Kerri Sawyer has always been good at choosing the sensible path—nursing, family, duty, the steady harbour of a life well-lived. But some choices leave an echo, and when grief opens a new chapter, Kerri finds herself face-to-face with the life she almost chose… and the man who once offered her the horizon.
The first time Kerri Sawyer almost chose a different life, she was seventeen and standing at the edge of the wharf in St. Elmo Bay, her school shoes damp with salt spray and her heart thudding hard enough to hurt.
The sea was restless that afternoon—pewter under a sour wind—and the fishing boats tugged at their ropes as if they, too, wanted to slip free. Around her, the town carried on: Mrs Duffy’s bell over the bakery door, the clink of milk bottles, the distant growl of a bus grinding up the hill. But Kerri heard only the voice beside her.
“Come with me,” Mike said. He was all sun-browned confidence and restless possibility, collar open, grin quick, eyes bright as storm light. “Just for a while. Melbourne. We’ll work. We’ll figure it out. We’ll be something.”
Kerri’s fingers tightened around the folded paper in her pocket—her acceptance into the nursing program. Her mother had cried when it arrived, pride and fear tangled together. Her father had held it like something delicate, something that could flutter away if he breathed too hard. Nursing was sensible. Nursing was steady. It was a clear path out of a small town that could be kind but also close, like a warm jumper you couldn’t take off.
Mike was the opposite of sensible. Mike was the sea.
“You can’t just—” she began, and stopped, because the terrible, glorious truth was that she could. She could turn with him, walk to the bus stop, leave behind her mother’s careful plans and the little bedroom with faded floral curtains. She could become the kind of woman who didn’t ask permission.
Mike leaned closer, his voice lowered by the wind. “You’re not meant to be trapped here, Kerri. I see you. I see how you want more.”
And he did, in a way. He saw the part of her that sat on the roof at night, watching the highway lights and wondering who was heading somewhere else. He saw the part that felt too big for St. Elmo Bay.
But hovering between them were the quiet weights of home: her mother’s hands red from dishwater; her father’s breath already shortened by factory dust; her little brother, Tom, who still crawled into her bed when he had nightmares.
Kerri looked at Mike’s face and pictured it older, laughter lines deepening, hope or disappointment settling at the corners of his mouth. She pictured herself with him in a rented room that smelled of onions and wet wool, washing dishes in a café, laughing anyway because youth can turn hardship into an adventure.
Then she pictured her mother standing alone at the sink. She pictured her father pretending he didn’t need help. She pictured Tom in the schoolyard, looking for her.
“I can’t,” she said softly.
Mike’s grin faltered. “Not ever?”
“Not like this,” Kerri whispered.
He held her gaze, as if sheer stubbornness might tilt the world. Then he stepped back, sharp nod, jaw set. “All right. But don’t forget you had wings.”
Ten minutes later, the bus came. Kerri watched from the wharf as Mike climbed aboard with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. When it disappeared around the bend, she walked home with salt on her lips and the acceptance letter in her pocket like a stone.
She told herself she’d chosen the right thing.
But late at night, when the wind rattled the windows, she wondered what it might have felt like to choose the horizon.
***
The second time Kerri almost chose a different life, she was twenty-eight and wearing a ring that didn’t quite fit.
The community hall smelled of eucalyptus polish and sweet sherry. There were paper doilies beneath plates of lamingtons. Her mother had arranged daisies in jars—cheerful, practical flowers, the kind that pretended nothing could go wrong.
Beside Kerri stood George Morrison, broad-shouldered and dependable, his hand warm at the small of her back. He wasn’t the horizon; he was the harbour. He fixed rattling windows without being asked. He brought her tea when she studied. He rubbed her aching feet after double shifts at the clinic.
“You, okay?” he murmured as Mrs Duffy fussed forward with a camera.
Kerri smiled automatically. “Fine.”
