She laughed. ‘Cheers.’
We clinked glasses and drank again, then Fiona’s face turned serious. ‘Can I tell you the real reason I brought you here?’
Oh God.
I jammed my thumb into my engagement ring again and squared my shoulders. This was a test. I was good at tests. I had never failed a test in my entire life. If I could handle repeated academic cross-examinations from Professor Christian Fisher without giving a single inch, then surely –surely– I could handle one conversation with his significantly less terrifying daughter without having some kind of nuclear meltdown.
‘Of course.’
‘Well, there’s a few reasons,’ Fiona said. ‘I really was dying to get out of the house. But I also wanted to apologise.’
I blinked. ‘What for?’
‘For turning up at the airport the other night.’ Her sheepish expression was eerily similar to Jonah’s. ‘I realised as soon as I saw you that I’d made a horrible miscalculation. Of course you’d be exhausted after all that travelling! But I have this nasty habit of getting way,wayahead of myself, and I was just so delighted that you and Jonah were here, and I couldn’t wait to see you, and the kids were excited too, and… I’m sorry. I’ll learn to read the room better in future, I promise.’
‘Fiona, please don’t worry about it,’ I said, deeply relieved to be getting out of this conversation so lightly. ‘Really. I never want to stand between you and Jonah. Ever. No matter how tired I am. It really should have been him you brought out tonight. I know you have a lot of brother–sister time to catch up on.’
‘No, no, it had to be you. Because there’s one more thing I need to say to you, and it’s a big one.’
Fuck. It would probably be bad if I poured the rest of the contents of my wine glass down my throat, right?
‘I was so excited, when you and Jonah told me you were getting married and moving here,’ she said. ‘But I was apprehensive too, because marriage is a huge step, and you took it so fast.’
‘It really wasn’t that big a deal.’ This, at least, I had a pre-developed script for. ‘Would we have done it if not for the partner hire thing? Not this quickly, no. But given the circumstances, it just made sense.’
‘I know, but it’s still a huge deal. Trust me, as someone in the middle of a messy divorce, getting married is an enormous deal.’
I jammed my thumb even harder into my engagement ring and gritted my teeth. I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of that right now.
‘You didn’t have to marry Jonah, but you did,’ Fiona said. ‘I know it was mostly so you could stay together, but I’m not an idiot. I know some of it was so that you could bring him with you to Hobart. Where I live.’
She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. ‘You took this massive, binding step, to help out a woman you didn’t even know. And that’s why I wanted to get you on your own, so I could tell you, from the bottom of my heart: thank you. Thank you for loving my brother enough to do this.’
The English language currently has about 170,000 words in common use. It is an embarrassment of words, more than most of us will ever use in our lives.
‘Oh,’ was the only one I could find. ‘Oh – Fiona. Oh, I…’
‘Not just for my sake. His too, obviously. Do you know I remember the very first time he ever talked about you?’
Fiona leant back in her chair, swirling her wine in one hand. ‘It was about a year before I married Matt. Elias had moved out already, but I was still living at home. I would have been twenty-one. Jonah was eighteen, and he’d just started uni. He sat down at the dinner table one night and started talking about some debate he’d had with this girl in his seminar about… some poet, I think.’
Fucking Wordsworth.
‘My dad went full – well, you’ve met him. He started quizzing him: “How did you read the poem? How did she? Did you take into account this line? How did she respond to this point? Why didn’t you counter with this argument, you stupid boy? You could have demolished her whole case if you’d only raised this point!” Classic Christian Fisher nonsense. I’m sure you’re familiar.’
I nodded, teasing my bottom lip between my teeth.
‘But I’ll never forget how Jonah responded.’
She topped up our water glasses. ‘He looked Dad dead in the eye, and said, “Winning wasn’t the point. Her reading was so interesting, I just wanted to hear what she would say next.”?’
I blinked.
‘Which is about as close you can come to treason in the Fisher family,’ Fiona said casually, as if the ground hadn’t just turned to water beneath our chairs. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard all about how we were raised. Winning arguments was practically our religion. I was radicalised at age ten when Dad took Jonah’s teddy bear away and told him he could have it back once he made a persuasive enough case for it.’
I couldn’t help but picture it: tiny, serious Jonah trying to find a way to rationalise his need for a basic childhood comfort, only to be faced with the unsympathetic brick wall of Professor Christian Fisher. Involuntarily, one of my hands curled into a fist.
‘He’s, um –’ I drank some of my water, trying to clear my suddenly dry throat, ‘– he’s never told me that. About the teddy bear.’
