The sweet curve of golden sand reaching out to meet the gentle swell of a sparkling Southern Ocean kissed turquoise by an unhindered summer sun is an image replicated again and again on Instagram. Rye, Woolamai, Torquay, Lorne—the influencers all talk salt vibes, harmony and the unwavering belief that magic will happen. It’s where surfers hang out the back dreaming of a point break, and tourists film Reels capturing the squeals of delight—or nerve-tingling shock—when the icy chill of foaming saltwater hits bare ankles. Either way, the message is clear: nothing bad can happen under such a clear cerulean sky.
Further down the coast at Kooramook—a far less photographed beach—local businesses are celebrating the sudden interest in their sleepy hamlet. When AFL legend Jacko Sampson bought the old Hewitt farm, the locals thought that might make nights at the pub a bit more interesting. But it’s his wife, Isobel, and her social media skills that are putting Kooramook firmly on the map with adorable TikToks of their blond tousle-haired children excitedly exploring rockpools, riding high on their father’s broad shoulders, or snuggling into her lap. They garner ‘likes’ in the tens of thousands.
With sentiments such as feeling blessed and family glue, cashed-up PFMs—people from Melbourne—are flocking to the district, wanting to replicate the wholesome family fun. The local real estate agent is busier than she’s ever been and is dreaming of tripling her commission within the year.
But a storm is about to break over Kooramook. It won’t come in the form of violent waves crashing over sooty volcanic rock and tearing at Neptune’s lace, or wind-blasted rain driving into the tussocky seagrass valiantly holding the sand dunes in place. It won’t come in the form of a raging geometric storm where the night sky dances wildly in vivid pinks a.nd greens evoking awe-inspiring beauty.
Instead, this storm slides in silently, accompanying the soft peach and pink streaks of dawn, as gentle waves deposit a body on a tiny patch of sand nestled between the rockpools.
Cecilia Cilento—CC to everyone unless she was in trouble—squinted into the summer glare as she navigated her car west along the C176. The plan had been to leave Geelong by four to avoid a sun-dazzling three-hour drive and the risk of hitting dusk-drawn wildlife. But her job as a registrar at the hospital meant plans were always fluid. Even so, she’d been particularly hopeful that today was the day everything would fall into place, and it had, right up until three thirty. The baby who went into foetal distress obviously hadn’t received the memo that this was CC’s precious weekend away. By four o’clock she’d been assisting with an emergency caesarean section.
Now, as she turned right at Woolsthorpe, Taylor Swift was rudely interrupted by the sound of cascading bells. CC pressed the ‘answer call’ button on the dashboard screen. ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Hello, darling. All settled in?’ Anji said.
‘No, I got away late, but I should be there by eight.’ Her stomach rumbled. ‘I’m hoping one of the cuzzies has cooked.’
‘You’re taking something?’
CC swallowed the reply ‘As if I couldn’t with you and Nonna constantly in my head’. Their words that had kept her up until midnight baking instead of sleeping. ‘I made torta caprese and I’ve got two bottles of Prosecco.’
‘Are you sure that’s enough?’
Anji’s anxiety bounced from the car speakers both familiar and annoying. It had been a constant presence in CC’s life but always seemed heightened whenever she was visiting Kooramook and the Friend family’s holiday house affectionately known as the shack. It had made some sense when CC was small and heading off on summer holidays without her mother. Back then Anji had worried that CC would miss her and not miss her enough. She’d also worried that CC might do something that would jeopardise the standing summer invitation, which was the solution to Anji’s school-holiday childcare. As insurance, and in good Italian style, she had always sent CC loaded down with gifts. But these days Anji’s Kooramook anxiety was long past its usefulness or relevance.
‘Mum, it’s plenty. I promise that neither of us will be haunted by Nonna or Rosa. Besides, the cuzzies were raised by Julia so the fact I’m arriving with home-baked goods gives me automatic rockstar status.’
CC was related to the Friends—James, Ollie, Lily and Felix—by their sharing of great-great-grandparents. The Friends’ grandmother, Rosa, and CC’s grandmother, Maria, were first cousins, making CC and the four Friends third cousins. However, CC felt far more Italian than the Friends, probably because Rosa had devastated her rural Italian family by not only marrying a ‘ten-pound Pom’, Bert, whom she met in the migrant hostel in Australia, but by the more horrifying fact that he was Anglican. The shock waves had hit the Rizzuto family with the strength of a Sicilian earthquake.
