The View From Sandy Lane (Brookleigh Bay #5)

Prologue

The scent of antiseptic marked a life divided — the before that ended at four o’clock, and the after that was only just beginning.

Outside, the first week of October pressed a cold, colourless dusk against the window, the kind that settled early and without mercy.

William Parker sat beside the hospital bed, still wearing his fire service fleece.

It had warmed slightly from his body heat, but damp clung to it, heavy and uncomfortable.

His hands rested near Jake, palms open, fingers slack. These hands had pulled strangers from wreckage before. Tonight, they felt useless. He didn’t cry or speak. He sat utterly still.

William looked down at Jake beneath the blanket.

The boy’s pale face had been scrubbed clean of the road’s grit, though dark hair still clung in stiff patches where blood had dried.

He was nearly three, small enough that the hospital pillow seemed too large behind him.

Jake wasn’t crying either. He stared — wide-eyed and vacant — until William leaned closer.

Then Jake’s small hands seized the rough fabric of his father’s fleece with desperate strength.

William slipped an arm around him and drew him carefully against his chest.

“Where mummy? Rosie?” he whispered.

William’s throat closed. The doctor’s words — instantaneous, no suffering, nothing anyone could have done — had dissolved into a meaningless hum long ago. A car crash. That was all it had taken to steal Eliza — his wife — and Rosie, their baby daughter, from him.

He hadn’t noticed Sam, his father, come in.

“The children are with your mother,” Sam said from the doorway, his voice barely above a murmur. “She and Ethan are looking after the younger ones.”

William nodded once. The names drifted through him like echoes from another life: Ethan. Mia. Ollie. Sophie. Only hours earlier, that life had still existed. Now, nearly midnight, it was gone.

A sharp thought cut suddenly through the numbness: the others.

Ethan trying to be brave. Mia trembling quietly.

Ollie confused and restless. Sophie would be waiting for her mum to come through the front door.

And Jake here in his arms, warm and shaking and alive.

Five children. He would have to tell them. The weight of it hollowed him.

Jake buried his face against William’s shoulder. William tightened his hold instinctively, feeling the rapid flutter of the boy’s heartbeat. Alive. His breath caught hard in his chest.

He did not know how to walk into that house again. He did not know how to say words that would break the world open for his children. He only knew he could not fall apart tonight. Not while five children still needed him to be their father.

He held Jake closer. Beyond the hospital room, the world felt impossibly distant, as though everything outside those walls belonged to somebody else. He did not have the words for a prayer.

But in the thick, aching silence, he became aware of something unseen and steady — not lifting the grief, not easing it, simply holding its weight with him so he did not have to bear it alone.

William drew in a breath that felt too heavy for his chest. Then another.

It was not strength. It was not certainty.

But it was enough to keep him upright while he held his son.