Free When I Lost You: A Gripping, Heart Breaking Novel of Lost Love. by Kelly Rimmer Page B

him that if he didn’t slow down, he was going to die. So he fired that doctor and found a new one who prescribed medication instead of rest. Dad’s every bit as addicted as Declan apparently was – his drug of choice is just work. If it wasn’t heroin via your cousin, it would have been something else through one of his wealthy friends instead. It sounds like what you actually did was to provide my brother with a soft, private place to land whenever he crashed, and I can’t even imagine how much that took out of you.’
    She reached across and placed her hand on my wrist and squeezed gently, and I was startled by the contact. I didn’t expect her to touch me – and I certainlydidn’t expect to find myself immediately distracted by the softness of her hand against my forearm.
    I couldn’t have missed Molly’s beauty if I’d tried, but up until that moment I’d observed it with a sense of detachment. Her skin against mine changed everything because suddenly, she wasn’t just a beautiful woman, she was a beautiful woman who was touching me and staring intensely into my eyes. Something shifted in the conversation with that contact. The vague curiosity and sympathy I felt towards her faded until I was simply aware of her. It was as if my pulse had grown loud within my body, and with each thump of my heart against my chest, that awareness grew. I noticed her scent in the air and the gloss on her lips. These things were all innocent, but suddenly my thoughts towards Molly were not. There was an undercurrent between us – hiding deep beneath the nostalgic conversation and the drama of what she’d discovered about her brother. Did she feel it too? Her hand lingered on my wrist.
    ‘You have a lot of tattoos,’ she murmured suddenly. Her gaze lingered on the place on my forearm where her hand rested. ‘Do they mean something?’
    I realised that her fingers now rested right beside the tattoo that I’d had made immediately after her brother’s death. I’d never explained my body art to anyone before, but I felt a sudden compulsion to. The meaning behind my tattoos was intensely personal, but the only reason I had never shared it aloud before was that I’d never actually wanted to – it was my truth, and only mine. What did it mean that I wanted to share this with her? I barely knew her but I knew one thing: she had lost Declan too, and she would understand my grief for his loss.
    With the fingers of my sling-bound hand, I awkwardly pointed to the symbols on my forearm beside her hand – two heavy arches around a series of circles – and I said quietly, ‘This tattoo was actually for Declan. It’s a dot painting – it represents two men sitting together – it signifies friendship. Do you know what “sorry business” is?’
    She shook her head.
    I said softly, ‘There were hundreds of Aboriginal nations here in the past and each had their own sort of culture, but death was always a time of ritual. That’s what “sorry business” means. It is different ways of remembering and commemorating a person lost. All of my recent ancestors were city people and most of those traditions are lost within my family, so what I learned about traditional customs mostly came from books. But Declan’s death was the first time I’d been scarred by grief, and I didn’t really have a framework to understand how to deal with it so I made my own ritual.’
    Molly lifted her hand off my arm slowly, but her forefinger immediately landed on the next tattoo along. She traced the shape almost absentmindedly, and I watched as her finger moved along my skin. Her touch was much more familiar than our fleeting acquaintance dictated and it felt to me to be almost intimate; bewildering given we were fully-clothed, near strangers and sitting in a public café. I could feel the heat rising in my blood.
    ‘Do these tattoos go all the way along your arm? And the other arm?’ Molly murmured. I was so distracted by the gentle friction of her