‘What’s wrong with you now?’ Rachael asks. She’s caught the way I’m looking at her. As if we’ve only just met and I’m seeing her for the first time. She stops chopping celery sticks and comes and stands beside me, peering into my face. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
She sweeps blonde hair away from her forehead and folds the cuffs of her pale blue shirt. Then she reaches behind me and flicks on the oven like she lives here.
After that, she looks into my face again and frowns at me.
I glare back and smile.
Her eyes narrow.
It’s like a tennis match, volleying facial expressions over the net, and when she shoves me along and plunges her hands into a sink of hot, soapy water, she says, ‘You’re really getting to me lately, Fraser Miller,’ before placing her wet hand on my arm for emphasis.
‘Trust me, it’s mutual,’ I tell her, wiping my arm with a tea towel. She holds my gaze for just a moment longer than normal. Long enough to plant the hint of a question I haven’t dared ask. Whatever major revelations I’ve been kicking around in my own brain about her recently, they haven’t ventured far enough to envisage a scenario in which she feels remotely the same way. She’s told me she’s leaving. And moving practically as far as possible from here. Seventeen thousand kilometres. I looked it up.
She puts the glasses on the dish rack, wipes her hands on the tea towel, picks up the charcuterie board, and takes it to the other room. I stand here in her wake, her fragrance still in the air, staring at my own reflection in the kitchen window, shocked at the hope on my face.
This is Audrey’sbest friend. My own best friend. A woman Parker loves as if she’s her own stepmum. And her current plan is to marry Seamus O’Grady and have a brood of Irish babies.
The only crack in that plan seems to be one slightly longer than usual, slightly irritated, ambiguous glance that my scientific mind has already categorised as an anomaly. Every logical fibre is screaming to listen to that science, to galvanise my heart and look further afield.
‘What thorny issue are you wrestling with now, Professor Miller?’ she asks, scooping the cheese knife from the bench seconds later.
I’m not wrestling with anything. It’s a proven fact. ‘I was thinking …’Hoping.‘Sometimes all it takes is one microscopic anomaly to burn an existing framework to the ground.’
50
AUDREY
‘Audrey?’ A voice squeals in the corridor as I lock the rehearsal room after a second productive morning of writing alone. ‘AUDREY!’
A cyclonic teenager slams into my body, pushing me into the wall, making me drop everything. My heart bursts as I squeeze Parker to my chest, then push her to arm’s length to take her in. ‘Look at you, Parks! You look incredible!’
How am I staring at her at eye level? When did that happen?I’m sick with how much I’ve missed of her life and just want to drink in every inch of her.
‘Mum hates this whole fit.’ She shows it off proudly. Black jeans. At least three layered tops. Combat boots. ‘Iknewyou’d love it.’
It’s been far too long. Months, since we’ve seen each other. The secondary loss of this child from my life guts me every single day. I doubt there is any number of years of sobriety that Maggie would accept as sufficient to allow me back into her life again, unleashed.
I glance over her shoulder. Her uncle is waiting for her in the foyer, watching from the respectable distance I commanded yesterday, hands in pockets, frown on face.
‘Mum doesn’t understand my life atall,’ Parker is already confiding. ‘Not any of it. Not you. Not …other things.’
We really can’t be having this conversation. We’re not meant to be unsupervised, let alone having an open rant about Maggie.
She takes out her phone and makes a call. My precious piece of Fraser. My connection to him, in human form. She is his DNA. His blood. Had he and I changed our minds and had a baby, she would have been my child’s sibling—
‘Mum? Can Audrey come to lunch if Uncle Josh is there?’
It’s like being shocked by a defibrillator.
‘Parker!’ I move in close and talk into the phone: ‘Maggie, sorry! We just bumped into each other. I’m not involved! I can’t really—’
She ends the call and squeals. ‘She said it’s fine!’
But it’s not fine!I wish Beau was still here—he would have been a good excuse—but he disappeared to work on his script.And to give you time to think, he said,about risking this level of exposure.
‘Uncle Josh!’ She runs down the corridor, and I can tell the precise moment she breaks the news, because he looks as impressed as I feel. Hardly surprising after I sent him packing yesterday.
I pick up the papers and the bag that I dropped and walk towards them, equal parts repelled and enthused.
