The Other Side of Us - By Sarah Mayberry Page 0,63
have been able to trust above all others.
He might put on a good show, but he wouldn’t be human if he wasn’t raw and hurting and confused right now. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she was the first woman he’d slept with since the breakup with Edie. Was it any wonder, really, that he’d retreated to a quiet space to try to get his head together? If his experience of their time together had come even close to being as intense as hers, Mackenzie could forgive him for feeling overwhelmed. Hell, she felt overwhelmed. She’d isolated herself here on the coast in an attempt to win her life back. She hadn’t expected to find Oliver. She absolutely hadn’t expected it to feel so...right when she’d given in to their mutual attraction.
So. Maybe she wouldn’t make an excuse to avoid helping him tomorrow, as she’d half planned on the walk home. Instead of avoiding him and protecting herself, maybe she would take a chance—another chance!—and show Oliver that while last night had changed some things, it hadn’t changed everything. They still liked each other, after all. It was possible that the sex, as spectacular as it had been, had been a mistake, but she refused to write off their burgeoning friendship because they’d made the mistake of falling into bed at a shitty time in both their lives.
She liked him that much. She really did.
It had been a night for revelations, apparently.
Feeling infinitely better, she began her preparations for bed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE WOKE FROM A DEEP SLEEP with a single, vivid image in her mind’s eye—two women standing side by side, one dressed in the sober, neck-to-ankle garb of a hundred years ago, the other in the clothes of today. The first woman was Dr. Mary Clementina De Garis, the second more amorphous and ill defined. It took Mackenzie a moment to understand she was simply a placeholder, a representative of the young women who aspired to be doctors today.
A buzz of excitement fizzed in her belly as she pieced together the fragments her subconscious had revealed overnight.
The old and the new. The trailblazer and the women who followed in her footsteps. An engaging, challenging examination of past and present culture.
She would find a young female medical student. Maybe even more than one. And she would follow them as they completed their training. She would contrast their experiences with those of Mary De Garis, who had had to fight every step of the way for acceptance and credibility. Mackenzie would look at the milestones for women in medicine. She would examine female medical achievements.
Her gut told her it was a good idea. It made her old project less of a dry examination of a woman’s life and more an exploration of women’s roles in Australian society over the span of a century. It gave Mary De Garis’s life context, shining a light on her achievements by showing how much things had changed.
Perhaps most importantly, it made Mackenzie’s passion project commercially viable because suddenly she had a hook. She threw the covers back and almost bounded out of bed, she was so energized by her re-visioning of her old project. Shoving her feet into slippers, she made her way to the study, stopping only to let Smitty out for his morning ablutions.
She dragged open the filing cabinet, searching through the neatly labeled files there for the backup she’d made of her old computer hard drive several years ago. The De Garis project had been with her so long it had been stored on floppy discs before she’d converted it to CD a few years ago. At the time, she’d felt foolish, preserving old research and ideas that she’d long since given up on. Now she blew a kiss to Past Mackenzie. She’d had good instincts, it turned out.
The file wasn’t there, and she turned to the cupboard and considered the half-a-dozen file boxes stacked in there. She’d brought all this stuff to the beach house when the storage locker in the underground garage beneath her apartment had reached the overflowing stage. There were many more boxes like this in Melbourne, and it was only when she’d rifled through those stacked in the cupboard that she accepted that the De Garis file must be among them. Damn.
She would have to make a trip up to Melbourne to retrieve them. Not the end of the world, but she dearly wanted to look over what she had in order to start planning her