I let out a long breath, letting it whistle through my teeth. Was the reason that Chess wasn’t replying to Sadie that she simply wasn’t getting her messages?
No. Surely not. She might not be checking her work email, but it was ridiculous to assume she wouldn’t have got all those texts and missed calls from when we first moved here. And surely, if she wasn’t getting all the books Sadie was sending her, at least some of them would have been returned to sender.
As I started walking again, I thought about whether to tell Sadie about the email I’d sent, but decided against it. Chess’s lack of response would tell her nothing she wasn’t already dwelling on at enormous length. Plus, she’d likely be livid that I’d reached out without telling her and I was at the end of my strength. I couldn’t bring myself to upset her.
Sadie smiled at me when I walked back in, laugh lines deepening in the corners of her eyes. ‘Sorry again about dinner.’
‘Nothing wrong with toast. Perfect vehicle for marmalade – and I bought a delicious Bruny Island one at Salamanca Market last weekend. Pear, lemon and cardamom. It tastes like sunshine.’ I held up the bag in my hand. ‘Wine?’
‘Please.’
No, I definitely wasn’t going to tell her. She’d find out eventually, when Chess finally got over herself and spoke to her again. Sadie could be angry with me for overstepping then, when her sister was finally restored to her position as the most trusted person in her life.
In the meantime, though, she had me, and I would treasure whatever scraps she deigned to give me.
45 We’d written well over thirty of them now. Fifteen years after we’d got our worst grade ever because we were terrible collaborators, Sadie Shaw and I had well and truly learned to work together.
46 Yes, yes.
47 This was… semi-successful, I’d say? Mostly because I also struggled under the weight of the fertiliser. Isamu Tsukamoto I was not.
MAY
Chapter SeventeenSadie
‘Hnnnnrrrrgggghhhh,’ Jonah groaned when my alarm went off.
I froze, halfway through sitting up. Usually, on Friday mornings, when we were sharing his bed in the Bunbury Suite so Rosie and Georgia could have mine, he didn’t even register my alarm going off in the pre-dawn. He’d sleep straight through me peeling myself off him and tiptoeing out to go and potter around my garden for a bit before the kids woke up, which conveniently meant we never had to talk about the fact that I always ended up sleeping half on top of him.
‘Cold,’ he mumbled. ‘You’re so warm, Shaw. Like a hot-water bottle.’
I tucked the quilt around his shoulders. He made a satisfied noise and snuggled into it. As usual, he was sleeping on his front, half draped-over, half hugging his pillow; and as usual, it made me think of three things: the story Fiona had told me about his dad taking his teddy bear away from him; what it might feel like if his arm was around me instead of the pillow; and then the teddy bear again, because I really shouldn’t be thinking about the other thing.
‘Go back to sleep, Jonah,’ I whispered, wrapping my dressing gown around myself. He wasn’t wrong about the cold – as winter got closer, the mornings were getting increasingly icy.
‘Don’t take too long today,’ he murmured. ‘Got to go to campus after we get the kids to school, remember?’
I suppressed a groan. Fridays were usually what we optimistically and euphemistically called our ‘research day’. We didn’t have to teach any classes, and getting Lex and the girls off to school was a task that didn’t require looking particularly presentable, so we usually spent the day working from home in the most comfortable clothes we owned.
Today was the first Friday we might actually get to look at our actual research. We’d finished writing the new units we’d been tasked with and we’d put the final touches on Lecture 52 the day before, a whole week and a half before we were due to give it. So, naturally, today was also the day that Petrovski had insisted on meeting with us both on campus to discuss our Semester Two workload – which was almost certainly going to involve dropping even more lectures on our heads.
‘Parcel came for you yesterday,’ he added, just as I was about to sneak out of the bedroom. ‘Forgot to tell you, with the kids and everything. I put it on top of the fridge.’
It was probably some books I’d optimistically ordered for the research I was almost certainly going to have to set aside again immediately. ‘Thanks. Need anything from the garden for breakfast?’
‘Cut me some chives and chervil.’ His eyes were still closed, voice half-muffled in his pillow. ‘Going to make omelettes. The twins love them.’
Something in my chest started aching. I rubbed at it with the heel of my hand.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I will.’
He sent Lex down to the garden a little while later with my coffee. I was always glad to spend time with Lex – now they’d realised I knew a decent amount about the books they liked, we often hadgood chats about what they were reading – but I always missed Jonah too, on these Friday mornings. The little rituals we’d established, the patterns, the routines…
It made sense. I didn’t need all my years of therapy to tell me that I craved stability, and it didn’t take a genius to see that Jonah was the only one currently providing it to me.
But still. I shouldn’t miss him when he was literally just upstairs. Him asking for herbs so he could make his nieces happy shouldn’t make me want to cry. I couldn’t get too attached to our cosy little domestic arrangement, no matter how surprisingly pleasant it had become. Because even if we still had more than two and a half years of it ahead of us, it was eventually going to end, and if I tied myself too tightly to it…
After I’d sent Lex back up to the apartment, I rubbed the heel of my hand across my chest again in the crisp morning air, looking at the snow, which had fallen overnight on the mountain.
