‘I wouldn’t dare.’ I sipped my own champagne and tried to swallow down how much I loved her, and how terrified I was to be leaving her, before I completely fell apart.
Chess unboxed a cheeseboard which must have cost her an absolute mint, especially last minute in the pre-Christmas rush. ‘How did the private school boy take it?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him yet.’
Jonah hadn’t come out of his room. I knew he was in there – I could see the strip of light underneath his closed door – but I hadn’t heard a single peep.
‘If it’s going to be awkward, living with him for this last six weeks before you go to Hobart,’ Chess suggested slyly, ‘you could always move in here with me.’
I pointed a piece of brie at her. It started melting in my fingers, and I swiftly rescued it with a cracker. ‘Nice try.’
This wasn’t the first time Chess had suggested moving in with her. Or the second. Or the hundredth.You don’t need to live in a share house with eight thousand different people. I’ve got a spare room. I’ve got all this space. Save your money. Stay here.
There wasn’t much I could resist her on, but this was a boundary on which I’d held firm. She loved me so much, and she’d look after me forever if I let her – which meant I absolutely couldn’t let her, not if I ever wanted to be an actual independent adult in my own right.
We were both in our thirties now. That five-year age gap between us that had fundamentally shaped our dynamic when we were kids shouldn’t matter anymore. And more than that: I should be the one looking after Chess sometimes – even if I was never,evergoing to be able to even the scales.
When I found myself in front of Jonah’s bedroom door later that night, I told myself that was why I was there. I couldn’t pay Chess back, so I was going to pay it forward instead, by making a very mature, olive-branch-y offer to check up on his sister once I moved to Hobart.
Even though, if the shoe had been on the other foot, and Jonah had turned up at my door to say, ‘Well, IsupposeI could have coffee with your sister once or twice, if that would make you feel better,’ I would probably have put two hands on his chest and pushed him down the stairs.
But after that night in the kitchen – where, even in the ambient lighting, I’d been able to see how tight and drawn the corners of his mouth were when he talked about how he’d failed Fiona – it felt like I had to saysomething.
Apologise, perhaps.
‘…please don’t cry, Fi,’ Jonah said.
I stopped, hand poised to knock.
His sister said something I couldn’t really hear, but even through the door, there was no disguising the sound of sobs.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Jonah said. ‘I tried. I really did, but… sometimes other people are just better.’
He must have turned the volume up, because Fiona’s response came through loud and clear this time. ‘No. Don’t think that, Jonah. I don’t want you to think that. I don’t want you to beat yourself up.’
‘It’s too late for that.’
I recognised the note in his voice. It was the one he used when our students would come to us right at the end of semester.I know I haven’t been to any of the classes and I didn’t submit the first assignment, but is there any way I can pass the unit?they’d say, and he’d look them in the eye and say gently but firmly,I’m sorry, but it’s too late for that.
‘No,’ Fiona said. ‘This isn’t your fault. This is my fault. You told me not to get my hopes up, and I did anyway, and—’
She started crying again, but I thought I heardI’m sorry, Jonahin there.
‘Fi, please.’
This note I didn’t recognise. I’d never, not once in fifteen years, not even that night in the kitchen, heard Jonah Fisher sound desperate.
‘Maybe I can figure something out,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing keeping me in Sydney, not really. All the unis I work for are cutting back their casual staff numbers massively. Maybe I even have a better chance of getting teaching work in Hobart. Sadie might throw me some, if I ask her nicely.’
I, like many workaholic thirty-something women, had persistent jaw issues from clenching too much. My masseters were so tight that the myotherapist I saw whenever I could afford it told me it was amazing I could open my mouth at all.
My jaw still dropped to the floor.
‘Or I could try for something outside of academia,’ he went on. ‘My career is on its last legs anyway. Maybe I can move to Hobart and find some other job I can do.’
I fled, as quickly and quietly as I could. This was none of my business.None.
Sometimes, when I read particularly dense (*cough* French *cough*) theory, my brain would just slide over the words on the page. I would understand the meaning of every word individually, but my mind simply would not absorb the meaning of the sentence. I would have to go back and read it six or seven times before it came close to sinking in.
