She definitely shouldn’t have come! Because now I’ve kissed her boyfriend and raised my hopes, and the way he’s holding her is making my insides buckle. I am furious at him! How could he let this happen, with me so vulnerable and confused and Chloe so ordinary and nice and with achildin the picture? And why is she so upset? Is she here to confront me?
“Look, Chloe,” I say quickly and apologetically. “I didn’t know about you two.”
“No, I know you didn’t.”
So it’s true, then? Is Chloe hispartner? The man had not given off “in a relationship” vibes—particularly when he was kissing me.
All the air has rushed out of my lungs, and I can’t seem to inhale enough to replace it. I need to sit down. If I had any doubt about my feelings toward Drew, it has evaporated right this second, imagining him—no,lookingat him—with the mother of his child. My heart is torn to pieces.
Bree suggests that Drew and Chloe go inside and find Harriet, and she sits beside me on the chair on the veranda. “Come on, Evie. It’s okay.”
Okay?How cananyof this be okay? And why am I taking advice from the best friend who walked out on me in the precise moment I needed her most?
“She had a baby with him,” I say, gasping for oxygen, trying to regulate my breathing and heartbeat. “And Ikissedhim!”
Bree takes my hand. “You were married to him, Evie, obviously …”
“Married?”
Bree looks confused. “To Oliver? We just watched the wedding DVD this morning, remember?”
I stare at her. “Chloe had a baby withOliver?”
Bree nods, and I cry again. Oliver is the dad? I suppose I’m meant to feel outraged, but these are great, heaving sobs of relief. “Thank God,” I whisper, between breaths.“Thank God!”
Bree pushes me back to see my face. “Evie, who did you think she had a baby with?” And, as understanding dawns, she draws me into a tight hug while enormous waves of emotion seem to well up and spill out about someone I’ve known less than three days, plus half a lifetime.
75
Evie
There’s some sort of surreal family reunion going on in my parents’ kitchen. Harriet is holding court, sitting on Drew’s knee, with Chloe beside them. “Grandpa” has produced a box of crayons and some stickers. “Nanna” is “just whipping up a batch of mini-pancakes.” It becomes painfully obvious to me, the second I see my parents cosseting Harriet, that this is not their first rodeo. And when I walk in with Bree, Chloe gets out of her chair for me. Chloe, who somehow had a baby with my husband, and yet we’re all smiles?
“Look, Evie!” Harriet says, passing me the drawing she’s done of stick-figure people. “That’s me, Mummy, Daddy, you, and Uncle Drew.”
The stick figure of “Daddy” is crossed out, with angel wings on his back, a sad face and the worddeadwritten beside his name.Dead.Harriet is holding my hand in the drawing, and trying to hold his, but their arms won’t reach.
My God.
Here is Oliver’s grieving little girl, proudly showing me her work, appealing to the love she’s so deeply portrayed between us on this page, and I have no recollection of a single second of our time together. Nothing that I’ve seen nor heard since theday I found out I was a widow has hit me this hard. I’ve been so obsessed trying to work out who I am and what carnage I seem to have caused that I’ve completely underestimated the way my husband’s death has ricocheted through other people’s lives.
Suddenly, Ihaveto remember. Looking into her big, innocent, heartbroken eyes, I know I have to step up. The dormant adult within me needs to phoenix herself out of the ashes of amnesia and stepparent the hell out of this encounter.
“This is beautiful,” I tell her, crouching to her level and then sitting on the kitchen floor beside her, cross-legged. She instantly scrambles into my lap, the way I suspect she has done a hundred times before, and pulls my arms around her waist. When I say her drawing is beautiful, I really mean everything in this room. The warmth I’m feeling in a tableau that should surely be filled with angst. Wouldn’t I have been furious that my husband had this baby? Yet nothing about the celebratory reunion here feels forced or tense or wrong.
“Harriet, you are magical,” I whisper. “Do you know that?”
She reaches back and touches my face with sticky mandarin-scented hands as I kiss the crown of her head, inhaling the scent of blueberry shampoo and sunscreen while love rushes into my drought-ridden psyche, flooding the parched spaces of my heart and pumping life back into my world.
You are the linchpin,I think.
“Daddy died,” she says, completely matter-of-factly. “I typed him a message on my iPad saying,Sorry you died, Dad.”
My heart!
“But he didn’t answer. It means we will never see him again. Evie, are you sad?”
As she asks the question, she jumps up out of my lap again and stands in front of me, taking my face in both her hands and looking directly into my eyes. Silence descends in the room during this inquisition, and I can almost read their minds.Handle this like a seasoned stepmum, Evie. Don’t botch this child’s grief.
