“Hi,” Danika says. She hitches her bag higher on her shoulder and waits until Kim looks at her again. “I’m sure you remember me.” Stupid, dumb thing to say. Of course Kim does. “I’m sorry, that was inane. I honestly don’t know what to say to you.”
One side of Kim’s mouth lifts. “I can’t help you there. Why don’t you sit here and find the words you need? There’s no hurry.”
Danika perches on the very edge of the bench, her bag clasped in front of her like a shield. For a few moments, she concentrates on her breathing. Her mind is a mess of fog and coffee, and she still has no idea what to say. She sifts through her thoughts, and one fact rises to the surface.
“When you came to my door, you said you lived in St Kilda. Did I remember that right?”
Kim stares at her for a moment, and Danika tries not to flinch at the sympathy in Kim’s warm brown eyes. Kim holds her gaze and nods once.
Danika chokes, and an inarticulate keen leaves her throat.St Kilda. She breaks eye contact and looks out at the pitch. Cami and Bella have linked arms, swinging each other around.
Kim reaches out a hand. It hovers near Danika’s, as if she wants to offer comfort, but she withdraws it. Of course. Kim is the last person able to offer reassurance that everything will be okay.
“Chris—myhusbandChris—was killed when a delivery truck sideswiped his car. It was early in the morning, and there were parked cars on both sides of the road. The delivery driver was apparently looking at the GPS and didn’t see Chris coming in the other direction. The truck was on the wrong side of the road, and there was nowhere for Chris to go. The delivery driver saw him at the last second and avoided a head-on, but sideswiped Chris’s car, which was crushed between the truck and a parked car. Chris died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.”
Kim nods, and Danika sees that none of this is news to her. She’s not surprised, or even shocked. She examines her own reaction. The grief that choked her eased as she spoke, enough that she can repeat the facts in an unemotional way. God knows, she’s had to repeat them, write them, explain them to many people over the past eight months. The day she had to tell Cami her father was dead was the worst day of her life. Air whistles out of her throat. As terrible as this is, it can’t compare with that.
“Would you…” Danika’s throat tightens. “Do you know what type of car Chris was driving?” She can’t look at Kim, so she stares out at the pitch, where Cami and Bella are sprinting to the end of the field. They’re neck and neck, stride for stride.
“A white Audi A6,” Kim says. “Black leather interior. But I could have got that information from the traffic report the private investigator obtained. Chris told me the Audi was a company car, but it turned out that was a lie.” Her voice floats over Danika’s head. “He was on Carlisle Street, St Kilda.”
Danika nods. “You could have got that from the traffic report, too.” She looks up, and her eyes meet Kim’s. “This is difficult. Do you know why Chris was in St Kilda at just gone seven in the morning on a Tuesday?”
Kim’s eyes close as if summoning strength from the momentary blackness. “He’d just left our apartment on Elstree Road, five minutes from where the accident was. He was driving to work. I heard sirens that morning, but I didn’t connect them with Chris. Why would I? There are often emergency vehicle sirens in St Kilda at all hours.”
The blood drains from Danika’s head to her toes, and she grips the bench. For a moment, the grandstand sways around her. She licks her dry lips, fumbles in her bag for her water bottle and unscrews it with shaking fingers. “When I heard about the accident, at first, I didn’t ask where it happened. It wasn’t important. When I found out it was in St Kilda, I wondered what he was doing there, but there were other, more important things to deal with. What mattered was that he was dead. I had to be strong for Camille. I had to deal with paperwork, and his estate, and a million other things, and still keep working.”
She meets Kim’s eyes. They’re still the same warm brown, but there’s a sheen of moisture there. “I thought Chris was in South Australia. It was his two weeks away. That was how he worked: two weeks in the field, then two weeks in the office. But he’d only left for Adelaide the day before, so I thought…somehow…that he’d returned early and was working in the office that week but hadn’t told me yet. Maybe he planned on surprising me when he came home that night. To be honest, I didn’t know what to think. I pushed it aside until I could deal with that, but the day never came.”
“He told me the same,” Kim says. “Two weeks working from the Melbourne office, at home with me and Bella. Two weeks in the field in outback South Australia. Maree, the bomb roads,Maralinga. He’d just got back the previous day, and it was the start of his two weeks at home.”
Danika had thought, when Chris was killed, that things couldn’t get worse. “It’s not true.”
Kim’s face closes over, and Danika wants to say that she’s not talking about what Kim just said. She’s talking about her life and everything she’s known for the last nine years. Instead, she rises and fumbles with the strap of her bag. “I… I can’t… I can’t do this.” On her second attempt, she settles the bag on her shoulder. With a brief nod, she descends the steps without looking back.
This can’t be happening. This is something she reads in the magazines at the supermarket checkout.My daughter is a werewolf! My mother-in-law stole my baby! My husband’s secret family!This sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal people. It doesn’t happen to her.
When a colleague confided her husband was having an affair, and said she’d had no idea, none at all, Danika was sympathetic, but deep down she wondered how Binh hadn’t known. There must have been signs her friend had glossed over. But Binh swore there was nothing. Their sex life was great. Steve was sweet, caring, attentive, someone who did his share of housework and bought her small gifts.
And now this is far, far worse, and she’s second-guessing every little thing Chris did over the past nine years, wondering how she could have been so stupid as to not know.
That’s if this is even true. Her mind still shies away from accepting that.
Danika can’t face sitting with the other parents as if nothing has happened, as if her life hasn’t fallen in pieces around her feet. She walks toward the coffee shop where she saw Kim yesterday. It’s the only one close by, and she’s sure Kim won’t follow her. Her thoughts are leaping around like startledkangaroos, and the more she tries to grasp them, to order them, to shoot down what Kim told her, the higher and faster they leap. She needs to be calm and rational about this. She wants to—she acknowledges—find the cracks in what Kim said so she can dismiss this idea, thisthingthat just can’t be true, but right now she’s too emotional. Danika can’t get past the screaming in her head, the black fog of misery, the denial.
It can’t be true.
She would have known.
Her feet have taken her past the coffee shop, but she keeps walking. She pushes aside the curtain of anger and focuses on Kim. She’s the key to this; if she can figure Kim out, she’ll know if this is the truth or a lie. Real or deception. Scam or… Or what? What is Kim’s motivation for telling her this?
Money? Maybe. Kim doesn’t look impoverished. Eclectic, yes, with her thick plait and rough-cotton hippie clothes, but she’s sent her daughter to an expensive soccer clinic. If Kim is after money, though, that doesn’t prove or disprove what she says. She could be after money for her daughter.
Or recognition and closure. Recognition of her place in Chris’s life, closure so she can move on.
Or the most altruistic reason of all—Kim could want Bella to know her half-sister.
Somewhere in the last few minutes, she realises, she’s shifted to believing Kim.
