Free Into My Arms by Kylie Ladd

anything,’ she said, emphasising the word. ‘I just wondered, that’s all. When did you stop?’
    Nell lay there in the darkness, thinking, still stroking Skye’s hair. It was so long ago. ‘Once it got serious, I guess. Once I knew that your dad was who I wanted to be with always, and not just for that week.’ A vision of Charlie as he’d looked when they first met flashed into her head: long hair, large hands, and that terrible waistcoat, so tatty and stained that she’d thrown it out a year into their marriage. She wished she’d kept it now.
    ‘You didn’t change your mind, not even for a month or two?’
    Nell shook her head. ‘We decided to get married pretty quickly after that. I would have been happy just to live together, but it was your father’s idea. He never did anything by the book, except that.’
    Still Skye persisted. ‘And you never wanted anyone ever again, not even after we were born?’
    ‘Well, you took a long time to be born, didn’t you? All those years of trying, and then the IVF.’ Nell rolled against Skye and put her arms around her. ‘But no, not really. Maybe once or twice, but I honestly can’t remember. We were both too worn out from looking after twins.’
    ‘Mmmm,’ said Skye, finally relaxing and snuggling back against her. ‘You got lucky, didn’t you?’
    ‘Sure did,’ murmured Nell into her hair. ‘Two babies on only our second go. A boy and a girl, perfect and healthy.’ Lucky, she wanted to add, that they had been living in Melbourne, where all the IVF research was taking place. Lucky, too, that she and Charlie had survived the process, when so many marriages went under from the strain. All those tests and drugs, the endless waiting—but it had brought them closer in the end. After their years of infertility, when Skye and then Arran were lifted from her body, bloody and screaming, it felt to Nell as if she and Charlie had truly made them. Not just conceived them, but put them together cell by precious cell. She’d first seen them, barely zygotes, under a microscope in the clinic’s lab. How many other parents could say that?
    Beside her, Skye had fallen asleep. Nell wondered if she should wake her up and send her back to her own bed, but knew she wouldn’t. She’d missed the warmth of a body next to hers, the comfort of having a fellow traveller alongside throughout the night. It wasn’t like Skye to need her either, and she wanted to be there in case her daughter woke again. Of her children, Skye was more likely to confide in her than Arran, but she rarely needed to. Skye was an open book. She’d fitted in easily wherever they went: from country to country, school to school. Sport had made sure of that. Skye excelled at gymnastics, but she quickly mastered whatever she turned her hand to. There was always a place for her in the netball team or the swimming squad, and friends came easily from that. For Arran it had been different. He’d never liked football or soccer or cricket, whatever it was the other boys were playing. People rarely guessed that he and Skye were twins—though technically, Nell corrected herself, they weren’t. She eased her arm out from under Skye’s body. As part of the IVF procedure, both embryos had been placed in her uterus at the same time. People did that more frequently back then, returning two or three or even four zygotes to the womb at once, so as to maximise their chances of success. Perhaps, Nell wondered, it would have been better if they’d done separate transfers. If they had, and assuming both were successful, Arran and Skye would have simply been siblings, rather than twins. That way maybe no one would have expected Arran to be as sporty as his sister, or Skye to have stayed at school as long as Arran had done.
    Nell sighed and rolled over, away from Skye. It was a stupid thought. She and Charlie had been lucky to have children at all, when so many others on the program had been left with nothing to show for all