As a result, CC’s grandmother, Maria, was married by proxy in Palermo before being allowed to step foot on the boat to Australia to join Alfonzo, her Italian-born husband. Maria had arrived in far north Queensland—a strange land with a strange language, the blandest food on the planet and dishwater the Australians dared to call coffee—sixteen hundred kilometres away from where Rosa lived. Whether it was the distance or the long reach of familial disapproval, the cousins didn’t communicate or see each other again for almost forty years despite being each other’s only relative in a foreign land.
They did, however, share the reality of only having one child each; and CC’s mother, Anji, had continued the tradition by only having CC—although that may have had more to do with her husband vanishing than any undisclosed fertility issues. Anji never mentioned CC’s father and CC had stopped asking about him long ago. His absence in their lives also extended to his family, who refused any contact. With the death of Alfonzo in an accident on a sugarcane plantation when Anji was sixteen, CC’s immediate family was matriarchal, and her extended family, in a very un-Italian manner, was thin on the ground. It wasn’t until she turned five and was invited to the shack that she’d learned she had relatives in Australia.
‘Zia Rosa has invited you to spend summer at the beach with Nonna,’ Anji had told her, ‘and your cousins.’
The discovery of the Friend cousins had changed CC’s life. For five weeks every summer and again at Easter, their presence broke up the loneliness of being an only child. For years she had counted down the days from Easter to the next summer, and she would have gladly given up Christmas if it had meant bringing Boxing Day and her arrival at the shack forward.
Twenty-five years later, her gut still fizzed with excitement when she was on her way to Kooramook. Tonight there was an extra zing because it was the first time in years that all the cousins would be at the shack together.
‘Are they scattering Leo’s ashes this weekend?’ Anji’s question broke into CC’s thoughts. ‘Is that why they’re gathering at the shack?’
Leo, the cousins’ father, had died suddenly and unexpectedly at seventy-four from a brain bleed two months earlier.
‘I doubt it,’ CC said. ‘I mean, if that was the purpose of the weekend, why would I be invited? Anyway, Leo wasn’t the biggest fan of the shack. I’m going to ask if I can stay there for the three months I’m rostered to Port— Shit!’
She braked hard—a kangaroo had jumped in front of the car. ‘Mum, it’s dusk and I need to concentrate. Love you, talk soon.’ She cut the call.
As she turned south off the Princes Highway she was greeted by the vista of a tranquil ocean and her shoulders immediately dropped. She pulled over and wound down her window, breathing in deep lungfuls of warm, salt-tanged air. Not for the first time she reminded herself that the crazy hours she was working and the experience she was gaining would eventually enable her to live somewhere along this coast, where glimpsing the ocean every day would fortify her and help her balance the caregiving aspects of medicine with her own needs. Not that CC was naive about the nature of the ocean. She knew it only took a change in wind direction and a drop in barometric pressure to turn joyous serenity into roiling, foaming danger.
The driveway of the shack was easy to find, marked by a towering Norfolk pine, the only substantial tree in two kilometres. Salt-laden winds challenged even the most dedicated gardeners and most people didn’t try to grow anything beyond wattle, but Bert and Rosa had both grown up on islands and had been more than up for the task. Now, well-established acacia hedges took the brunt of the wind, creating an oasis for other plants to thrive including fruit trees and a once impressive vegetable garden.
As CC indicated to make the turn, memories roared back. Life at Kooramook had contrasted so dramatically with her home life that visiting always felt like living on another planet. Home was quiet and routine ruled—school, homework, chores and the occasional outing with her nonna and Anji. Whereas at Kooramook the only rule enforced by Bert and Rosa was that they be home in time for dinner.
Leo and Julia would occasionally swoop in and out like magpies—two days here, two days there—organising and directing, and treating them to trips to the old art deco cinema in Portland to see the latest blockbuster movie and fish and chips on the beach. But as fast as they arrived, the cousins’ parents departed and the halcyon unstructured summer days returned. Oh how CC had adored them. She still experienced a shot of loss whenever she recalled the summer she and Felix had finished high school and Leo had congratulated them on being adults before waxing lyrical about the ‘freedom of the young’. CC had been shocked to realise this speech meant that her thirteen years of summer holidays at Kooramook were over and she’d grieved the loss. Fortunately, Ollie and Lily continued to invite her to visit, and for that she was ever grateful.
