Jill’s pavlova appeared more than once.
I keep Ned’s notebooks by my bed now and allow myself to pick “one good thing” every night before I go to sleep (always on my side of the bed, I give the pillow on his side a little pat good night), and so often it brings back another memory I’d forgotten, and I think about time, and how much we don’t understand about how it works, and I do my very best to travel back through my memories, and sometimes if I try hard, but not too hard, if I just let it happen, I’m back there, in the moment, with Ned.
—
You may remember my mother mentioned “notebooks” when she did her last ever reading. Look for the notebooks. I didn’t think of it at the time, but a few weeks after I found them, I dreamed of Mum. She was dancing about our old kitchen with the purple grape wallpaper, singing, “Told you so, I told you so!” (she so loved to be right) and I said, grouchily, as I seemed to be a teenager in this dream, “Told me so what?” I woke, and the first thing I saw was one of Ned’s notebooks, where it remained, face down on my chest. I often fall asleep like that, hugging his words instead of him.
I put the notebook on my bedside table and thought, Yes, you were right, Mum.
Then I looked at Ned’s empty side of the bed, the sheet so smooth and cold, and thought, Sure the notebooks are lovely, Mum, but you didn’t think to warn me to keep an eye on my husband’s precious heart?
She didn’t respond.
Mum and I continue to have a somewhat fractious relationship.
The notebooks also gave me ideas for lesson plans for Bridie, and she began coming here every Wednesday afternoon for math tutoring.
I am no Ned. I’m not a natural teacher, but never mind, I’m improving along with Bridie and I think we’re getting somewhere. My favorite part is just chatting with her. She wants to be an actress. Not an actuary. An actress. Her father and I agree she will win all the Academy Awards on offer.
One day Bridie finished eating her Monte Carlo biscuit and said, “I love Wednesdays.”
I assumed she was talking about another activity in her day, perhaps at school, but she meant me. She meant she loved Wednesdays because she came to me.
I said, “I love Wednesdays too, Bridie.” And then I told her about Mum, and how she told my fortune all those years ago and said that one day a little girl would arrive on a plane just when I needed her the most and her name would begin with the letter B.
She studied me with such a serious expression, the same expression as the only little girl I’d ever imagined mothering had, and then I saw it dawn on her, and slowly she said, “Wait, Cherry, do you think she meant me?”
I said, “Yes, Bridie, I think she meant you.”
Epilogue
“Timothy Binici, this is your first Olympics, you must be so excited.”
The boy is seventeen, tall and broad-chested, dark hair cut short, swimming cap and goggles in one hand. He lowers his head to speak carefully into the microphone. “Very.”
“Now I hear, and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but I’ve been told you could swim before you could even walk? Is this true?”
“It is true. When I was a baby a fortune teller told my mother I’d drown when I was seven,” says Timmy. “So she got me into swimming pretty early.”
“That’s amazing!” cries the sports reporter. “And you obviously proved her wrong because you clearly did not drown when you were seven.”
“No, but when I was seven, I went on a school excursion and got knocked off a rock platform into the sea by a freak wave, fully dressed. I should have drowned. Most kids my age would have drowned. But I was a super-strong swimmer, so here I am.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what, shout-out to that fortune teller, Australia thanks you!”
—
“You’re welcome,” says Cherry Lockwood from her armchair in front of the television. “Now bring home the gold, Timmy.”
She is on her feet, both fists in the air, when he does.
It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Acknowledgments
A huge thank-you to my incredibly talented editors: Amy Einhorn, Claire Craig, Maxine Hitchcock, Danielle Walker, Brianne Collins, Lori Kusatzky, Madeleine Woodfield, and Bhavna Chauhan.
Special gratitude to Catherine Nance, Aimee Thompson, Nam Hyun (Natalie) Kim, and Jocelyn Milward (author of the thought-provoking book Zero, Infinity and Me), who gave their time so generously and patiently to answer questions about their respective professions. I am also indebted to George Gates, Jolie Futterman, and Rochelle Blacklock for sharing personal anecdotes that helped me create fictional lives for my characters. Thank you Lena Spark for answering medical questions for fictional purposes while our sons played football (causing you to miss seeing an excellent goal save. Sorry!).
Thank you to my fabulous publicists: Tracey Cheetham, Gaby Young, and Dyana Messina. Thank you to my wonderful literary and film agents: Fiona Inglis, Faye Bender, Jonathan Lloyd, Kate Cooper, Sam Loader, Jason Richman, and Addison Duffy. Thank you for the memories, Jerry Kalajian. Thank you to all the amazing sales and marketing teams, booksellers, and bloggers, who help readers find my books, with special thanks to Julie Cepler, Rufus Cuthbert, and Ellie Morley.
Thank you to Caroline Lee for fantastic narration of my audiobooks. Thank you to my amazing translators around the world.
Thank you to my sisters: Jaci, Kati, Fiona, and Nicola. Thank you, Jaci, for being my first, fastest reader and giver of extravagant compliments. Thank you, Kati, for your generous help with proofreading. (My sisters Jaclyn Moriarty and Nicola Moriarty are both incredible authors. Look for their books!) Thank you to my brother-in-law Steve Menasse for patiently handling all things online and technological for me.
Thank you so very much to my readers for your stupendous support. I promise I never take it for granted, and your kind comments truly mean the world to me. It’s now been more than twenty years since my first novel was published, and I have some readers who have been with me since the beginning and some who weren’t even born then. I love seeing mothers and daughters at my events along with book groups and friendship groups. Two readers once told me they first became friends after they got chatting in the signing line at one of my previous events from years before. That made me so happy.
Sue Fern contacted me after reading Nine Perfect Strangers and told me about the devastating loss of her gorgeous son, Dom. It was my pleasure to honor Dom’s memory by giving his name, Dominic Archer-Fern, to one of my favorite characters in Here One Moment.
Thank you Dad for butterflies and parking spots and for popping into my head whenever I need you.
Thank you to all my fellow Australian authors, with special thanks to my friends Ber Carroll (now writing as B. M. Carroll) and Dianne Blacklock (now an editor extraordinaire).
Thank you to my beautiful mother, Diane Moriarty, and her friend, my beautiful godmother, Sandi Spackman, for sharing so many details and stories of their glorious tree-climbing, blackberry-picking childhoods on Sydney’s upper north shore.
Speaking of lifelong friends, I have dedicated this book to two of mine: Marisa Colonna and Petronella McGovern. We met in our twenties as work colleagues and fingers crossed, we’ll still be laughing together in our nineties. Thank you for your friendship and support.
