Page 117 of The Science of Attraction

“Do you blame me?”

“No.” Liam slid down in his seat and put his knee against the dash, a small smile playing on his lips. “It’s still pretty unbelievable, isn’t it?”

And then some.

When I’d left the medical centre the day after I’d been shot and returned to Lane Station, Liam had bypassed any discussion with my parents and simply put me inhisbed. He’d spent the next two days moving all my stuff from the flat into the cottage and we’d been there together ever since. Just over three months, give or take.

Liam’s cottage, Ten’s cottage, the guest cottage, had now becomeourcottage. A place we’d made into a home. A place where we laughed, and cried, and fought, and made up, and planned, and plotted, and complained, and just lived. But above everything else, it was a place where we loved, fiercely and unequivocally. A place that had become our fortress against all the difficult times we’d known were coming our way.

Liam’s plan for us, which he’d shared with me in my hospital bed that day, had seemed simple in its conception, but the reality involved a hugely complex rearranging of his business. He waved my immediate protests aside, claiming that he would’ve needed to do something like this anyway due to the demand on his services, it was just earlier than expected. But I wasn’t fooled. His commitment tousblew away any lingering doubts I might’ve harboured about whether we’d both lost our fucking minds. Liam was proving he was all in, and that meant we both were.

In Liam’s plan, he had a couple of short-term contracts to complete during December, during which time he would come and go between the station and Dunedin. After Christmas, he had a break until February. By that time, he hoped to have a suitably qualified person employed to handle most of the contracts while Liam finished his doctoral thesis. This would happen in-between fucking me stupid and working out if we could actually live together. His words, not mine.

I had zero problem with any of it.

He already had a specific person in mind for the job, someone he’d trained with and whom he hoped might stay on, giving Liam the ability to focus on expanding Loose Goose and employing more staff. In addition to those lofty ambitions, he saw potential for Loose Goose to fit into the wellness retreat idea that Gil was working on.

They were big plans. We never believed for a second that any of it would be easy, and it wasn’t. The person Liam had initially wanted to employ was already committed. It had taken Liam until mid-January to find someone else he was even remotely happy with. The new guy showed promise, but it was still early days and Liam was nervous as hell. His plan had the capacity to go up in flames and take his business with it, and all we could do was try and have a little faith.

As for my father, despite his protests and once I was ensconced in the cottage, Liam had insisted on fulfilling the last few days of their contract and Paddy had reluctantly agreed. I didn’t fully understand Liam’s resolve at the time but I trusted his instincts, and it had absolutely been the right decision.

The forced interaction compelled my father to face up to what had transpired and ensured conversations happened that might otherwise have been avoided. I didn’t know everything that had been said between them, but Liam had told me enough for me to realise the two men had built somewhat of a bridge.

It might’ve been a bit of a rickety bridge to start with, but it improved enough that Liam continued to work with my father now and then while I recovered. And Liam had been Paddy’s biggest cheerleader when my father finally made that all-important solo circuit to the woolshed and back a week after the accident. I’d watched from the veranda, and the look the two men had shared at the end of Dad’s mammoth achievement had been one of grudging respect on both sides. It felt like a massive win.

My own conversations with my father had been equally difficult. They initially centred around reaffirming my stance that I was fully prepared to walk away from the station if things didn’t change. That, and the fact that I wasn’t looking for his approval to be with Liam, a fact which I think surprised him. I didn’t give a fuck what he thought because I was dating slash living with Liam, regardless.

After lying in that hospital bed for twenty-four hours, I’d come to the realisation that my father needed me a great deal more than I needed him. I would always have family—Zach, my mother, and Liam. My father had much more at stake, and I knew from my mother that when I’d left him in the kitchen with my ultimatum that day, he’d been rocked and as uncertain as she’d ever seen him. The shooting had forced his hand.

But for all of those glimmers of hope for change, there had been times I wasn’t sure he’d ever get there. The first thing he did after the shooting was try to pause the team’s shared lunches—code for reducing his own awkward discomfort around them—but I wasn’t having a bar of it. Every lunchtime, without fail, no matter how bad the pain, I made my way over to the kitchen in the big house and sat at the table with the others.