The tetanus-waiting-to-happen gate was propped open and CC parked her old Subaru wagon between James’s Mercedes four-wheel drive and Ollie’s brand-new RAM 1500. She didn’t recognise the Tesla that was also parked there. Although it was the sort of car Lily might wish to drive, CC knew the cost was prohibitive for a woman who lived from one short-term contract to the next with decent gaps in-between. Perhaps it belonged to Felix and Bronte. Apart from a quick chat at Leo’s funeral, CC hadn’t seen her youngest cousin and his partner in over two years.
As she stepped out of the car she heard the chatter of children and saw Lily playing pied piper, leading her nieces and nephews through the dunes up from the beach. CC waved.
‘You’re here!’ Lily enveloped her in a wet, sandy hug.
‘I am. Sorry I’m late, there was an—’
‘God, it’s good to see you.’ Lily pulled back without pausing for breath. ‘It’s been too long. I’m so glad you’re here. I need you here. We nee—’
‘Jesus, Lily!’ James’s frustration cut through the fast-fading light. ‘The kids are supposed to use the outdoor shower before coming inside. Now they’ve tramped sand everywhere.’ He stopped and squinted into the fading light. ‘Is that CC?’
‘Sure is,’ CC said.
He gave her a tight smile. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
A ripple of surprise ran through her—not at his directness because that was just James, but at the fact he didn’t know that Ollie had invited her. She was about to tell him, but James was saying, ‘Good to see you,’ and leaning in to kiss her briefly on the cheek.
Lily suddenly roared like a lion and chased Ollie’s youngest kid, Archie, into the house. His squeals of delight shook the old fibro walls.
James rubbed his temples. ‘God! I need a drink.’
‘I’ve brought Prosecco,’ CC said.
He gave her an indulgent look—one that said, of course you did. He always seemed entertained when she showed her Italian tastes, which she found odd as they both had Italian nonnas.
‘I’ve just opened a Coonawarra red, but Gretel will happily join you with bubbles.’ James hefted CC’s overnight bag from the boot, then stood still.
‘What?’ she said.
He grimaced. ‘You’ve still got time to back out.’
‘Back out from what?’
‘Utter chaos. It’s a zoo in there. Kids, who’d have ’em.’
She laughed. ‘Lily will have exhausted them at the beach, Ollie and Paige will soothe them with polpette, and Felix and Bronte will ignore them. In twenty minutes they’ll all be in a food coma and collapsed in front of a movie.’
‘Hmm, maybe. Mine are getting a bit old to fall for that trick.’
James ushered her inside and the familiarity of the shack circled her. It was the ultimate retro experience: a mix of the sixties, eighties and early 2000s. Bert had bought the block in 1966 and over the course of a couple of years had built the now iconic fibro-cement beach house with its distinctive angled roofline. Although it was now double its original size—and that wasn’t saying much—it still only had one bathroom and the outhouse added a second toilet. When the grandchildren had arrived, Bert built in the back porch with flywire screens and it became affectionately known as the ‘sleep-out’. It was where the boys had slept, and when CC had first arrived at Kooramook her older cousins had declared it a girl-free zone. By the time they were seventeen, that rule no longer applied and more than once CC had seen girls slip in and out under the white haze of moonlight, the bang and squeak of the screen door drowned out by the crash and roar of the surf.
Not a lot had changed over the years. The large living room was still filled with a mismatched selection of comfy couches circa 1990 and vinyl beanbags. Two dozen boxes of board games—everything from Monopoly to the more recent addition of Catan and Azul—were stacked on bookshelves, along with an eclectic selection of paperbacks that were either Christmas gifts or had been purchased from the second-hand book stall at the Kooramook market. The only real nod to the modern world was a small flatscreen television, which didn’t receive a signal but had a DVD player attached to it. CC remembered the video player that had preceded it and the drama that had unfolded when the well-worn copy of Toy Story broke.
Beyond the living room, the kids sat at the solid blackwood table that Bert had made. CC wondered how many meals had been eaten at that table over the years. She took in the familiar kitchen—pale green wooden cupboards with angled silver handles, grey and white patterned lino flooring, and the brown, yellow and orange wallpaper pattern of coffee percolators, cups, baskets of fruit and pepper grinders. A set of green and cream Bakelite cannisters, their contents labelled in cursive script, sat on the mantelpiece above the stove as they’d always done.
James spoke over the babble of voices. ‘CC’s here.’
Ollie turned from the stove, a wide grin on his face and a large spoon in his hand. CC got a flash of Rosa serving generous portions of polpette and pasta to starving teenagers after a day of surfing.
‘Cuzzie!’ Ollie set down the spoon and crossed the room in long strides before wrapping her in a hug. ‘It’s been too long. Thanks for making time,’ he said softly in her ear. ‘You need to be here.’
