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her expression. ‘Who needs candlelight and champagne when there’s dumplings?’ He held out his hands. ‘Mum says it’s your favourite.’
    She’d remembered. Ailsa had remembered!
    ‘And the kids are already sorting toys for Button,’ he said, and tugged her toward the door. ‘Come on home, Ginny.’
    Home.
    She didn’t want to go. Every sense was screaming at her to go back to the vineyard.
    But Button was asleep at Ailsa’s. Ailsa had made parsley dumplings.
    Ben was holding her hands and smiling at her.
    What was a woman to do? A woman seemed to have no choice at all.
    ‘Fine,’ she said.
    ‘That doesn’t sound gracious,’ he said, but still he smiled.
    She caught herself. She was sounding like a brat.
    ‘I’m sorry. It’s very generous...’
    ‘It’s you who’s generous,’ he said gently. ‘If you hadn’t helped I wouldn’t be getting any dinner, and Mum knows that as well as I do. So thank you, Ginny, and don’t feel as if by coming you’re beholden. Or even that you’re somehow putting your feet into quicksand. You can draw back. You can go back to your vineyard and your solitude but not before you’ve eaten some of Mum’s Irish stew.’
    * * *
    There were eight people around Ailsa’s kitchen table, and the kids were asleep on the squishy living-room settee just through the door. The children were still in sight of the table. They were still part of the family.
    It had always been thus, Ginny thought. Not only had Ailsa and her long-suffering Doug produced twelve children, but their house expanded to fit all comers. Doug worked on one of the island’s fishing trawlers. He spent long times away at sea and when he was home he seemed content to sit by the fire, puffing an empty pipe.
    ‘I know you smoke it at sea, but not in the house, not with the children,’ Ailsa had decreed, and Doug didn’t mind. He regarded his brood and Ailsa’s strays with bemused approval and the house was the warmer for his presence.
    Eight was a small tableful for these two, but the kids were mostly grown now, setting up their own places. Ben was the third of twelve but only the three youngest were home tonight. Becky, Sam and Hannah were fourteen, fifteen and seventeen respectively, and they greeted Abby with warmth and shoved up to make room for her.
    Abby, the nurse who’d worked with her that afternoon, was already there. The nurse had impressed Ginny today, not only with her people skills but with her warmth. She looked at home at the table, as if Ben often had her here.
    Abby and Ben? A question started.
    Ben was helping his mother ladle dumplings onto plates. Doug hardly said a word—it was up to the kids to do the entertaining, and they did.
    ‘It’s lovely to see you again,’ seventeen-year-old Hannah said, a bit pink with teenage self-consciousness as she said it. ‘We missed you when you went.’
    ‘Ginny was Ben’s girlfriend,’ fourteen-year-old Becky told Abby, with no teenage self-consciousness at all. ‘I’m too young to remember but everyone says they were all kissy-kissy. And then Ginny went away and Ben broke his heart.’
    ‘Becky!’ her family said, almost as one, and she flushed.
    ‘Well, he did. Maureen said he did.’
    Ginny remembered Maureen. Maureen was the oldest of the McMahon tribe, self-assertive and bossy. She’d come to see Ginny on the last night Ginny had been on the island, all those years ago.
    ‘You could have been kind. Ben’s so upset. You could say you’ll write. Something like that.’
    How to say that she couldn’t bear to write? That even at seventeen all she’d wanted to do had been to fling herself into Ben’s arms and stay? That she’d talked to her parents about the possibility of university in Auckland but she hadn’t been able to divorce the request from the way she’d felt about Ben, and her parents had laid down an ultimatum.
    ‘You’re being ridiculous. The boy has no hope of making it through medicine—twelve kids—they’re