“I’m sorry.” She hurries down the hallway and reaches past Danika to pull the door closed. “That was unthinking of me.”
Danika dashes at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “No, I’m sorry for prying. I didn’t mean to. I just glanced around as I followed you, as you do when you go into someone’s home for the first time, and I saw your room, and realised… It sank in that this is where you lived with Chris. That was your bed.”
“I gave all the bedding to the op shop… after I found out. I couldn’t afford a new bed. Plus, it’s really comfortable.” She lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug.
Danika turns to face her. “Those photos. May I…? Could I?”
Kim’s heart thunders. This feels like a bigger intrusion than simply Danika coming into her home, getting to know Bella. This is Danika studying her life, the expressions on her face in the photos.
She originally put those photos there for a reason—because love and happiness shine like the sun from the images. At first, when Chris was missing, Kim would take her favourite photo and trace his face, hold it to her chest and try, in some woo-woo psychic way, to sense where he was. There had only been blackness and blankness, as if Chris was forever out of reach. Which he was, on so many levels.
Fear and longing are scrawled across Danika’s face as she stares at the closed door to the bedroom, and Kim can’t deny her request. She nods.
For a moment longer, Danika stares at the doorway. Then, with a hitch of breath, she enters and walks across the room to where the three framed photos sit.
Kim follows, closing the door behind her.
Danika reaches out, and her hand hovers as if the frame will burn her, or maybe she thinks if she touches it, it will all becomemore real. But then, with an audible breath, Danika picks up the first picture and studies it.
Kim stands to one side, not wanting to intrude. The photo she’s holding is an early one. Kim, cupping her baby bump with both hands. Chris stands behind her, his chin on her shoulder, his hands resting over Kim’s. It’s a study in intimacy, hope, and love.
Danika’s face smooths like marble, but her lips tremble. She puts the frame down with hands that shake, and the picture falls over. She sets it upright and picks up the second.
It’s a photo taken at Moomba when the three of them went to the carnival. Bella, who was three, sits on Chris’s shoulders. One hand clutches a stick of fairy floss, and lumps of it have fallen on Chris’s head. He’s grimacing and laughing all at once. Bella looks delighted with herself. Kim remembers taking that photo and thinking how normal their lives were, how ordinary. Just a happy family having a day out at the fair, eating too much crap, then feeling sick on the carnival rides.
How little she knew.
The last photo is Bella’s favourite. It was taken at a soccer game, and seven-year-old Bella is about to kick the ball, concentration etched on her face. Chris and Kim are in the background cheering her on. Chris is yelling, his blond hair on end, and she’s pressed close to him, quieter, but her eyes intent on her daughter. A photographer who was covering the game took it for the local paper. They didn’t print it, to Bella’s disgust, but Chris came home with the prints and said he’d purchased them. Now, she wonders if he’d persuaded the paper not to print them because of the freak chance Danika might see them.
She’ll never know.
Danika turns to her and makes no attempt to hide the tears in her eyes. “He loved you.” She says it with wonder, like she’s just learned a fact she thought not to be true.
“I thought so,” Kim says. “Now, I think I was wrong. I don’t know his game, or why he played it, but I’m not sure love came into it. Power, maybe? Manipulation? The thrill of the illicit?”
“No.” Danika reaches out a hand and takes Kim’s, uncurling her fingers one by one. She holds Kim’s hand pressed between her own palms. “He loved you. Those photos…” She stares at their linked hands. “It’s difficult for me to look at them, to be honest.”
Her raw honesty slices into Kim’s chest, along with Danika’s pain. She grips Danika’s hand, lowering it so their linked hands hang by their sides.
“Mum! How long ’til lunch?” Bella’s voice comes from the kitchen.
Danika gasps. “Please don’t let Cami see these. I don’t want her to find out this way.” She disengages their hands and flees from the bedroom into the hall. “Your mum’s just coming,” she says to Bella. “I’m sure you can wait a little longer.”
Kim presses her palms to her cheeks. She can still feel the imprint of Danika’s hand on her own. Steady, reassuring, kind. Unlike her heart, which is wild, panicky, troubled. She leaves the bedroom, closing the door carefully behind her, and goes to the kitchen.
“Lunch,” she says, and her voice has a brittle, artificial gaiety to it, even in her own ears. She takes the platter of sandwich quarters from the fridge and puts it on the table, adds the bowl of salad, and some of the cheese portions Bella loves. The fruit bowl is full. She’s proud of the healthy eating in this house.
Bella fills water glasses from the ceramic filter and carries them to the table one by one.
“Sit anywhere and help yourselves,” Kim says. “Meat sandwiches on one side, vegetarian on the other.”
The girls squash up together on the bench seat, leaving the chairs for the adults.
“This looks lovely,” Danika says. She snags two sandwiches—chicken and ham—and a portion of salad. “Are you both vegetarian? There was no need to do differently for us.”
“Mum is,” Bella says, through a mouthful of cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
“But Bella eats meat. She can choose to go vegetarian later if she wishes.”
