Ferne savoured the spicy curry with its lemongrass and coconut milk undertones, the flavourful rice, pork and vegetable bibimbap, and the succulent dumplings in a chilli oil that lingered long after the final mouthful. She patted her stomach and sighed with contentment after she’d scraped her plate clean.
‘You need to give me the name of that restaurant, Bette, because I see a lot of Uber Eats in my future.’
‘Lee’s House of Fusion.’ Bette kissed her fingertips. ‘The food is always incredible.’
The meal Ferne had practically drooled over turned to lead in her stomach. Lee was Jesse’s surname, and while it was a common Asian surname, the proximity of this apartment to the restaurant made her wonder if Jesse Lee had an association with it.
‘What’s wrong?’ Bette took her plate and handed her a wine. ‘You look like that last dumpling didn’t agree with you.’
‘Jesse Lee was my husband’s lover. The surname could be a coincidence, but considering how close the restaurant is to this place …’
Bette’s eyes widened and she paled. ‘I’ve never seen Jesse, his grandmother does most of the cooking, but apparently he’s incredible in the kitchen too.’ Her gaze flicked to Ferne’s empty plate. ‘He makes all the dumplings from scratch.’
For the second time that day, nausea swamped Ferne in an unwelcome wave. What were the odds she’d just consumed dumplings that Mac had probably sampled countless times?
‘I’m sorry, Ferne.’
She shook her head. ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. How could you envisage serving me food cooked by my husband’s lover?’
‘Did you know your husband was gay?’
‘No. We met in our late thirties, and I had my son Cruz at forty, so we never had the full-on giddy sparks of youthful love. I’d resigned myself to being single and childless, so when Mac came along and charmed me, I thought, why not? Once I had Cruz, the sex dwindled to nothing, and I thought it was me.’
Stricken, Bette grabbed Ferne’s hand. ‘That’s awful, his selfishness affecting your self-worth.’
Ferne shrugged like it meant little, when in reality she’d cried herself to sleep some nights back then, wondering if pregnancy had changed her body to the extent her husband couldn’t stand to be inside her. She’d read up on it, how vaginas stretch and loosen, but had never had the guts to come out and ask Mac directly.
In that manic first year of Cruz’s life, she’d almost been relieved Mac didn’t want sex, but as Cruz became a toddler, she wanted answers. She instigated sex a few times, trying everything from sexy lingerie to porn, but Mac had been gruff in his rebuttals, and when she finally plucked up the courage to ask him why he didn’t want to have intercourse anymore, he said he was having erectile dysfunction problems and didn’t want to burden her.
Turned out, his impotency had been a result of her being a woman.
‘I prefer not to think about those wasted years,’ Ferne said, wanting to lighten the mood. ‘To think, I could’ve been rooting every farmer in the district to get satisfaction.’
Bette laughed, squeezed her hand and released it. ‘Does that mean you haven’t had sex for almost thirty years?’
‘Who said anything about not having sex?’
Bette’s mouth formed a shocked O before she rubbed her hands together. ‘Tell me more.’
‘You’re not disgusted by my infidelity?’
‘Honey, after discovering your connection to Jesse in some weird six degrees of separation, nothing surprises me.’
‘Actually, I didn’t have sex when I bumped into my first boyfriend, but I wanted to. I ran into him about ten years ago, not long after Cruz left home and moved to Melbourne to work. He’s a chef. Cruz, I mean, not my first love.’
Bette’s eyebrows rose. ‘Is it weird that your son and your husband’s secret lover are both chefs?’
‘What would be weirder is if they know each other.’ Ferne snorted. ‘But Melbourne isn’t Rosevale Grove, where everyone knows each other, so in a city with thousands of restaurants, I think it’s safe to say they haven’t crossed paths.’
She hoped. She hadn’t told Cruz the truth about his father yet, and the thought of him knowing Jesse turned her stomach. What if they’d met and Cruz liked Jesse? Worse, what if they were friends? Crazy, because as she’d just said to Bette, the chances of them knowing each other in a city of millions because of their profession would be remote.
‘Tell me more about this grand first love.’
‘I was a late bloomer, so dated him in my mid-twenties. We had a scorching attraction, but he had zero ambition, whereas I was already a social worker hellbent on saving troubled youth. He worked part-time jobs so he could travel, but I wanted nothing more than to help teens doing it tough. I got tired of his laidback attitude and broke up with him because I envisioned a stable future, not one where I followed him around to the ends of the earth.’
Ferne knew the reason why she’d never had a serious relationship between Taj and Mac. Taj had been ‘the one’ for her, that kind of physical connection that is rarely replicated, and in marrying Mac, she’d settled. Jaded with her job and living in an increasingly violent city where teens as young as thirteen committed crimes with machetes and worse, the prospect of living on a farm far removed from Melbourne had held a certain appeal. Mac had been gentle and charming, and she imagined growing old with him in the sun-dappled shade of their avocado orchards. And while her marriage had become an empty ruse, she always counted her blessings in having Cruz when she’d resigned herself to being childless.
‘So how did you cross paths again?’
