She says it’s the only way she can let out her guilt about the accident.
Parker’sguilt? Rachael and I stare at Maggie’s latest message and then at each other. I know exactly how heavy this guilt weighs. I cannot imagine a child carrying that around—all this time, in silence. Iachefor her. Maggie and I went over and over the ‘it’s not your fault’ conversation when we broke up.Have we not reinforced that about Audrey’s accident?
‘It was Russian roulette who picked up the phone that day,’ I say to Rachael. ‘It could just as easily have been Maggie or me crossing that road. It never occurred to me that Parker would have felt it was her fault.’
She takes my hand. ‘Fraser, listen to yourself. This is what you just told me. In that instant the cosmos would have downloaded a whole alternative future, but what’s the sense in trying to imagine it? You can’t ever know how things might have played out. Maybe Audrey would still be here. Maybe you’d be the one who would’ve gone—’
‘And she might have handled everything so much better.’
‘Or she might not have. You can’t know that. But Parker would have lost one of her parents!’
Did I miss something on the day of Audrey’s death?It would be easy to do, swept along by the emergency. Maybe Parkermessaged us and I didn’t see it or respond, routine family communications knocked off course by the crisis.
She was supposed to stay with us that night, but Maggie made some excuse about the shift in our arrangements. Then Parker ended up at Maggie’s parents’ place. Maybe this is where it all fell to bits. Where she lost trust in the world, and in us. Because we made her believe everything was all right that night and then, just hours later, tore her world apart.
All this time, Parker must have replayed that afternoon and imagined a version of the day in which she hadn’t raised an alarm. Hadn’t been struggling. Hadn’t gone to sick bay. Hadn’t called us in early to pick her up. A world in which Audrey hadn’t died trying.
‘All I know is that good parents don’t get a clear ride through. You can’t protect kids from the harshness of the world. It’s never about how we fall. Always about how we rise.’ Rachael takes my hand. ‘You and Maggie have got this, too, Fraser.’
60
AUDREY
Walking into the music school, I’m facing a new kind of miserable. This pain of losing Beau, a man I’ve known so fleetingly, is of course a loss that does not exist in the same universe as losing Fraser. I’m mourning the sense of possibility. The hope. And the breakneck few days I’ve just enjoyed, during which my heart roared to life again in a way that I hadn’t known it could. Beau Davenport blazed across my path like a meteor, shifting me beyond a creative crisis that spanned years.
I’m not going to worry about the film. Surely it will be possible to have that scene written out. When he skated too close to his ex-girlfriend in writing, she had him upend the entire script. Talk about a repeat offender! And I’d assumed he was so creative! Perhaps ithadbeen Lucinda who brought the flair. It’s the whole Shakespeare and Bassano dynamic all over again.
Nearing the door to Llewellyn Hall, I’m hit with an unexpected sense of empowerment. Last time I was in this room with Josh, he was onstage. I was in the wings, barely breathing at the magnificence of his work, gutted by the canyon that more than a decade had carved between what should have been comparable careers. I’d been burning with professional disappointment.
Now I’m bursting with ideas. I was never the kind of composer they tried to pigeonhole me to be. I don’t want to be predictable. I want to take what I’ve been through and transform it into sounds that people can touch and taste. Something that transcends the fire of my own experience and flames into theirs. Music that might be technically clever and complex, but accessible. I want people to cry with relief because it means so much when they recognise their world in my pieces …
‘Sully! I’ve been trying to reach you for days,’ Josh says in a whisper, sweeping up behind me, taking my arm, and pulling me away from my epiphany at the entrance to the hall, down the side corridor, and into a dark practice room, slamming the door behind us. There is a beat of silence in the dark, charged with urgency and regret and the familiarity of his scent, that throws me straight back to that hot summer in the studio, and I have to restrain myself from filling the quiet with tumbling thoughts on my recently inspiredwhere to nextcompositionally.He is no longer my sounding board.
He switches on the light, looks at me as our eyes adjust, and says, ‘What the fuck happened to you?’
‘What?’
‘You look like hell. Mixed with hope. But listen, we haven’t got time to unpack that.’
It’s like being run over by a truck.
‘Ridges is here,’ he announces.
I forget everything else and go stone cold. ‘What do you mean he’shere?’
‘He’s the patron of Parker’s music school. He’s flown in. He’s going to be at tonight’s concert.’
I don’t know what to say. I want to sayso much. ‘But, Josh, the kids are all performing original compositions.’
Now that I’m paying attention, he looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Face drawn, dark circles—it’s a far cry from that Manhattan chic he was flaunting when he first arrived.
‘Sully, I’ve been in meetings all week with my lawyers.’Explains the cuff links.‘I want to do the right thing here. But there’s a paper trail. It would come out that I was complicit in what he did to you, and that I’ve continued to ignore it for eighteen years, putting others at risk. They’ve strongly advised me not to get involved. I’ve got too much to lose, reputationally.’
I was wrong when I thought he couldn’t disappoint me any more. ‘What are you saying, Josh? You’re going to protect yourself and offer up yourniece?’
He looks at me, spent.
‘Wow,’ I say, shaking my head. Is there a stage beyond ‘disappointed’? I feel like I’ve reached the end of human emotion. As if he’s now put me through the full suite and wrung me out.
