The Last Love Note(76)

I’ve missed the old us. The Grace and I who’d laugh at ourselves until tears were rolling down our cheeks in dressing rooms. The friends who’d dance till the lights came on at pre-baby nights out at the one eighties-inspired nightclub in town. I’m struck by the loss of our spontaneity and lightness. The whole ‘Want to grab brunch? See you in twenty’ thing.

‘Hiya, neighbour!’ Justin says, popping into the frame. What’s this? I need to dampen my champagne-infused delight at seeing the two of them unexpectedly together. Keep it cool, Kate. You’ve retired from matchmaking!

Seeing them play happy families for a few seconds reminds me how lovely that can be. And I realise I’ve been stuck in the endless purgatory of loss. Enslaved by the extra burdens of raising a child who carries the very real anxiety that I might not come home from work one day. Fearing that outcome myself. Paying bills. Being responsible. Getting on with a life that isn’t Plan A but couldn’t in any sense be construed as a decent Plan B, either.

‘You know “caretaker mode” before an election?’ I say to Grace, moving off the dancefloor and away from the loudspeakers. ‘They dissolve the House of Reps and keep everything ticking over but they put the brakes on any major new decisions?’

She knows exactly what I mean. ‘That’s only ever meant to be a temporary mode, Kate.’

Yes.

Don’t stop living, just because I do.

As Hugh arrives and crosses the room, and Dancing Queen reaches a climax, I make Grace promise to tell me everything about the new romance when we next chat, and end the call. Hugh looks different. It’s not just the tousled hair and two-day stubble, though those do stray from his typical impeccability. It’s the wildness in his eyes. As if the fight or flight mechanism has kicked in and he’s been wrestling those demons of his – henceforth to be known as Genevieve – for hours.

He reaches me and, without ceremony, takes me gently by the wrist, pulls me back across the dancefloor in silence, then towards the door and outside into the cooler air, stopping beneath a string of fairy lights hanging from a cypress pine. The distant sky lights up, followed by the rumble of thunder, and the intensity in his blue eyes almost scorches my skin as he looks at me. Really looks at me. Walls down. Barriers stripped. Nothing but raw, exposed honesty between us now.

‘Kate,’ he says, his voice heavy. ‘You need to know about Genevieve. I want to tell you everything.’





34





Back at the beach house, waiting for the kettle to boil, Hugh looks nervous. He leans against the kitchen bench, arms crossed, staring at a spot on the cupboard while I get mugs and tea bags ready. Wow, she’s really done a number on him!

‘Is everything okay?’ I ask, as waves break on the beach. I’m not sure I really want to hear the answer.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s earlier. At the cafe. The whole . . .’

Spit it out, Hugh.

He looks straight at me. ‘This is exactly why I never . . .’ He shakes his head and gestures at me, and at him. At us, if you will. I’m still lost. The kettle clicks off and he pours water into the mugs. Then we move to the couch by the fire.

My mind is scrambling to work out what he could possibly be so nervous to tell me about, and it’s coming up blank. Scarily blank. This morning on the beach, which now seems like a thousand years ago, I was only just starting to vaguely admit that maybe, I don’t know, Hugh and I . . .

‘When Cam first got sick,’ Hugh begins, then falters. He inhales and expels the kind of steadying breath athletes take before the most important race of their lives. It only dials up my apprehension.

‘I thought this was about Genevieve,’ I interrupt.

‘Kate, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I know how you love those. And this isn’t a performance review—’

Thank God.

‘—but you have a nervous habit of interrupting.’

‘No, I don’t.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘Just let me try to articulate these thoughts, okay? This is hard to say.’

I zip my mouth shut, as much as that is possible, and vow to let the guy speak.

He begins again. ‘I first met Gen at uni, as I said, then later working up north.’

‘I thought this was about Cam. Sorry.’ I physically put a hand over my mouth to shut myself up.

‘Gen was . . . Well, she was . . .’

He gets a faraway look on his face and it fills me with a type of full-body dismay with which I’ve not been previously acquainted. God. He loved her. Loves her? It’s hard to tell from his expression if it’s past or present tense. All I know is I have an awful, sinking feeling of inferiority. I feel like he’s slipping through my fingers before he’s even in my arms.

‘An absolute knockout of a woman?’ I suggest, and he snaps his attention back to me.

‘Yes.’

He looks confused.

‘Andrew’s description,’ I add, and he gives me a small smile.

I didn’t sign up for this conversation and would like to request a refund at Hugh’s earliest convenience. Something is knotting, hard, in my chest. I’m feeling this wrench. This heart . . . thing. Where have all my words gone?

‘We were together six years,’ he explains. ‘You know how there are those golden couples? Sickeningly good together. Everyone wishes their own relationship would measure up?’