Free-Falling (31 page)

Epilogue

On the night that Andi and Isabelle were preparing to be born, a nineteen-year-old girl, wearing knee-high boots and a long leather jacket, with bright-pink streaks all through her hair, stood outside a nightclub in the middle of Perth. She checked her watch. It was almost midnight â her friend was supposed to have met her here half an hour ago. Extremely agitated, she typed a short, blunt text into her phone to send to her friend.

As she was keying in the phone number, she felt a soft, warm breeze against her neck. She shivered as the breeze turned into a chill that seemed to tingle up her spine, and she felt goose bumps appear on her arms. She fumbled with the buttons and accidentally hit the wrong number on the last digit before hitting âsend'.

She had absolutely no idea that the text was now travelling right across the country to New South Wales, and was zipping its way into the bedroom of a guy who was fast asleep at three in the morning.

The message simply said:

Acknowledgements

First a general thank you to my family, Steve's family, the Crestwood Girls, the Gilroy Kids and Tag-alongs and my mother's group for all of your support and advice. Thank you to Steve Menasse, Liane Moriarty and Jaci Moriarty for reading my earliest drafts and giving me so much incredible feedback and encouragement. I am also very grateful to Diane Moriarty, Kati Harrington, Fiona Ostric, Rebecca Saunders, Michelle Foster, Kate Fitzpatrick and Allyson McKinnon-Howett for all being such kind and wonderful readers of later drafts.

Thank you to Kerry Lockwood for sharing stories with me about life in the country, and to Brooke McDonald for telling me what it's like to be pregnant with twins. Thank you to Justin Saunders for answering my questions about police protocol, and also for crashing your mum's book club with your mates while wearing pastel coloured cardigans.

Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown was the first professional in the literary industry (who wasn't related to me) to read this book, so thank you Tara for loving it and for passing it on to Pippa Masson, who then became my lovely and supportive agent. Thank you to Beverley Cousins and Maisie Dubosarsky at Random House for all your hard work editing this book and making it so much shinier!

Finally to my family â to Mum, Dad, Madeleine Menasse and Arthur Menasse, I appreciate so much all of the babysitting, support and encouragement. To Maddie and Piper, thank you for being beautiful and inspiring and allowing me to write while you are sleeping or at day-care, and sometimes while you're watching Sesame Street. But most of all, thank you to Steve for letting me share so many of our own stories with the world and for putting up with me reading over your shoulder, watching for your reactions while you were reading this book. Sorry I kept prodding you if you didn't laugh or look upset quickly enough in the right bits.

Nicola Moriarty lives in Sydney's north west with her husband and two small daughters. She has a serious literary pedigree as the younger sister of bestselling authors Liane Moriarty and Jaclyn Moriarty.
Free-Falling
is Nicola's first novel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Free-Falling

Published by Random House Australia 2012

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Bantam book

Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW, 2060

www.randomhouse.com.au

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

First published by Bantam in 2012

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Moriarty, Nicola
Free-falling [electronic resource] / Nicola Moriarty