughed. The word predator and everything it entailed seemed to ring in the quiet night.

“Why didn’t we see that?” Ollie’s tone was low.“We all blamed her.We treated her like a pariah-” her voice faded out.In her mind she saw the set of Lara’s spine in the store earlier that day. Defensive.

“And she still is, isn’t she?” Pia raised her eyebrows.

“I mean-” Natasha started, then stopped.She picked up her wineglass and put it down again. “She’s still pretty nasty,” she said quietly.

“Some women need armour,” came a voice that made every single head turn. Her Nonna, tiny in her chair.She looked pale and immensely tired.“If you make a girl an outcast, what else is she going to do?”

That night Ollie lay awake, sheets kicked off, listening to the geckos barking from the window eaves. She couldn’t get those sharp blue eyes out of her mind, replaying over and over the moment that Lara Bennett had seen Ollie and her gaze had frozen. If back in high school Ollie had looked at a teenage girl in trouble and only seen a slut , what had Lara seen when she looked back?

God, this was why Ollie hated coming back to Ribbonwood. It wasn’t flattering, understanding herself so fully. She felt queasy, seeing herself through Lara’s eyes. She’d been so young back then, floating thoughtlessly along on the same cultural currents that had made her hate herself as well as Lara. Ollie knew better now and she damn well did better, on that she was sure. But if they’d all been wrong about Lara back then, were they wrong about her now? The world might be changing, but had this tiny town changed one bit?

She thought of her brothers, so easily accepting women’s service without ever seeming to notice, of the way they had to be instructed to put their own young niece and daughter into Lara’s shoes before they were able to empathise. She thought of her mother, happily engaging in salacious gossip about another woman while simultaneously denouncing that same woman for gossiping back. God knows they all had a point of view. After everything she’d heard that evening, Ollie wondered if she’d learned anything at all. Because who was Lara Bennett really?

She stared up at the ceiling and tried to tell herself that it wasn’t just the hot stab of desire that made her want to find out.