As she looks at me, I realize I don’t want to know her answer. Whatever it is will never be enough, and while she doesn’t confirm it, I can always hold out hope.
“Anyway, why are you thinking about mortgages and kids?” I ask, hoping to divert her attention.
“Don’t you? I mean, not all the time, obviously, but don’t you sometimes fast-forward into your future and imagine a partner and babies and—”
“I’m not going to have kids,” I confess quietly. It’s something I’ve never told anyone else.
She pulls her knees up and hugs them, leaning toward me. “Why not?”
I think of everything I have to do for Mum, and the way illnesses run in families. And then I’m imagining some poor future kid lying awake at night scared of finding me, the way I’m scared of finding her …
“I don’t want to end up a burden,” I say. Inside that admission is a confession I’ve never voiced before. Guilt punctures my chest just saying it, and I wish I could take the words back. “Mum is not a burden,” I say hurriedly. “But she’s … hard work. Herillnessis hard work.”
“But she’s sick,” Evie replies. “None of this is her fault. And you’re amazing with her.”
Who else has she got to take care of her? Certainly not my dad.
“It’s okay to admit you find things hard,” Evie says, her serious eyes on mine. I want to tell her exactly how hard I find itand outline all the ways Mum’s illness frightens me. But I’m scared of what might come out of my mouth if I start. Worried I’ll say things that even my conscious mind hasn’t been brave enough to voice.
We sit there in silence for a long time, in the gentle shallows, light all around, until the waves move farther out and the breeze stills and I become aware of my phone ringing just up the beach.
“Sorry,” I say, getting up. “Someone’s calling me.”
I stagger to our stuff on the sand, relieved that someone else on this earth knows even a tiny part about how I feel at long last. And I find my phone.
Four missed calls. One from Mum and three from a number I don’t recognize. They’ve also left a voicemail, which I listen to while watching Evie play with the fluorescent blue on the water’s edge, knowing the spell is about to be broken.
My heart falls.
“It’s Mum,” I call to Evie. “We have to go back.”
38
Evie
Bree and I didn’t plan on spending our summer holidays hanging around in a hospital cafeteria, but a week after Drew and I had that almost religious experience together in Jervis Bay, she and I fall into a routine where we visit him in the café most lunchtimes.
“Are your parents okay with you staying here a bit longer?” she asks me as we’re walking from the bus stop. She knows they’re not. My mum has been on the phone to hers, and we listened down the hallway while her mum made the argument for me staying just a few more days in Sydney while we support our friend.
“Drew is on his own with his mum. How would it look if they told me to ditch him?” I ask.
She pulls my elbow and stops me on the path. “You and Drew are getting pretty close?”
I don’t understand the question. “I thought you approved of him.” Why is she always acting like my gatekeeper with boys?
“I really do,” Bree says. “And he really likes you. Be careful, Evie.”
“I’m with Oliver,” I remind her.
She looks at me like she’s unable to think of a response to astatement this obvious. It’s the look of a person with tons on her mind, but nothing will make its way through her vocal cords and come out of her mouth. “Yes, on that,” Bree starts. “With the formal …”
“Oh, there he is!” I wave at Drew near the hospital entrance, quickening my step. “We can talk about the formal later.”
“It’s a forensics necklace,” Oliver explains weeks later, as I unwrap the silver chain he’s brought me back from a police museum in Amsterdam. There’s a tiny silver fingerprint pendant hanging beside a microscope and a strand of DNA. This is a million times better than some sort of gemstone. It represents the future I want to create. And the fact that heknowsthis about me—and how much it matters to me.
I throw my arms around his neck, my fingers threading through his still-wet hair. He’s freshly showered after the long flight and smells of shampoo and some expensive cologne that’s so different from the Lynx Africa other boys reek of.
He pulls me even closer and kisses me like a person who’s been forced to go on a six-week European trip with his parents when he wanted to be in Sydney with his girlfriend. It’s a six-weeks-in-one kiss, and when we emerge from it, we’re both hot and flustered and I barely know which way is up.
