‘I had a chat with Parker about this on the phone this morning. You two are doing okay now, aren’t you?’ She blows gently on her latte to cool it. And to avoid eye contact. ‘I mean, you don’t need me around as much now. Not like the early days?’
I’m hit with a big serve of regret. ‘Have you been staying around for us? Have we been holding you back from something?’
She shakes her head. ‘No! It’s not that. I just feel like you two have become my family. It’s been amazing and wonderful, and I don’t regret a moment of it, but spending so much time with you and Audrey, and then with you and Parker since she died, has become a bit of a … placeholder in my life.’
My toasted sandwich is delivered but now sits unwanted on the plate as I try to calibrate her words. I understand the concept of the placeholder. I can see why she feels that way.But hasn’t this been so much more than that?
I run a mental reel of it all. After we lost Audrey, Rachael swooped in to support us. Events we would have had to endure on our own, she endured with us. But hadn’t that support shifted over time into a friendship that had grown in its own right? The kind of friendship that would have evolved naturally, even if Audrey had never been in the picture.
Looking at her across from me, earnestly discussing her next steps, I realise with a jolt that this woman is not in any way a ‘placeholder’ for me. She is my closest person. She’s the closest thing Parker has to a mother figure when she’s with me—I mean, look what happened this morning with the period drama. The fact is, I’m searching for the right words to define exactly what Rachael McKenzie has become in our lives … In mine, in particular. And it’s terrifying.
‘I’m scared if I don’t detach myself and chase my own little family, I might miss out altogether,’ she confesses.
Detach herself? Why does this feel like grief?
We’d wondered once before if our convenient little arrangement was soaking up opportunities for us both to meet other people. But we barely gave lip service to the problem. Neither of us made a single move to change anything. We were too comfortable. Perhaps we kept each other safe.
The same conversation now cuts straight through me. I try to imagine her with a family of her own. I can see her with children—I’ve always seen that and wanted it for her. And with some amorphous man who’d be their father … Though suddenly, the latter isn’t settling so palatably.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ she asks, pointing at the sandwich. I shake my head, and she picks up a triangle and bites into it, steam escaping, cheese dripping, which she wipes from her mouth with the napkin I pass her on autopilot.I thought she wasn’t hungry?Perhaps getting all of this off her chest is bringing back her appetite.
‘I’m thinking of moving,’ she suddenly says.
‘Cities?’
‘Countries.’
Am I being dragged out in a rip?
‘Maybe Ireland?’
‘Ireland?’
‘You know, green fields, Guinness—’
Can’t see it. ‘But you hate beer. You hate … fields.’
And I hate the mental picture I now have of her and some brawny Irish poet, traipsing the moors until rain forces them into some cosy pub for a pint and a glass of red. She’d be all rosy-cheeked andalive…
The opposite of how she looks now, I realise. Trapped. Tired. Pale.
Have I done this to her?
‘I have relatives in Ireland, Fraser. An elderly aunt, for starters …’
She’s never mentioned Irish relations. ‘Is this the same elderly aunt related to my recalcitrant students? The one who keeps dying every time they have an overdue assignment?’
She laughs and pulls out her phone, scrolling through the photo app. ‘Here. Evidence. This is my great-aunt Aisling on my dad’s side.’
I take the phone and find myself staring at a grey-haired, wiry little woman with Rachael’s blue eyes, swallowed by a floral-printed, doily-covered armchair. She looks about a hundred and fifty.
‘The distance could be good for you, too, Frase,’ she suggests as I pass the phone back. And I know she is wrong.
Audrey would tell her to go. She’d fill out her passport application and research house swaps. She’d pack her bags and drive her to the airport, where she’d cling to her and cry and then push her into the queue for the security screening and tell her to have a wildly brilliant, exciting,incredible life.
Because that’s what you do when you love someone, isn’t it? You suck it up if they want to sever themselves from you and follow a different path. You prioritise their happiness above your own and kick your convenience to the kerb because they mean so much to you that all you want is to see them fly.
When you love someone. When you really love them—