But inside her, something fluttered—small and persistent, like a moth tapping at a lampshade. It had been there ever since she’d come home after training, telling herself it was temporary. Her father’s health had begun to fail, her mother needed help, and Tom was unmoored and sullen. Kerri kept saying, soon. Soon I’ll go back.
Soon never arrived.
It just changed shape.
Mrs Duffy lifted the camera. “Smile, love! He’s a good one.”
Kerri smiled. The flash popped. Applause rolled through the hall like a wave.
Later, while laughter and teaspoons and congratulations filled the air, Kerri slipped outside. The afternoon sun sat low, turning the sea copper. She breathed in slowly, as if air might settle the tightness in her chest.
“Kerri.”
She turned.
Mike stood at the edge of the car park, hands in his pockets. Older now—grey at his temple, a harder line to his mouth—but unmistakably Mike. The sight of him struck her like a sudden change in weather.
“I heard,” he said, nodding toward the hall. “Thought I’d say congratulations.”
Her mouth went dry. “Mike.”
He offered a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “He seems good.”
“He is,” Kerri said quickly, fiercely, because it was true.
Mike studied her. “And you? Are you happy?”
“It wasn’t that she loved George less. It was that she was learning… that becoming didn’t stop after you said yes to one path.”
The moth inside her beat its wings. Kerri looked past him to the horizon. “I don’t know,” she admitted, and the honesty felt both shameful and exquisite.
Mike’s voice softened. “You could still come. The city’s bigger now. You could work anywhere. You could be… more.”
More. The word tasted like a warm wind. For one dizzy second, she imagined packing a bag, leaving a note, stepping onto a bus the way he had. She imagined anonymity, new streets, a life that belonged only to her.
Then she imagined her mother’s face. Tom’s confusion. George’s trust breaking like glass.
And she imagined George’s laugh—warm, uncomplicated, full of faith in her.
“I can’t,” Kerri said, and this time the words tasted like grief.
Mike’s gaze held hers, a kind of weary understanding flickering there. “Because of them?”
“Because of me,” she whispered. “Because I made a promise.”
Mike exhaled—almost a laugh, but too sad to be. “You always were the good one.”
Kerri felt tears sting her eyes. “And you always made it sound like goodness was a cage.”
He looked away. “Sometimes it is.”
He kissed her cheek—light as wind—and walked back to his car. Gravel crunched under his tyres. Kerri stood in the cooling air with her ring suddenly heavy on her hand, watching his taillights fade until they were swallowed by dusk.
Inside, someone called, “Kerri! Come cut the cake!”
She wiped her face, squared her shoulders, and went back into the hall where her chosen life waited—bright and loud and full of expectation.
She married George two months later.
***
Years moved like tides—quietly, inevitably, reshaping everything.
Kerri and George bought a weatherboard house with a lemon tree out back. Kerri worked at the clinic, then the small hospital. George grew his carpentry business. They had a daughter, Lily, who arrived fierce and loud and perfect, and Kerri loved her with a kind of astonishment that made her catch her breath.
From the outside, their life looked like a postcard: school runs and Sunday roasts, the smell of sawdust in George’s shed, Lily’s sandy feet on the kitchen tiles. Kerri was grateful—truly. She didn’t regret choosing steadiness. George was good, and goodness, it turned out, could be a shelter.
And yet, in certain quiet moments—the wind at night, a bus sighing past the main street—Kerri would feel the faint echo of the life almost chosen, not as a wound but as a question she’d never fully answered.
Then the question changed.
George’s heart attack came on a plain Tuesday, cruel in its ordinariness. He survived the first one, pale but stubborn, joking from his hospital bed. Kerri clung to him as if love were enough to bargain with fate.
***
Two years later, another attack took him for good. One moment, he was laughing at Lily’s dreadful pun; the next, his face went slack, and the world tipped sideways. Kerri stood in her own kitchen and felt herself split open.
