Danika scrolls and stares and scrolls again, wiping moisture from her eyes. What must it be like for her, seeing her husband happy with another woman? Another daughter. The photos would ram home that this was no casual affair.
A few minutes later, she hands the phone back. “I had no idea about you. None. How stupid I was.”
This time Kim doesn’t halt her impulse and takes her hand. “I didn’t know about you either. Please believe me on that.” Danika’s hand is cold and dry, and Kim resists the temptation to run her thumb over the back.
“You said you hired a private investigator,” Danika says. “May I read the report?”
“Are you sure?” Kim studies her face, the short brown hair flattened on her head as if it needs a wash. It frames her drawn face too harshly.
Danika’s lips twist. “Not sure. But I need to know.”
Kim frees her hand, pulls the thick folder from her bag, and holds it out.
“Thanks.” Danika makes no move to take it, staring at it as if it’s an unexploded bomb. To her, it most likely is. “This folder is the end of everything I thought I knew.” She takes it, stands, and walks off. Kim watches her leave, anger twining through her veins.
Fuck Chris and his deception, messing up so many lives.
Chapter Seven
Danika
“Noa has two mums,” Cami announces as they drive to the pitch the next morning.
“That’s right. Lots of kids have two mums or two dads.” They’ve had this conversation before, but Cami still finds it fascinating. And now, Cami has only one mum and no dad.
Once Cami and Sylvie have gone to join their friends, Danika climbs the grandstand to where Kim is and sits next to her. She hands her a takeaway coffee, then pulls the report from her bag. “I took a copy.”
“Thanks for the coffee.” Kim takes a sip.
“I’d say thank you for sharing the report with me, but I can’t thank you for something that’s destroyed my life.” Danika looks at Kim’s profile, at the thick plait hanging over one shoulder. At her high cheekbones and tanned skin, the almost invisible scars from teenage acne on her cheeks. No make up. “I don’t know where I go from here, to be honest. I don’t know what to tell Cami.”
“I haven’t told Bella either. I’ll tell her soon. Her last name is that of a man who doesn’t exist.”
So many things are affected by this, practical and emotional. At least she doesn’t have that to deal with. “How did you meet?” she asks.
“Nine years ago, I was flying to Adelaide to attend a conference. I’m a nervous traveller, so I went to the bar for something to steady my nerves. The only vacant seat was at Chris’s table, and we got talking. He bought me a drink. He was on the same flight, and he switched seats so he could sit next to me. We chatted all the way to Adelaide. He said he had a day in the Adelaide office before heading north to a mine site. We discovered we both enjoyed playing tennis, and he asked if I’d like a game early the next morning.”
It’s like listening to a story, or overhearing someone talking in a café. If she can stay dissociated, she can do this. It’s information, that’s all, like when she types reports about people with inoperable cancers as part of her job as a medical transcriptionist. It’s sad, but it doesn’t affect her. “When did you see him again?”
Kim slides her a sideways glance. “That evening.” She hesitates. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
So they slept together that night. A shaft of anger knifes Danika’s gut. She pushes it down, but the knowledge bubbles under her skin. That won’t help her now. She sucks a deep breath and nods.
“We went out to dinner, and I spent the night with him. He went off to the mine the next morning, but we made plans to meet up in Melbourne when he returned.”
How quickly he fell. How eager, how smooth. Danika wonders if it was his first affair—that’s all it could have been at the start. “And then?” Her voice sounds flat and bleak in her ears.
“He called me the day he returned. Then, a few days later, we met for dinner.”
Kim doesn’t say they slept together. She doesn’t need to. “How soon did it get serious?”
Kim takes a mouthful of coffee as if collecting her thoughts. “It didn’t, not for a while. I’d not long broken up with my girlfriend and wasn’t looking for anything serious.”
Somehow, despite Kim having been in a relationship with Chris, Danika’s not surprised she’d had a girlfriend. Kim seems the free-spirited type, unfettered by labels or boxes.
“We’d see each other a couple of times a week—mostly weekdays. Sometimes he’d stay over; other times, he’d say he had work to do or an early start. He was working away in South Australia a fair bit, too, and I couldn’t contact him then. Chris always seemed busy, enough that I asked if he was in another relationship. He assured me he was single, just busy studying for a master’s degree.”
“So what changed things?” She pretends she’s a TV talk show host, drawing out a scandalous story from her guest, one dispassionate question at a time.