Surprised at the unusual seriousness of his words, she pulled back and tried reading his expression, but he’d already turned away and was talking to the kids.
‘Okay, you lot, you remember your fourth cousin, CC?’
‘Is that cake?’ Archie asked with the directness of a three-year-old, his eyes glued to the round container in her hands.
CC smiled. ‘It is.’
Ollie’s eldest, Elsa, stared at her, then pointed to James’s children. ‘How can you be our fourth cousin when we’ve only got two?’
‘We’ll draw you a family tree after dinner,’ Ollie said. ‘The most important thing to know is that CC’s family.’
‘I want cake,’ Archie said, and the other children joined in, the noise bouncing off the walls.
Paige, Ollie’s wife, told them to shush and dumped bread and oil on the table before greeting CC. Gretel enthusiastically accepted the bottle of Prosecco and immediately popped the cork. The sound brought Felix and Bronte into the room, and CC gave them both a hug before accepting a glass of bubbles.
Ollie lugged a huge pot to the table and Paige placed two dressed green salads at either end.
‘Everyone sit,’ Ollie said to the adults. ‘Let’s eat.’
James looked askance at the spaghetti and meatballs. ‘I thought the kids were eating first.’
‘I’m not a kid, Dad,’ Maddi said in the world-weary tone of a twelve-year-old.
‘I’m a big boy,’ Archie announced.
‘That’s right, Arch,’ Ollie said. ‘No more babies so we’re all eating together family style.’
James grimaced, refilled his wine glass and sat.
As bowls were filled with pasta, the conversation centred around the passing of the salad, parmesan, bread and pepper grinder. Ollie and Paige fielded the kids’ complaints and squabbles with equanimity. CC noticed that James and Gretel didn’t interfere—it reminded her of Leo and Julia when Rosa and Bert had ruled the table.
When everyone’s bowls and glasses were full and CC had raised the first fork twirl of pasta to her mouth, Felix said, ‘So about the “no more babies” comment, Bronte and I are pregnant.’
‘OMG!’ Paige clapped her hands in delight. ‘Congratulations.’
Bronte elbowed Felix in the ribs. ‘Remind me exactly when you last threw up because you were pregnant?’
‘Awesome news, mate.’ Ollie rose and slapped his younger brother on the back before squeezing Bronte’s shoulder. ‘Well done, clever woman.’
James and Gretel echoed the congratulations in far more restrained tones than Lily, although that wasn’t difficult.
When CC added her own good wishes, she found herself rubbing at an unexpected hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. Did she want a baby? That would require trusting a man to stay in her life for longer than a year and so far that seemed harder than finding a cure for cancer. She snuck a glance at Lily, who’d recently celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday. CC wondered if the news had tugged on her cousin’s fast-fading fertility, but her face held only delight.
Bronte was peppered with questions. How was she feeling? How far along was she and when was the baby due? Gretel asked which hospital they’d chosen for the birth, and Paige suggested they consider midwife-led care. Lily chimed in suggesting a home birth and asked what their plans for the placenta were—would they use it to make birth announcement cards or dry it to use in moisturiser? When Maddi squealed ‘ewww’ and Blake asked what a placenta was, James told the children they could take their cake and ice-cream and eat it outside. There was a fast mass exodus.
Despite being the only doctor among them and currently working an obstetrics rotation, no one asked for CC’s opinion because she was, and always would be, ‘little cuz’ even when she was eighty.
When Paige and Ollie called the kids in for bed and Lily promised bedtime stories, Bronte and Gretel were deep in conversation and Felix was checking his phone. James rose to open another bottle of wine. CC glanced into the kitchen and took in the explosion of dirty dishes and pots and pans that littered every surface.
‘Who wants to help me wash up?’ Silence greeted her. ‘James?’
He turned, bottle in hand, his face a study of dismay. ‘This place needs a dishwasher. We’ll do them in the morning.’
CC envisaged hungover adults, hungry children and no clean dishes. She started stacking plates. ‘It won’t take long.’
‘Washing up for two doesn’t take long. Washing up for sixteen will take at least half an hour. The kids should be helping,’ James said stubbornly.
CC was thrown back in time to when a teenage James would spend ten minutes arguing about why it wasn’t his turn to wash up. She supposed it had been good practice for a career in the law.
‘While you dry, you can fill me in on work,’ she said. She had little interest in James’s work, but knew he loved to talk about it. ‘Gretel said you’re now head of Wills and Estates?’