After the funeral, after the casseroles and condolences, the house fell quiet in a way that made her skin itch. She moved through days—work, bills, Lily’s school needs—while grief lived in every corner: George’s boots by the door, the unfinished shelf in the hall, the empty space in the bed.
One night, sorting a wardrobe, Kerri found an old bus timetable in a shoebox and felt seventeen again—salt air, Mike’s voice, the horizon calling.
For the first time in decades, no one’s needs came before her own.
It wasn’t liberating at first. It was frightening. Who was she when she wasn’t someone’s daughter to rescue, someone’s wife to steady, someone’s mother to organise?
But under the fear, there was a crack of light.
Kerri began to loosen the stitches of her life—carefully. A weekend course in Melbourne, “just for work.” A coffee with a former classmate who spoke about galleries and book clubs as casually as Mrs Duffy spoke about sponge cake. A walk through streets where no one knew her history.
When Kerri mentioned moving for a hospital role, Lily surprised her by saying, “You’re allowed, Mum. Dad would’ve said you’re allowed.”
It was such a simple permission. It slid into Kerri’s chest like warmth.
She applied for the job.
She got it.
The move happened in steps: a small flat with a sunny balcony, shifts that left her exhausted but alive, phone calls with Lily, who was old enough now to be both child and almost-woman. Some days, guilt tried to pull her back like an undertow. Other days, she laughed in the supermarket because she could buy whatever cereal she liked without anyone complaining.
It wasn’t that she loved George less. It was that she was learning, late but honestly, that becoming didn’t stop after you said yes to one path.
On a crisp spring morning, Kerri wandered through the botanical gardens with a coffee in hand. Families picnicked on the grass, lovers lay tangled together, and elderly women walked arm in arm. Life in all its versions.
She sat on a bench and breathed in, feeling grief soften at the edges, shifting from open wound to tender scar.
A man sat at the other end of the bench.
Kerri glanced up—and her breath caught.
Mike.
He looked older, too, lined and a little tired. But his eyes were still the sea.
For a long moment, they simply stared, the years between them humming.
“Kerri,” he said finally, voice rough with disbelief.
“Mike.”
He let out a quiet laugh. “Of all the places.”
“I could say the same,” she managed.
“I live here now,” he said. “Have for a while.”
Kerri nodded slowly. “So do I.”
Mike’s gaze softened. “I heard about George. I’m sorry.”
The simple kindness steadied her. “Thank you.”
“And Lily?”
“She’s good,” Kerri said, pride warming her. “She wants to travel. Doesn’t want to be trapped anywhere.”
Mike smiled faintly. “Sounds familiar.”
He looked away toward the trees. “Did you ever stop wondering?”
Kerri thought of George’s laugh, of Lily’s small hand in hers, of nights at the clinic when she held strangers’ fear with steady hands. She thought of the horizon she had resisted and the second chapter she was living now.
“Yes,” she said softly. “But not the way I used to.”
Mike studied her. “How, then?”
Kerri turned her cup slowly. “I used to think there was one right life,” she murmured. “The life I chose, and the life I didn’t. I thought the one I didn’t choose must have been bigger.” She smiled, gentle and true. “Now I think it’s just different. Every choice costs something. Every choice gives something.”
Mike’s shoulders eased, as if he’d been holding his breath for years. “You finally followed the horizon.”
“Not exactly,” Kerri said, and a quiet laugh escaped her. “I took the scenic route.”
He smiled back—older, softer, and somehow more real. “Dinner sometime? Just… talk.”
Kerri hesitated, not from fear this time, but from reverence—for what had been, and what still might be. In that pause, she felt the strange, tender miracle of being allowed to choose again.
Not the life she’d missed.
Just the life still waiting.
“Yes,” Kerri said. “I’d like that.”
They stood, and as they began to walk through the gardens, Kerri felt something settle inside her: the life almost chosen had never been a rival. It had been a reminder.
She had had wings.
And, at last, she was learning how to use them.
Let it settle.
SOS | The Story Atelier
Add comment
Comments