The Last Love Note(29)

‘I can’t think of food,’ I tell him.

‘Let’s go for a walk.’

We make it out of Emergency and as far as the hospital foyer. I don’t want to stray too far in case the nurse rings.

There’s a discarded magazine on one of the lounges. I take a seat and flick through pages of ‘inspiring’ interviews with ‘brave’ women who’ve made it through unimaginable tragedy. I do not want to join them. I’m not the heroic type. I’m more the falling-in-a-heap type.

Hugh sits down beside me, catches a headline in the magazine and confiscates it. ‘You know they invent most of that stuff,’ he says definitively. ‘Come on. You need to eat. There’s a cafe across the road and we could sit in the sun for a few minutes.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Come and watch me eat, then.’

He stands up and starts walking. I find myself following him out of the foyer like he’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Must be the Hot Coals Effect.

Canberra has the audacity to have turned on one of its peerless autumn days for this experience. The crunch of red and brown leaves, the soft breeze and twinkling sunbursts through the trees want to trick me into believing the high-tech environment of machines and alarms and tubes and cords that we’ve just exited does not exist.

‘What about some soup?’ Hugh suggests when we reach a small cafe in the private hospital across the road. It’s populated by staff in scrubs, and shadow families – gaunt, pale humans, living a half-life while a loved-one suffers. Are these my people now?

‘Really can’t eat,’ I tell Hugh.

‘Come on. You don’t know how long you’ll be in here with him. Keep your strength up.’

‘I don’t want to talk about Cam, or my strength. The two are not currently compatible.’

‘Two bowls of soup, please, and bread rolls on the side.’ He pulls out a credit card from his wallet and says, ‘You’re stronger than you think, Whittaker.’

‘You’ve known me all of, what, nine weeks?’

‘And what a fascinating nine weeks that has been.’

When he smiles, it lights up the whole cafe. My body absorbs the light, desperate for the flicker of warmth.

‘Listen. I’m not going to tell you everything is going to be okay,’ he says as we find a table outside. ‘I do know Cam is in the best possible hands. You’re not alone.’

I’m not alone, but I’m also not overwhelmed with Canberra friends. Most of my friends are back in Melbourne or scattered around the world. Between them, Cam and Grace tick so many boxes for me, I haven’t worked too hard on expanding my circle further here, particularly when I spent most of the first two years struggling through pregnancy and new motherhood. A local mums’ group has been nice, but it’s been a bit fractured since some of us returned to work and others haven’t.

‘Apart from Grace, who you met at the gym, and who’s on her way home from Sydney, most of my friends are interstate,’ I admit. ‘Or overseas.’

‘Well, you’ve got your colleagues,’ he states calmly.

‘Who’ve known me five minutes and definitely have somewhere better to be than a hospital bistro.’

Saying that makes my heart race. I want him to stay. The idea that Cam is right now having tests that could upturn our entire future, and that I will have to handle this alone, utterly unnerves me. Being the only adult, caring for Cam if he slips further from Charlie and the baby and me, is a waking nightmare I simply cannot entertain.

‘Can we change the subject?’ I ask, taking a sip of the soup. Its hearty tomato flavour is as out of place in my mouth as the autumn trees had been in my hospital reality.

‘As long as we don’t talk about work,’ Hugh says, pulling a small white bread roll apart and dunking it in the soup. ‘Such a bore.’

I force a smile.

Hugh and I have had several coffee meetings in the last few weeks, but we haven’t shared so much as a sandwich in the work kitchen yet. Everything about having a meal with a relatively unfamiliar man amplifies all the ways in which he is not Cam. Cam doesn’t dunk bread. Unlike my husband, Hugh scoops his spoon away from him in the bowl like you’re supposed to. I watch as he lifts the spoon to the line of unfamiliar lips. Dark stubble on his neck that he’s missed in his morning shave, where I’m used to seeing blond . . .

Stop this, Kate. You’ll go mad.

I need spoken words to drown my internal chatter. One of those buoying, distracting conversations people dance through in waiting rooms when they’re really miles away, worried as hell.

‘What do you do in your spare time, Hugh, apart from picking up strange women at the gym?’ I’m referring, of course, to myself, and the fact that he picked me up from the floor after I was discharged from the treadmill.

‘You’re technically the only woman who’s thrown herself at my feet lately,’ he replies and takes another sip of soup. And a bite of his bread roll.

Looking at him, I find that very hard to believe. ‘You know that woman in the purple gym gear chased after you.’

‘Yep,’ he explains. Full stop. He takes a convenient glance at his lock screen, checking for missed messages.

I see.

‘Did she ever get the tea on your relationship status?’