Chapter 67
Christmas Day, One Year Later
Meg stood at the kitchen bench, rereading the Jamie Oliver recipe for the sixth time to make sure she had the timing right.
She didn’t even like turkey, it was always so dry.
A roast chicken was nicer, but it was Christmas, after all.
The first step in the method was a little pep talk about the recipe being ‘nice and simple’, which she’d found strangely comforting.
It was the reason she’d chosen this recipe over a similar Neil Perry one, which was a little irrational, obviously, but she’d always had a soft spot for Jamie.
According to her calculations—based on the size of the turkey and her knowledge of the oven, which was on the hotter side—it was time to pull it out.
There were footsteps in the hall and Pete appeared. ‘How’s my little Nigella going?’ he asked, a light hand on her back as she studied the turkey through the oven door.
She pulled a face. ‘It’ll be a Christmas miracle if this turkey is edible. Can you help me get it out?’
Once the enormous bird was on the bench, they shrugged.
‘Looks okay,’ Pete said.
She reached for a knife and stuck it into the thigh, as directed by Jamie. Clear juice ran out. Pete literally hooted. Meg laughed.
There was a knock at the door. ‘Show time,’ he said, going to answer it.
Excited voices filled the hall, exchanging kisses and Christmas greetings.
Meg wiped her hands on a tea towel and looked up to see Georgie, followed by Chrissy and Robbie, and Shirley and Bruce, her grandparents, who had travelled down from Queensland to share their first Christmas as a family.
She forced back tears as she hugged them, one by one, and led them out the back.
‘Everyone’s here, Mum,’ Meg said to Jenny, who was resting on a sun lounge in the shade of the frangipani tree.
Jenny’s head moved ever so slightly to see them, and she smiled weakly, glassy-eyed. She was non-verbal since the stroke a few months before.
Shirley pulled a chair over to sit beside her eldest daughter and took her hand.
‘Drinks!’ Pete said. ‘Beer, Robbie?’
Meg smiled watching the interaction. Robbie’s progress since receiving proper treatment for his back injury had been swift.
The wheelchair was gone. Movement in his back was still limited, but he was pain free and off the oxycontin, and even working a few hours a week.
Issy had got him into the best specialists and covered the costs.
‘Please, let me do this,’ she’d said, when Robbie objected.
‘Hello?’ a voice called from down the hall.
Meg jumped up to see Issy and Felix at the screen door.
‘Merry Christmas!’ Issy said smiling, her lips impossibly red.
‘G’day, Meggsie,’ Felix said, ruffling her hair. It was the nickname he’d chosen for her and, strangely, she didn’t hate it.
That was almost everyone. Just as she was about to follow Issy and Felix up the long hallway, the last guest arrived at the gate, her face obscured by the enormous pile of presents she held in front of her. All Meg could see were her soft grey curls.
‘Is that you behind there, Cathy?’ Meg asked, opening the gate.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ Cathy said, peeking out from behind the giftboxes. She looked so much younger since she’d grown her hair out. ‘Merry Christmas!’
‘Merry Christmas!’ Meg said, reaching for a couple of the top boxes. ‘No DNA tests this year, I assume?’
Cathy laughed. ‘Not this year, sweetheart. My work is done.’
Once the turkey was carved, glasses refilled and everyone was seated at the table, Meg looked around at the faces of her family.
She felt like she needed to pinch herself.
Last year, she and Jenny had dined at Rosedale.
This year, they were sharing Christmas Day with so many people that she’d had to join two tables together to accommodate them all.
Her lip quivered as she watched Jenny in her wheelchair at the far end, flanked by her sister and her mother.
Shirley was cutting Jenny’s turkey into small pieces.
Shirley and Bruce had come down to Sydney as soon as Chrissy told them about Jenny.
It had been painful, knowing they’d lost so many years, but they were making up for it with frequent trips.
When Jenny had the stroke, Shirley had stayed for more than a month, visiting her daughter every day.
The doctors had warned them that improvement was unlikely based on the brain scans, but Shirley had said, ‘We’ll see about that,’ and taken Jenny through the therapy exercises every day.
Meg wasn’t sure how much difference it had made, but it was something Shirley could do for the daughter she’d lost at twenty-two and found again thirty years later.
Jenny smiled as her eyes met Meg’s across the long table.
She was different since the stroke. Along with the loss of speech, she’d lost her wary detachment.
