Road to Rosalee by Mandy Magro

Author:Mandy Magro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mira
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter

11

Halfway through her six-week stint at Rosalee Station, Melody couldn’t quite put her finger on what exactly was wrong, but something didn’t feel right. She’d woken at four am, edgy and overwhelmingly emotional. The silence she had sought comfort in over the past three weeks had become oppressive, so much so that she found herself smothered by it. Like a sailboat without a mast, she felt as if she were drifting aimlessly in a stormy sea of doubt and hurt and fear and confusion. She had been so sure in the days after she’d arrived at the station, optimistic that she was on the right path, hopeful she would have an ‘aha!’ moment, one that would instantly tip her topsy-turvy world the right way up.

But old habits die hard. Her deeply ingrained trait of second-guessing everything about herself was storming to the forefront, like soldiers going to battle. Was she running away from where she was meant to be in life? Was she overdramatising what Antonio had done? Was she, like he had roared at her the day she’d left, the root cause of their marital woes? Should she be back there, try to fix things?

Hot oil spat from the pan of sizzling bacon, landing on her arm, snapping her from her incessant thoughts. Cursing, she tried to ignore the sting of the searing fat while flashes of vivid clarity – of plates smashing, of demeaning comments, of him calling her terrible names, of him being caught, red-handed, with that other woman but then blaming it on her, telling her that it was because she wasn’t doing her duty in the bedroom, forget the fact her mother was dying – permeated, stealing her breath and bringing rise to hot tears. Huffing, she fervently blinked them back. She’d cried enough over him. It was high time she faced the cold hard truth that he was all that the psychologist had warned her of. She needed to wean herself off the unrealistic fantasy of them ever being happily married, had to find a way to untangle herself from feeling like it was her job to fix him, to make him a better man, and to find a way to accept that she might also lose the café when she walked away.

Over the years of her stormy marriage, she had become a master of blotting things out, of finding consolation despite the seemingly forgotten wrongdoings of her husband. But the ghosts of her past were making themselves known – they’d been relentless in her sleep and even now, hours later, no matter how much she tried to ward them off, they were almost suffocating.

Bustling about the common kitchen, she was fighting to keep herself in the present. The wall she’d built over the years in her mind was one she didn’t dare look behind too often, for the fear of the memories which lurked there, but now, here, within Mother Nature’s embrace, without the distraction of the city and the innate need to

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