‘Just try not to get your heart broken, Auds. Jasper’s teething. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to add my best friend’s Alist breakup to the sleepless nights …’
‘I’ve been widowed, Rach. I’m hardly at risk of heartbreak after a week!’
‘What, nobody in the world has ever fallen in love in a week?’ Clair argues.
My own grandparents fell in love in a weekend. It’s the stuff of family legend.
‘What do I do? Just sit there like an unqualified impostor at this meeting he hasn’t even invited me to?’
‘Maybe she wants to surprise him, too? She’s his wing-woman!’ April says, strategising.
‘Hello!magazine said she was his secret on-again, off-again girlfriend,’ I remind them.
‘And what did he tell you about the tabloids?’ Rach asks.
April props her sunglasses on her head and looks serious. ‘Just don’t run this by Sara, okay? I respect your sister, but we’re at a critical moment in the arc of this love story and we don’t want you spooked—’
She’s talking about it like I’m a jittery animal, ready to bolt from headlights and plunge into a forest. ‘Oh, I’ve already spoken to Sara. She is unexpectedly obsessed with him! You all are!’
‘Sara’sonside? This must be worth chasing!’ April says, beaming. ‘And we’re not obsessed withhim… I mean,we are, but we’re more obsessed withyou. This is your first real chance since Fraser died to be with someone incredible. You thought this person didn’t exist. You were convinced nobody could ever measure up to him, and here you are, potentially with someoneremarkable…’
Someone remarkable whom I haven’t spoken to in days. Now that he’s not in my vicinity, and with him working in that caravan with gorgeous Harlow, I can’t help wondering if I made the whole thing up.Poor Audrey. So starved for romance she’s invented a famous boyfriend, like when she was ten and convinced herself Luke Perry would take her seriously.
‘The table read is in Sydney, at one o’clock. It should be over in time for me to fly back and get to Parker’s concert. Either way, if I’m going, I need to leavenowand book the only available flight on the way to the airport!’
‘Oh God, does Maggie know you’re coming?’ Rach asks. I’d conveniently left this part out, because it would have led to a conversation about Parker that I don’t want to rush, plus an admission that I’d had sushi with Josh, and she’d have killed me.
‘Can we just focus on one of my crises at a time? What if I turn up and Beau isn’t thrilled? What if he’s right—Iammadly in love with Fraser and we can never find our way through that, and I’ll flip out and run at the first paparazzi shot in theDaily Mail? What if I end up dealing with an even more shattered heart, and I can’t ever recover from multiple emotional traumas—’
‘What if you don’t go, and you never see him again?’ April asks, shutting me up, well and truly.
Never see him again?
It’s swift, insightful wisdom, and utterly spot on. Because the very idea takes the wind out of me.
‘Remember, it’s Fraser’s life that ended,’ Rach prompts me, a gentle mic-drop message from a best friend in the midst of a bubbling exchange. ‘Not yours.’
55
FRASER
‘I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?’
Rachael and I are at my place, with the email to Audrey’s former university peers open. She’s beside me, feet up, looking over my shoulder, leaning against my hip and arm, and I can barely keep my train of thought. I don’t understand how this woman has been in my life all these years without my ever going to pieces like this around her.
‘We need to finish what she started,’ she says. ‘She’d want this. And after what Josh implied about the music school—we’ve got no choice.’
We listen to the rough track that Audrey recorded when she was a student, and then again to the track from Ridges’ album.
‘It’s exactly the same tune, right? I mean, it’s unmistakable,’ Rach says.
I click on the link in the email to the cloud repository of the other students’ music and we listen to the first sample. And the next. Over and over, there are unambiguous examples of Ridges outright copying his students’ work. Justliftingit. It’s abhorrent. And these are just the handful of people Audrey knew. He’s been teaching for thirty years.
‘I should never have stopped them from fighting this. It’s not fair on any of them. It’s only now that my own daughter is atrisk that I’m doing something about it, like that evolutionary quirk that wires us to care more about tragedies closer to home.’
Rach takes the laptop out of my hands. ‘What were you going to do, Frase? Focus on this from the depths of grief? You were parenting a devastated child. Teaching. Paying a mortgage. Battling your own demons. You couldn’t have done one thing more at the time, and I won’t hear another word about guilt.’
She starts typing something on the keyboard, and I watch as she scrolls through, then leans closer, frowns and uncrosses her legs. ‘God, look at this,’ she says, angling the screen. ‘How much research did Audrey do on this guy?’
