69.
Callie
Seen this?” Liam skims a postcard over to me while we’re cleaning chainsaws in the workshop.
I wipe my hands and pick it up. It’s from Dave, a bird’s-eye view of the Amazon rain forest on the front, a précis of his latest adventures on the reverse. My heart pumps a little faster as I picture his life now, close to the equator—the boiling landscape and exotic discoveries, the shimmering wilderness of the rain forest.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Liam says.
“What is?”
He shrugs, like it should be obvious. “That a year ago Dave was hanging around here, eating crisps and mucking about on the quad-bike, and now he’s on the other side of the world. Bet he never comes home.”
I flip the postcard over. “Yeah. Weird. Sounds like he’s having a blast, though.”
Liam removes the engine casing from his saw, sets it on the bench. “Not my cup of tea. But yeah.”
I laugh. “I know. Six months in a rain forest would be your idea of hell.”
He shudders as though we’re talking an actual means of torture. “Surprised you’ve never done it, though.”
Smiling, I turn the postcard over again. “Done what?”
“Traveled,” he says, characteristically blunt. “You’re always on about it. You should go to Chile, find that bird.”
Blinking back an image of Grace expressing similar sentiments, I slide a smile Liam’s way. “I thought you said I’d have a better chance of seeing a snow leopard.”
He almost-but-not-quite smiles back. “Well, I’m sure you’d have fun looking for it. What’s stopping you?”
I shrug and turn away, mumble something about timing. Liam’s monosyllable disorder must be catching.
“Timing’s perfect, isn’t it?” he counters. “Your contract must be nearly up.”
It’s true—it’s up in a few weeks, and there’s no news yet on the money they’d need to renew it. Fiona’s assured me they want me, but it’s just a case of when and how. At the very least, she says, they could offer me scrub-clearance work in the interim, which would be better than nothing. “In a month,” I tell Liam.
“They said what’s happening yet?”
“Nope. They’re keeping me in suspense.”
Liam frowns. “Didn’t they just get a load of new funding in from the grants award scheme? Sure I saw an e-mail about it last night. You could go off traveling, and then—”
And it’s at this point, with impeccable timing, that the workshop door opens and Fiona sticks her head through the gap. “Callie, can I have a word?”
70.
Joel
Taking a seat at Dad’s kitchen table, I try to remember how long it’s been since the two of us talked properly. Perhaps it was when I’d just quit my job. He was sounding off at me in the back garden, aided by Mrs. Morris next door (who’d eavesdropped on the whole thing and just so happened to agree I was most irresponsible).
Good times, good times.
Pink-skinned and still in shorts from his Monday morning badminton session, Dad hands me a coffee. I notice he’s got one of those straps on his glasses, to hold them to his head while he’s doing something sporty.
For a moment I wonder if it’s cruel to spring this on him without warning. But the clues are starting to mount up fast. I was here only last week when my phone rang from the living room and Amber yelled Warren’s name. I darted back in there, stomach sawn in two, but thankfully Dad had popped upstairs for something. Still, it can only be so long before he clocks what’s going on.
“Well, this is a nice surprise,” Dad’s saying, which really is the most woeful of misjudgments.
I take a moment to survey the kitchen, as if for the last time. Overripe bananas, Bella’s nursery tea towel, marigolds spread-eagling the tap. I look at it all like nothing will be the same once the words are out of my mouth. I suppose in many ways, it won’t be.
