Devil's Choice

Old Balmain House family story moves to the next generation

A man sits at a table in a prison cell, hands shackled. The door opens.

In comes a slip of a girl, eyes darting around, face drawn and white.

She is small and slender, like a teenager, but seems older.

The man leers with desire - so long since he has seen a pretty girl.

“Well, well, look what the fairy godmother has brought to pleasure me.”

The girl recoils as if struck, then steadies and sits down facing him.

She stares at the man intently, mixed loathing and desperation in her eyes.

She wrings her hand together then holds still, as if to gather courage.

Finally she speaks, “Please, I need to know if you are my father?”

Two decades pass. Lizzie’s daughter, Catherine, has a child, Amelie.

But soon after Amelie’s third birthday, the unthinkable happens.

She gets sick: the unspoken word is ‘CANCER’, childhood leukaemia

Treatment fails, it is all to no avail, a little girl’s life hangs in the balance.

A bone marrow transplant the last chance - but no match, no donor is found.

Could another relative help – perhaps her father, aunt, uncle or cousin

But who is Catherine’s real father, the man who raped her mother.

Three men were there that night; one is murdered, two are in jail.

She must ask for help from these monsters who abused her mother

These men are hardened criminals - she must visit them in prison.

She cannot bear to ask, to beg them and plead for help,

But yet she must try – it is her daughter’s only chance.

It truly is a Devil’s Choice

A parents worst nightmare. A small child with an incurable disease and a father who served in Vietnam and blames himself for her illness. The family is torn apart. Finally only one choice remains to save the daughter's life, a Devil's Choice.

The time is in the 1980s. Catherine, Lizzie's daughter has returned to Sydney to study. She now lives in Balmain, near where her mother grew up. She settles into life there, establishes a successful career and marries. Then she has a daughter who is the joy of both her and her husband's lives.

But when her daughter is two years old the unimaginable happens. Her daughter develops an incurable disease, advanced leukaemia. Other treatments fail. Now the only option to save her daughters life is a bone marrow transplant. They search desperately for a donor to match. But no one is found. Her daughter has an unusual tissue profile that seems to come from her Catherine's own father.

But who is her father? Catherine was conceived when her mother was raped by three men. Two of the three men who raped her mother are now in jail, destined to spend the most of their life there. The third is dead.

Can Catherine bear to make the choice and bring herself to appeal to one of these men in an attempt to save her daughter's life when she knows that even this may be futile. 

This is the third novel in "The Old Balmain House" Series. Novel two, Lizzie's Tale,tells the story of Lizzie a girl from Balmain and her struggle to keep her own daughter when pregnant at only 15 and the terrible choices she must make. This book.continues the family's story into a third generation.