Read Online Wildflower Hill by Kimberley Freeman - Free Book Online Page B

in there somewhere.” There. I’d managed to talk about dancing and Josh without crying. No, wait, I was crying.
    Adelaide gave me a squeeze around the shoulders. “You’ll be fine.”
    “I won’t be.”
    “Of course you will.”
    I indicated the box of awards, their attractively designed angles carefully softened by the tissue paper. That was my life in there. Wrapped up and ready to be sealed away. “I feel as though I’ve lost my anchor. I’ve lost my boyfriend. Now I’m losing my apartment . . .”
    “Do you have to move? Really? Could you wait a little longer?”
    “I’m going to run out of money soon.”
    “I don’t get in, Em. Your millionaire grandma died a few years ago. She didn’t leave you anything?”
    “No. Nothing. And I didn’t want or expect anything, so I don’t mind.” When Grandma died, she left nothing to her family. From my earliest childhood, I had understood that my grandparents were very important people: Grandma for her business, Grandad for his work in parliament. But they had never flaunted their wealth nor forgotten their responsibilities to the community. Grandma’s company was now in the hands of the shareholders, and the personal fortune went to sixty different Australian charities. It was one of the reasons I had been reluctant to return to Australia. My mother and my uncle had become so bitter, even though they were both company shareholders and were quite wealthy enough. There had been legal investigations and long, stupid arguments. Nothing ruined a family like a rich relative’s death. “Besides, I can’t manage the stairs here at the moment. It’s best if I just get away.”
    That’s when the doorbell rang.
    “I’ll get it,” Adelaide said. “Don’t get up.”
    I anticipated the moving van arriving an hour too soon. What I didn’t expect to hear was my mother’s voice at the bottom of the stairs, explaining who she was to Adelaide.
    My heart jumped, and I tried to get up too quickly. Hurt my knee. Sat back down. Then my mother was there, striding toward me gracefully, her back erect, her dark hair shining and straight and caught in a long ponytail at the nape of her neck. I had always known the sting of having a beautifulmother. When I was a teenager and my mother was still modeling professionally, I would pin photos of her to my bedroom mirror, then sit among them with sick wonder at the difference between our complexions, our eyes, our mouths. Then I’d tear down the photos and put them away, practice for an hour as though exorcising a demon. All that mattered to a ballet dancer was that she was firm and fit and light enough to be picked up. Which I mightn’t have been if I’d grown as tall as Louise Blaxland-Hunter.
    “My darling,” Mum said, leaning down to enclose me in a hug. “You look pale and tired.”
    “Thanks,” I muttered.
    Mum knelt and I envied her the ease of movements in her joints. Despair tumbled over me like a wave. “Let me look at you,” she said.
    I glanced at Adelaide, who nodded and quietly left the room.
    “Was this your idea or Dad’s?” I asked my mother.
    “Both of ours,” Mum said. “But I organized it. I’m offended . . .” A little-girl pout, a flutter of eyelashes, entirely inappropriate on any other fifty-eight-year-old woman but somehow still appealing on my mother. “The first thing I wanted to do was come to you. My baby. But I kept thinking you’d come home on your own.” She stood, smoothed her skirt. “But you didn’t. So I’ve come to take you home with me.”
    “I’m not coming home.”
    “Why not?”
    I opened my mouth to reply, but her question caught meoff guard. Why not, indeed? I’d been lying in bed being miserable for weeks. I didn’t eat properly, I took too many painkillers; I’d seen myself in the mirror, and the light had gone out of my eyes. There was nothing here for me in London now. Would it be so bad to go home, to be with my family?
    My mother sensed me wavering and