The wall she’d hidden behind—ever since that day when she drove straight past the medical clinic and never looked back—had tumbled down, leaving her raw and unprotected, as though the stroke, and the truth, had cracked her open.
Just last week, Meg had downloaded The Princess Bride and they’d watched it together, lying side by side in Jenny’s bed.
As the end credits rolled, Meg had seen that Jenny’s cheeks were wet with tears.
‘Are you crying?’ Meg had asked, laughing, expecting her mother to hastily wipe her cheeks.
But Jenny had nodded and taken Meg’s hand, giving it a little squeeze, a statement of love as clear as if she’d said, ‘I love you.’
Feeling tears threaten her own eyes, Meg looked over at Issy and Felix, who were talking with Georgie.
The fallout from that day at the Highland Dairy factory had changed their family for good.
Spencer had been charged with manslaughter in January and granted bail, a shock to no one given his access to the best criminal defence team money could buy and the funds to pay the million-dollar bond.
In addition to the criminal proceedings, the State Corruption Commission was investigating the role of Derek Palmer and Tony Skelton, among others, in the rise and rise of Ashworth Property while Spencer was at the helm.
How much Malcolm knew about his son’s criminal activity was still unclear—it looked like he’d managed to keep his own hands clean—but Meg suspected he’d been turning a blind eye for years.
According to Felix, Malcolm was hoping to sell off the property business once ‘all this nonsense’ was done with, but creditors had repossessed a number of Ashworth assets, including Hartwell Gaol, and a recent column in the Financial Review speculated that insolvency was likely.
Regardless of the future of the company, his retirement plans were on hold for now.
Meg had had no contact with Heather or Malcolm since the truth came out, which was fine with her.
Technically they were family, but she’d come to believe that blood wasn’t necessarily thicker than water, after all.
There was a ripple of laughter as Issy and Georgie pulled a Christmas cracker, sending the trinkets flying across the table.
Meg smiled. It was good to see Issy looking so happy.
It had been a hard year for her. After what happened in Hartwell, she’d been unable to slot back into her Sydney life as though nothing had changed.
‘I can see through it all now,’ she’d said, when Meg asked her why she never went out anymore.
Once the administrators running Ashworth Property no longer needed her help, she’d struggled to know what to do with herself.
The family business had always been her only plan, trading on her family name her only strategy, so it felt scary, Meg imagined, to suddenly have to forge her own path.
But after many interviews and a few disappointments, Issy had found out a week ago that she was the successful applicant for a marketing role with a global hotel chain.
‘It’s the first thing I’ve ever really done on my own,’ she’d said to Meg with pride in her voice, as they’d celebrated with Champagne.
She was flying out to Dubai in a couple of weeks.
And then there was Cathy. Meg looked over to see her laughing with Chrissy, their faces already flushed with Champagne.
For over thirty years, Cathy had devoted herself to the Ashworths.
She’d been loyal to a fault. Keeper of their darkest secrets.
So when Malcolm forced her to retire, it felt like a betrayal by the man she’d secretly loved for so long.
When she’d seen Meg that first day in Hartwell and guessed who she was when she saw her unusual eyes, it had been the final straw.
She’d been filled with quiet fury for what she’d seen over the years, and a little shame too, she admitted to Meg, for her own role in keeping things quiet.
‘But how did you know I would have done a DNA test?’ Meg had asked her, once the truth came out.
‘I didn’t,’ Cathy admitted. ‘To be honest, I didn’t think any of the Ashworth kids would do the test, either. I just wanted to see the look on Heather’s and Malcolm’s faces on Christmas Day.’
Since then, Cathy had redirected her deep loyalty and outstanding organisational skills to Meg, who’d been ridiculously busy since she won the award for Best True Crime Podcast earlier that year.
Out of the Ashes, which told the story of her time in Hartwell, was still in the top charts every week as more and more people listened to her extraordinary account of uncovering corruption and finding a family.
Because of the viral Instagram video, the podcast went global.
She was interviewed on USA Today, Good Morning Britain and countless other programs across the world.
In April, she’d given up freelance writing to focus on podcasting, which meant she wasn’t working with Pete anymore.
That was probably for the best. They’d agreed to take things slowly at first, but then she’d stayed over one night and never left. As she looked at him now, pulling a cracker with Issy, warmth flooded her body. Love. She was surrounded by it.
She dinged her glass with her knife, swallowed the lump of emotion that sat in her throat, and stood up.
Everyone looked at her, waiting for her to speak.
‘To family,’ she said.