When the infamous lunch coup failed, my father next attempted to take over managing the station accounts and daily work schedule. I’d initially handed them to Ten to sort out until my injuries improved, and it had been Liam who held me back from turning the whole thing into another blazing row.

“Just leave him,” Liam had suggested. “Give him some rope and see how it plays out.”

I took Liam’s advice, and for three days it had been like watching a car crash in slow motion as my father came to slowly accept the inescapable truth: there was no going back. For three days he struggled to remember what everyone was doing, fucked up a couple of feed orders because his brain no longer processed numbers the same way, shouted too much, and generally pissed everyone off. I’d finally needed to step in and soothe the oh so many ruffled feathers. Then I’d ordered my father to back the fuck off before people started handing in their resignations.

Liam had been right. My father grumbled and complained, but he backed off—able to save face and blame me for having to step aside. I was more than okay with shouldering the blame. Everyone knew the truth and something important changed between us on that day.

The mantle of responsibility for the station landed semi-officially on my shoulders. It settled there lightly, like it was coming home, and for the first time in a long while I saw potential for a future that included both meandLiam living together on Lane Station.

When Dad stepped away, Zach stepped in, moving into my flat on a temporary basis to help with the running of the station until I was physically capable. Watching him zoom past the cottage on his quad, hearing him work the dogs, or joke with Ten was a special and unexpected gift, and while Zach remained in residence, my mother insisted Luke stay over as often as he liked. There was even the occasional family meal—a total mindfuck to say the least—and although initially my father contributed little during those times, that slowly changed, and I was given a glimpse at a possible future for our family after all—laughing and teasing and passing the mashed potatoes like any other.

It was baby steps and we knew it, but we also didn’t make it easy for our father because... fuck that. Zach and I weren’t about to cater to his bigotry for one more minute, and that included plenty of PDA with our respective boyfriends, with the full support of our mother. We weren’t going to drip feed our lives to Dad just so he wouldn’t gag. Not after what he’d put us through. If he didn’t like it, he knew the score. And it seemed to work. Well, we were still living there, so I guess that said it all.

As for Marty, we didn’t see much of him that first week. He’d briefly apologised via a phone call the day I got home, but other than that, he kept to his cottage and spent a lot of time in Oakwood. I observed him walking into the kitchen of the big house a few times and saw him talking with my father on the front deck. More than once, I’d thought about knocking on his cottage and forcing the inevitable conversation between us, but Liam always held me back.

“It’s his responsibility to make the first move, not yours,” he reminded me, and for the millionth time, I thanked God for his calm presence of mind when it came to knowing how people worked and curbing my impulsivity. We were yin and yang in the best possible way.

Ten days after the shooting, three things happened that changed everything.

First, Marty appeared at our cottage to formally apologise in person to both Liam and I for what had happened—just the accidental shooting, of course, not the dobbing us in or homophobic arseholery part. Liam could barely stand to look at the man and we said little in return, just thanked him for the apology, which felt somewhat directed, like he’d been asked to. Still, for me it was enough because what happened next was far more important.

Second, Marty moved out of his cottage and into an Oakwood retirement villa under my father’s instruction. Lane Station apparently underwrote the cost of the move—news to me at the time—but I couldn’t even be mad about that. For once, Paddy Lane had chosen to back his family, more specifically me and Zach, for maybe the first time in his life.

The third thing was my father formally verbalising his intent to hand the running of the station over to me. It was said in front of everyone over a beer on the front deck of the big house after a long day of tailing. The legal work would apparently follow at some point. I wasn’t holding my breath, but I appreciated the intent and I sat there gobsmacked. First, from my father actually saying the words, and second, by the loud cheers and round of applause that quickly followed. The icing on the cake was when Liam pulled me into his arms and kissed me in front of everyone to another round of cheers—maybe not from my father, but who gave a fuck?

The ute rattled and slogged its way up the final push to the top of the pass, dropping to a crawl as the wheels slid in and out of the deep ruts formed by snowmelt. When we finally made it to the top, I pulled over to let Liam take in the view and the downhill run to Miller Station.

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