‘He is yours.’ Masha had refused to look at the baby. Her averted face, her sweat-soaked hair flat against her forehead, could have been carved from marble. ‘Not mine.’
A nurse at the hospital said, ‘Mum will come around.’ It was the grief. She was still in shock, probably. Such a terrible thing to go through, losing her son when she was six months pregnant with her second. That nurse did not know his wife’s strength. She did not know Masha.
Masha discharged herself from the hospital. She said she was going straight back to work, that very day, and she would send money. She would make enough money in her job so that her husband could take care of the new baby, but she wanted nothing to do with him.
She spoke very calmly, as if this were a business arrangement, and she only lost her temper once, when the man fell to his knees and clutched her and begged her to let them be a family again. Masha screamed into his face, over and over, ‘I am not a mother! Can you not understand this? I am not a mother!’
So he let her go. What else could he do? She did exactly what she said she would and sent money, more and more each year, as her career became more successful.
He sent her photos. She never acknowledged them. He wondered if she even looked at them and he thought that maybe she did not. She was a woman with the strength to move mountains. She was a woman as weak as a child.
He remarried two years later. His son called his Australian wife ‘Mummy’ and spoke with an Australian accent, and they had two more sons and lived an Australian life in this lucky country. They played cricket on the beach on Christmas Day. They had a swimming pool in their backyard and his sons caught the bus home and on hot summer days they ran straight through the house, tearing off their clothes, and jumped into the pool in their undies. They had a large circle of friends, some of whom dropped by their house without phoning first. His second wife grew up in a small country town, and her accent was from ‘the bush’, broad and thick and slow, her favourite phrase was ‘no big deal’ and he loved her, but there had been occasions over the years when he would be standing in his backyard at the barbecue, turning steaks, a beer in his hand, cicadas screaming, a kookaburra laughing, the splash of water, the smell of bug spray, the early evening sun still hot on his neck, and without warning Masha’s face would appear in his mind, her nostrils flared, her beautiful green eyes blazing with superiority and contempt but also childlike confusion: These people! They are so strange!
For many years he had given up communicating with Masha. He didn’t bother to send photos of their son’s wedding, but five years ago, when their first grandchild was born and he was awash with the fierce, all-consuming love of a new grandparent, he had emailed again, attaching photos of the baby, with the subject heading: please read, masha. He wrote that it was fine that she chose not to be a mother, he understood, but now, if she wanted, she could be a grandmother and wasn’t that wonderful? There was no reply.
He looked now at his granddaughter. He thought he could see something of Masha in the shape of her eyes. He held the baby with one arm and extracted his phone from his pocket with the other, and snapped a photo of her exquisite, sleeping face.
He wouldn’t give up. One day Masha would answer. One day she would weaken, or find the strength, and she would answer.
He knew her better than anyone.
One day she would.
chapter seventy-seven
Reader, she didn’t marry him, but he moved to Sydney for her and they lived together, and Tony was there beside her during the resurgence of her career, when Frances’s first foray into ‘romantic suspense’ turned out to be a surprise hit. (A surprise to everyone except Jo, who called her up the day after she delivered the revised manuscript and said, in a very un-grandmotherly tone, ‘You fucking nailed it.’)
Frances was also a surprise hit with Tony’s grandchildren in Holland, who called her ‘Grandma Frances’, and Tony credited Frances with the family’s decision to move back to Sydney, which was entirely unwarranted, as his son Will had got a transfer, nothing to do with her. But she was besotted with his grandkids – her grandkids – and all of her friends said that was just so typical of Frances, to skip the hard yards and go straight to the good part, where you got to love them and spoil them and hand them back.
But they forgave her.
chapter seventy-eight
Of course, not everyone gets a happy ending, or even the chance of one. Life doesn’t work like that. Case in point: Helen Ihnat, the reviewer of Frances’s novel What the Heart Wants, lost her entire life savings in a mortifying, high-profile cryptocurrency scam and lived in a state of quite profound unhappiness for the rest of her days.
But as she despised neatly tied-up happy endings, she was fine with that.
chapter seventy-nine Oh, reader, of course she married him eventually. You’ve met her. She waited until her sixtieth birthday. She wore turquoise. She had eleven bridesmaids, none of whom was under the age of forty-five, thirteen flower girls and one page boy, a toddler just learning to walk, who clutched a Matchbox car in each of his tiny fists. His name was Zach.
Every chair at the reception was tied up with a giant white satin bow at the back.
It was the most beautiful, ridiculous wedding you’ve ever seen.
Acknowledgements
As always there are so many people to thank for their support with this book. Thank you to my talented editors who worked so hard to make Nine Perfect Strangers so much better in so many significant ways: Georgia Douglas, Cate Paterson, Amy Einhorn, Maxine Hitchcock, Ali Lavau and Hilary Reynolds.
Thank you to Elina Reddy for giving so generously of her time to help me develop the character of Masha. Elina is not only a wonderful artist but has the ability to paint such vivid pictures with her words. Maria (Masha) Dmitrichenko was the winning bidder at a Starlight Children’s Foundation charity event to have a character in one of my books named after her and I thank her for the use of her name.
Thank you to Dr Nikki Stamp for answering my questions. She is one of only a handful of female heart surgeons in Australia and the dialogue I gave Masha’s heart surgeon came straight from her fascinating book, Can You Die of a Broken Heart?
Thank you to Kat Lukash and Praveen Naidoo for help with my Russian and my football, to Lucie Johnson for sharing health resort stories and to my brother-in-law Rob Ostric, for the expression on his face when I asked how he would feel about driving a Lamborghini down an unsealed road. Thank you to my sister Fiona for instantly answering my texts demanding information. Thank you to my charming fellow guests at the Golden Door health resort for a lovely week where I saw the sun rise, which was very pleasing, although I feel no particular need to see it do so again.
Thank you to my agents: Fiona Inglis and Ben Stevenson in Sydney, Faye Bender in New York, Jonathan Lloyd and Kate Cooper in London and Jerry Kalajian in LA. Thank you to my publicists for your patience and for all that you do: Tracey Cheetham in Sydney, Gaby Young in London and Marlena Bittner in New York. Thank you also to Conor Mintzer, Nancy Trypuc and Katie Bowden.