It’s not instinct that tells me that.
It’s experience.
We’re on the M5 when Coldplay’s “Fix You” comes on the radio. The opening bars are enough to fling me straight back to the scene Oliver made at their 2012 concert. I’ve already got my finger over the button to change the station when she pipes up from the back seat.
“Can you put something else on?”
Does she remember it too?She can’t possibly. Or she’d remember me being there trying to intervene.
“I don’t know what it is about that song,” she says, shivering. I dial the AC down a notch.
It was the soundtrack to your first fight.
“Is it okay if I charge my phone?” It’s a rhetorical question as she passes it over my shoulder. “It’s on eight percent.”
It always is. I grab it from her and plug it into the charger in the front. The car picks up her playlist and starts blasting Niall Horan’s “Arms of a Stranger.” She’s not still obsessed with him at nearly thirty! I’d rib her about it, except the lyrics are cutting surprisingly close to the bone.
“I don’t even know if I can trust you,” she admits. I need to get my head together. After all this time, surely I can summon enough long-overdue perspective and keep her safe. That must have been some knock to the head. She’s so vague, she’s practically two-dimensional. How do you justforget?
Maybe it’s grief.
No. I know grief. You don’t forget details. It’s the opposite. Details torment you. They swirl through your mind in a relentless, agonizing loop until you think you’ll go mad. The phone call you let go through to voicemail because you were too busy reading a book. The offhandedness of that last text message. The endless, haunting, unchangeable dance of all that was said and unsaid as life pushes you further from the opportunity you lost to make things right.
Evie is not struggling with any ofthat.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I assure her.
Now that she’s ditched the airport idea and we’ve wound up on the motorway, we’re heading toward Parramatta. Glimpses of houses and commercial buildings flash between the trees up off-ramps, just as a pair of cars weaves in and out of multiple lanes in a game of cat and mouse around us. My consciousinstinct is to roar out of here, but my foot lifts off the accelerator instead, putting extra space between our car and theirs—betraying a leftover protective streak I don’t want to think about.Will I ever get her out of my system?
Road signs point to Canberra or the Blue Mountains and either option suddenly feels like a massive overcommitment. This is hurtling badly out of control, and I run up an exit ramp at Moorebank Avenue, pull the car into a side street, and cut the engine outside a strip of commercial offices. All I can hear is her ragged breath, and mine. That, and the deafening silence of the gaping void from which a sensible plan needs to materialize, because I’m sure as hell not running away with Oliver’swife.
“Where are we?” she asks.
I open the car door and get out, gulping smog and heat. Exhaling history. Shaking my head, as if trying to rattle sense into it. As I hear the click of her door opening, I step away from the car. Away from her.
Away from …me and her.
“Drew? What are we doing?”
When I turn around, she’s standing in front of me, a masterclass in contradiction. Power. Wealth. Fragility. Despair. She’s staring at me like I’m her lifeline.
I can’t be that. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer her question. All that’s clear is that it’s not my responsibility to clean up Oliver’s mess. Or hers.
Not again.
6
Evie
The funeral must be over. My phone erupts from the front seat with six calls in a row from my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and their lawyer. It’s like I’m being hunted. I fling it into the back seat as if the device is scorching hot and slam the door.
“I shouldn’t have ditched the funeral,” I admit, my voice quivering. “I’ve made it worse.”
All the scaffolding in my life has crumbled and I’m stranded on a mile-high ledge. Maybe my in-laws should try waking up in a reality they don’t even like, grieving the life they had, the years they missed, and the people they’ve lost. Right now, it’s all I can do to focus on my immediate problem. My driver. And the fact that he appears to be having some sort of very inconvenient personal crisis of his own.
This guy has me all wrong.
“I don’t wear Versace,” I argue. Obviously, Iamwearing it, but I don’t usually. “The last memory I have of shopping for clothes was at a pop-up vendor in an outdoor secondhand market in Newtown.” I might have spent time on weekends dressing up as Austen characters at the Regency Reenactment Society, but I didn’tonlywear Empire-waist dresses. “Isnagged an amazing pair of burnt-orange seventies hotpants that day!”
