Free February by Gabrielle Lord Page A

daughter in intensive care and a son … well, that kid hasn’t had it easy, but the less said about him the better. She’s in a terrible way. I’m willing to do anything to help her.’
    ‘But signing over the house,’ protested theother man, ‘that’s being too generous. You’re forgetting your own interests—your own security.’
    ‘Listen, I can’t expect you to understand. This is my brother’s wife, Tom’s wife and family we’re talking about. They’re all I have. They’re all I care about. I feel I have to do it.’
    ‘I can tell you’ve made up your mind, Rafe. Very well. Come around to my office tomorrow and we’ll do the paperwork.’
    ‘I know Tom would have done the same for me. I mean, if I’d been in a similar situation.’ There was a pause. ‘This coffee is undrinkable,’ he added.
    A moment later, I heard the scrape of the men’s chairs as they got up and left.
    I let out a huge breath. I hadn’t dared to breathe during that conversation. My mind was spinning. Rafe was signing over his mansion to my mum? I felt a mixed-up rush of gratitude and guilt.
    ‘That was way too close! Did you hear all that?’ I asked Boges when I could speak again.
    He nodded. ‘See? You’ve been way too hard on him, dude. His heart’s in the right place. He just has a seriously messed-up way of showing it.’
    ‘You were right,’ I said, almost numb with shock.
    Boges sat opposite me scratching his headlike he was trying to put all the paranoid pieces together.
    He looked at me, waiting for me to say something.
    ‘I think,’ continued Boges, ‘he’s been trying to hold everything together—to deal with everything alone.’
    Just like me, I thought.

    There was no-one around as I slipped through the fence near the railway yards and made my way back towards the big stormwater culvert. The crickets stopped their chirping as I sneaked past them in the long grass.
    My mind was still whirling from seeing Rafe earlier. I felt such confusion and guilt in my stomach.
    I hurried down the sloping drain. I’d sleep here for a few more nights, I thought, and then go back to suss out the St Johns house.

18 FEBRUARY

    317 days to go …

    I sat up in the alcove in the drain, the drawings spread around while I stared at them by torchlight. I was trying to work out what the half-woman, half-lion sphinx might have meant. Had my dad been trying to warn me again about the dangerous woman he mentioned in his letter? The beastly, answer-demanding Oriana de la Force?
    The sounds of the city echoed through the drain, and my mind began replaying the moment I’d turned and seen my double staring at me. Had he seen something in me that scared him? Maybe he knew that seeing your doppelganger meant doom.

19 FEBRUARY

    316 days to go …

    I’d risked going for a swim off a rocky cove not far from Dolphin Point, a spot where people rarely swam because of the strong currents that often whirled around there. When I first dived into the water it was pretty calm. It felt so good and refreshing to be underwater and free, but I could also feel that the ocean was growing rougher by the minute.
    It was a stinking hot day and as I floated on my back and looked up at the sky I saw that in the southwest, thunder heads were building—huge grey cauliflowers of cloud with ominous, flattened tops. Time to go.
    I climbed up the rocks and hurried to my backpack, secured in a cave-like hole well above the high water mark.
    I moved as fast as I could, knowing that Ineeded to get back to the stormwater drain to grab my stuff before the downpour.
    Just as the first heavy drops started to hit the hot black tar of the roads, I made it to the tunnel. The roads hissed and steam lifted like ghosts. It was going to be one of those storms that dumps thirty millimetres on the city in half an hour.

    I climbed up into the alcove and took out the plastic folder with Dad’s drawings. I forced my sleeping-bag into my backpack and wondered how I could