There Must Be More Extract

Allen & Unwin
Apr 30
4 min read

Read an extract from There Must be More by Kellie Finlayson with Alley Pascoe.

Prologue

I’ve always held a vision for what I wanted my wedding day to be. I pictured the ceremony happening in my home town of Port Lincoln, by the beach overlooking the bay, outside under the sun. I imagined two dresses: one with a big train and veil for the ceremony, and a party dress for dancing at the reception. When Jeremy came into my life, I saw him standing at the end of the aisle.

I knew Jezz was the man I was going to marry. It sounds like a cliché, but it was his eyes that got me: those big blue eyes. I didn’t stand a chance. We met at a Justin Bieber concert in Sydney in March 2017, when we were both 21, but we didn’t reconnect until after I returned from living overseas a few years later. I had been teaching in Norway, while he’d been making a name for himself in the Australian Football League (AFL), playing for the GWS Giants in Sydney. Then, in November 2019, I was in Sydney for the weekend when Jeremy slid into my Instagram DMs. How romantic.

We used to fight all the time about who messaged whom first, but I’ve got the receipts. It was Jeremy. ‘Are you in Sydney?’ he asked me. We became inseparable from that moment on.

I will admit, I was the first one to say, ‘I love you.’ It was Easter 2020. Caramilk had just been reintroduced, changing the chocolate game for those of us too young to have experienced it in the nineties. When Jeremy showed up with a bag of mini Caramilk Easter eggs for me, I gushed, ‘I love you.’

He said it straight back. ‘I’ve been wanting to say it for ages, but I didn’t want to say it first,’ he told me.

From the get-go, we were immediately comfortable with each other. I’d be on the toilet while he was in the shower, and vice versa. Nothing was too much. Everything was easy. It was a great feeling. We both wanted the same things out of life: to have a family, a big backyard and a kitchen to cook in together.

We didn’t muck around. We moved in together, got a dog and started planning our future. When I fell pregnant in the first year of our relationship, it felt entirely right. We were going to be parents, and we were so excited. Sophia Jai Finlayson was born on 19 August 2021. We were a family. And we moved back to South Australia to be closer to my family.

Our daughter was with us in 2022 when Jeremy got down on one knee at Henley Beach, Adelaide, and proposed to me. It was so special to share the moment with her. I was surprised, but I wasn’t shocked. I’d sent Jezz a screenshot of the ring I wanted very early on in our relationship; he’d taken my dad out for a beer the night before; and I’d noticed a rather large transaction come out of our joint bank account. Plus, who goes for a ‘coffee’ at the beach at 3 p.m.? Jezz might not have nailed the art of surprise, but he still blew me away. The ring was beautiful—a simple gold band with an oval diamond set in four delicate claws—and the proposal felt like a natural progression for us. We were going to be together forever. He was mine and I was his. This was it.

I was going to be a bride! On the morning of our wedding on 5 March 2023, I got ready in a hotel room in Adelaide with my bridal party, my parents and Sophia, who was eighteen months old and looked adorable in her little flower-girl dress. We made a bow out of the lace of my veil to put in her hair. She still has it.

When I put my dress on and did the reveal with my mum and dad, the tears began. I arrived in a Mustang at a nondescript cul-de-sac that led down to Tennyson Beach. It was cold and rainy, but that didn’t matter. As soon as I saw Jeremy, I felt warm. He was sobbing his eyes out under the arch that was our altar. He wasn’t the only one. There wasn’t a dry eye on the grass when I walked down the aisle to the Conrad Sewell song ‘Remind Me’.

Everyone’s eyes were on me, and I didn’t know where to look. It was like I could feel the force of everyone’s emotions and their love for us. It was overwhelming.

Lucky Sophia was there to bring us all back to reality.

In what was meant to be a cute moment in the ceremony, the celebrant asked Soph if Mummy and Daddy could get married. ‘No!’ she yelled. Righto. Everyone laughed and we carried on (even without her blessing).

Things got all deep and meaningful again when we started our vows. ‘Kellie, words cannot explain how truly grateful I am to be marrying you today,’ Jeremy said. ‘From the moment I met you, I fell in love with you.’

The feeling was mutual. ‘Jemison, within the shortest time, I knew it was you . . . It was always you,’ I told him.

We promised to love each other endlessly, to be there for each other through the ups and downs, to make each other proud and to be the best parents to our daughter. We

promised each other forever.

This should have been the happiest day of our lives, but it wasn’t. Underneath the joy was a brutal truth that we couldn’t escape, no matter how much we wanted to. As I stood facing Jeremy at the altar, the truth was there with us.

My husband would soon be a widower.

An extract from There Must Be More by Kellie Finlayson with Alley Pascoe

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