James smiled and picked up the tea towel. ‘And a named partner. Do you have a will, CC?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You should.’
‘My car’s twenty years old, I don’t own a house, and I have a whopping HECs debt. I really don’t need one.’
‘You say that, but you’d be surprised. Besides, making a will is a helpful guide for those who love you. It’s a roadmap when they’re grieving and not thinking straight. The least you can do is give them the relief that they’re following your wishes rather than guessing at them.’
‘I suppose when you put it that way …’
‘I even got Lily to make one.’ He smiled. ‘We could do yours this weekend.’
CC laughed. ‘Can I afford that?’
‘I’ll give you the family discount.’
When the kitchen had been restored to order and the table set for breakfast, Beth breezed into the room. ‘OMG! Come outside. The moon’s amazing!’
Ollie had lit the fire and circled chairs around the pit. Felix offered whisky—a tradition inherited from Bert—but CC stuck to amaretto, which Rosa and Nonna had preferred.
She raised her glass. ‘It’s so special to be here again, and an extra treat with all of us together. When did that last happen?’
‘Must be at least ten years,’ Lily said.
‘Nah, longer than that.’ Felix glanced at James. ‘Bert’s ninetieth birthday?’
‘James missed that,’ Ollie said, a hint of rebuke in his voice.
‘Leo missed that,’ Gretel said, defending James.
Bronte raised her brows at CC, who now regretted asking the question. ‘Here’s to not letting it be another decade then,’ she said.
Murmurs rolled in the night air and caught in the crackle and pop of the fire.
CC gazed up, revelling in the awe of nature. The night sky at Kooramook was both stunning and daunting in equal measure, although tonight’s full moon made stargazing tricky. All she could really see was the cloudy ribbon that gave the Milky Way its name.
‘James, you’ve told CC the news?’ Ollie said.
‘About his promotion?’ CC smiled. ‘Yes, it’s great.’ She raised her glass again. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Christ, James,’ Ollie muttered, one knee bouncing wildly.
James shifted in his seat and glared daggers at Ollie. ‘To be fair, I didn’t even know CC was coming. Anyway, you always say the shack is a business-free zone. In fact your email subject line was very specific. It said family weekend.’
Felix took a long sip of whisky, but despite his silence CC could hear him saying ‘literal James strikes again’.
‘It is a family weekend,’ Lily said, her face shining in the firelight and her hands clasped together. ‘A time to bond. Right, bros?’
‘Exactly,’ Ollie said. ‘And this involves the family.’
The tension between Ollie and James quashed CC’s night-sky-induced serenity and now some less than stellar childhood memories of the cousins fighting rose to the surface.
‘I can go inside if you need to discuss something private,’ she said.
‘I can’t believe you still haven’t told her,’ Ollie said. CC noticed Paige put her hand on his jiggling knee.
‘James has been flat out with work,’ Gretel said emphatically.
‘That is correct. And as executor of both wills, I have up to a year to inform the beneficiaries,’ James said in the pompous tone that always riled Ollie. He leaned around his wife so he was facing CC. ‘Gretel will back me up here. Your name’s on the top of next month’s to-do list.’
‘Ah, okay.’ CC had no idea what else to say. Her mind was sticking on ‘both wills’. What did that mean when only Leo had died? Had he left her something? It seemed unlikely. Her contact with him as a child had been sporadic; and as a young adult, the only interest of his she’d seemed to share was a love of books, although not the same books. Leo had collected first editions of British authors writing in the first half of the twentieth century—Hardy, HG Wells, DH Lawrence and George Orwell. Had he left her one of their books?
James cleared his throat. ‘You may not be aware, CC, but Bert’s will was very specific in regards to the shack. He knew Dad didn’t share his love of the place and that if he inherited it, he’d sell. So Bert’s estate couldn’t be wound up until Dad died. Now that’s happened, the shack has been left to all of us.’
CC’s brain struggled to comprehend the news. ‘Us? As in an us that includes me?’ Given she was unrelated to Bert other than distantly by his marriage to Rosa, she didn’t understand why she was named in the will.
James nodded. ‘That’s correct. You now own a fifth of the shack.’
Shock numbed her, but was quickly replaced by gratitude for an old man who’d recognised how important the Friend family was to her, and how those childhood summers at the shack had shaped and expanded her world. Now, not only was she tied to the cousins by precious memories of holidays past, there was the promise of many more wonderful times to come. It was the ultimate family glue.
She let out a squeal of delight. ‘This is the most incredible news!’
Ollie grinned at her. ‘The best.’