He bent down to pick up the copy ofCodename CharmingI’d dropped as he led me back to our seats. ‘Do you want this?’
I nodded, taking it from him and clutching it in white-knuckled fingers, so hard that I would probably bruise the pages.
He sat me back down. ‘Here.’ He took the lid off the bottle of water he’d bought and offered it to me.
I shook my head wordlessly.
‘I’m so sorry, Sadie. This is all my fault.’
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to scream right in this man’s face, this man whose face I had screamed in plenty of times before, this man who was being so fuckingniceto me. I wanted to scream and scream and scream, and I wanted to never stop screaming.
‘Just shut up, Jonah,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Please.’
He should have got up and left.
Instead, he hesitated. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.
I should have pushed him away.
But this was the only tie I had left now, the last bridge I hadn’t burnt – so I reached up and, even though I had no right to, even though there was no one watching, I clung to my fake husband’s hand like a lifeline.
Chapter ElevenSadie
‘Not long to go now,’ Jonah said, hoisting my bag down from the overhead compartment and then reaching for his own. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had some sleep.’
That was fundamentally untrue, but I didn’t have the energy to argue. I’d tried to doze on the two-hour flight to Hobart, but my mind wasn’t kind enough to let me. Every bone in my body felt like it was melting.
And we were supposed to show up to campus tomorrow, two scholars finally delivered to the promised land of secure employment. God.
‘I don’t think anyone will be expecting big things of us tomorrow,’ Jonah said, reading me as easily as if I were written by Shakespeare. ‘They’re hardly going to make us lecture three hundred students and draft a grant proposal on our first day.’
I nodded, turning off airplane mode on my phone as the people a few rows ahead of us started to file off the plane. Nothing from Chess.
It’s late, I told myself.She’s probably asleep. She’ll feel better in the morning too.
It wasn’t a convincing story, but I clung to it.
My knees creaked as we walked across the tarmac and into the terminal. ‘Let me just find our driver,’ Jonah said absently, craning his neck to look, ‘and – oh God, Sadie, I’m sorry about this.’
‘There he is!’ someone exclaimed.
Two cannonballs slammed into him, wrapping their arms around his waist. ‘Uncle Jonah! Uncle Jonah!’
‘Hi girls.’ Jonah’s eyes met mine apologetically over their heads. ‘What are you doing here?’
Two identical sets of wide brown Fisher eyes looked up at him. ‘Mummy said we could stay up late to pick you up!’ one declared.
‘It’swaypast our bedtime,’ the other one said.
‘Well, then, hello Rosie, hello Georgia.’ He smoothed their hair down, one hand on each head. ‘How nice to see you.’
‘Are you Auntie Sadie?’ the first one – Rosie? – demanded of me.
My mouth was suddenly dry.Auntiewas not a word I had been prepared for. ‘I, um…’
‘Yes,’ Jonah said. ‘This is Auntie Sadie.’
