He makes me look at him now, twisting me to face him, eyes piercing mine as he says, ‘The problem is that after she’s told him her life story—the whole messy plotline in three acts—and he understands just how much she has at stake, his public life will bring her undone. Journalists will dig and pry, and they won’t let up until they’ve fed like vampires on all her secrets. They’ll take the precious life she’s reclaiming and they’ll blow it all up again—’
This isn’t about not trusting him, I realise very belatedly. It’s about not trustingthem. He’s not abandoning me; he’s trying to protect me.
‘And here’s the real kicker,’ he adds before I can collect myself, pain really searing across his face now. ‘All along, no matter how far she opens her heart and how much music they make, there will never be a time, for the rest of their lives, when she’s not still madly in love with someone else.’
49
FRASER
‘I need you to help me sift through Bumble,’ Rach announces while I mix her a cocktail.
She’d been so distressed on that ladder on the mountain, I doubt she even remembers me telling her I’d been taking her for granted. Every interaction with her now is confusing and fragile. Her rising sense of certainty and empowerment is being charged from my own rapidly depleting power bank. She even looks different.Is it the clothes? Has she cut her hair?I’m having unsettling flashbacks to the time Maggie had already made up her mind that our marriage was over and, having switched onto that different track, nothing could divert us back.
‘I thought you were moving to Ireland,’ I say, passing Rach a margarita.
‘I’m not moving away this week. I can have fun, can’t I?’
Can she?It’s her life. But suddenly the notion of Rachael ‘having fun’ with individuals other than myself makes my insides buckle.
‘Here I am. No partner. No kids. No prospects …’
‘Need I remind you you’re a kick-arse cybersecurity ninja? You do your own prospecting.’
‘Noromanticprospects. I told you, Frase, I’ve got way too comfortable loafing around the house with you every week.’
‘I thought we were calling this “place-holding”.’
She laughs.
‘It’s not like we sit around doing nothing,’ I argue. ‘Outdoor cinema. Cooking classes. Concerts. Galleries. Day trips …’
‘Yes, and every time an eligible man sees me gallivanting with you on our endless quest to be the poster couple formen and women can just be friends, I lose another opportunity!’
Oh, Rachael McKenzie, we have well and truly lost that title.She might be able to accomplish ‘friends’, but I seem to have dropped that ball. I fast-forward to her settling down with that faceless Irish bachelor—or any bachelor at all—and I’m already missing her. Not in the way you miss a friend. The way you lose a lover, languishing in their absence.
This woman has had complete control of her love life, or lack of it, ever since we met. She has kept herself away from relationships, citing no time, no interest, no viable prospects, no trust in the apps. She’s been ‘picky’ and ‘fussy’ and ‘endlessly disappointed in men’, and she’s stayed deliberately, happily single. But now that she’s flipped this on her own terms, she’ll be unstoppable. She’ll plunge into that dating pool, a late entry, and storm to victory. The top-shelf contender. She’ll be inundated.
‘Is this why you’ve forced me onto the apps?’ I ask, having lost feeling in several limbs. ‘To make room for your own love life?’
She looks me square in the face. ‘No, Fraser. That’s because you’re too good a man to stay single. You’re depriving some woman, and yourself, of future happiness. Have you had any matches?’
‘None that feel right.’
‘None that are Audrey’s twin, you mean? Don’t tell me, you’re waiting for some tormented creative who’ll write songs about you …’
I thought I’d been avoiding everyone equally. But maybe she’s right. I’ve been waiting for someone to come along in the exact shape of the hole in my life.
‘Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, Frase.’
‘Actually, Rach—’
‘Don’t mansplain the science to me! I’m being poetic.’
But lightningcanstrike the same place twice. In fact, it often does. If something is tall enough or isolated enough and it’s made of a material that attracts lightning, it can be struck multiple times, even in the same thunderstorm.
I glance through the living room door at Audrey’s piano, untouched since the day she died. Sometimes, I can almost hear the keys. If I close my eyes and focus hard enough, I imagine a faint vibration, as if her ghostly fingertips are trying to will the music back into my life.
When I look at Rach again, bright eyes, sapphire pendant sparkling, I can’t help feeling a similar sensation. That invisible whisper of Audrey’s encouragement. Some part of mehasbeen waiting for that second bolt of lightning, someone so similar, she could almost walk straight into her shoes. It never occurred to me that the second bolt might be less about how alike that person was, and more about how close.
