I look at Hugh. He’s Plan C, and a picture of ease, leaning back against his headrest, eyes closed, unflappable. How does he do it? He’s habitually in command.
This is so different from when I used to travel with Cam. I was never anxious then. If anything, I was the risk-taker. The one missing the last bus at some remote beach just for the perfect sunset photo, even if we had to walk miles back to the hotel in the dark. I was always angling for mystery flights and spontaneous mini breaks and off-grid adventures.
We had Christmas Day in Paris once as students. It was right at the end of our trip and we’d drained our budget and couldn’t afford a proper Christmas lunch in a cafe. So we spent the entire day walking the streets with nothing but a baguette and a wheel of brie between us. We sat on the Pont des Arts, freezing our butts off while we invented stories about the couples who locked padlocks on the bridge.
‘We didn’t have to come all this way, you know,’ Cam had said. ‘You make a trip to the local supermarket fun. But Katie, I’m seriously cold. Do you want to go to church?’
‘Pardon?’ I’d replied in a bad French accent. Had he found religion?
‘Voudriez-vous aller à l’église?’ he’d stumbled through, using an English–French translation book, pre-smartphones. ‘C’est gratuity.’
‘Free?’
‘And warm,’ he argued.
We spent the next three hours sitting on a wooden pew, huddled over an electric bar heater in some understated, crumbling little chapel, losing track of time, just talking, until we were finally thrown out by the nuns, who apparently had more of a social life than we could afford. It was never flashy with Cam. It never needed to be. Once he swept me into his orbit, I’d barely notice we were in the sky.
But it’s not Cam beside me now. It’s Hugh. And he’s shut down, so I’m completely lost. Not for the first time, I wish things with Hugh were more like they used to be. Something big went down between Cam and Hugh, near the end. Neither would ever speak about it, no matter how much I begged them to let me in. All I know is, after it happened, the landscape of our friendship shifted. I watched the walls go up between the two of them and felt the tremor of a new fault line beneath Hugh and I. It never stopped him being supportive, but it’s hard to be totally at ease with a person who holds a secret my husband took to the grave.
The plane’s captain introduces herself over the intercom and I pay attention like I’m her star student. She maintains that she’s looking forward to flying us to Brisbane this morning and I marvel at the fact that she chooses to put herself 30,000 feet above the earth as a job.
‘She sounds about sixteen,’ I whisper.
Hugh still has his eyes shut but his mouth twitches.
‘We’re expecting a few little bumps from some upcoming weather,’ the woman says.
I’d googled the interstate weather warnings this morning and can only assume she is drastically underplaying the situation. ‘I’ll keep the seatbelt sign illuminated until—’
Nothing. Silence.
‘Until what?’ I ask nobody in particular. The pilot’s introduction is suspended and the interior lighting flicks off and back on. I have visions of her getting distracted by something unforeseen and alarming on the weather radar, instruments going haywire. Or by something worse. Bird strike. UFO.
‘Get some sleep, Kate,’ Hugh says wearily, having opened his eyes and apparently decided I am overthinking. ‘You look exhausted.’
I look at him as if he hasn’t been listening. ‘I told you, Hugh, I was—’
‘Up all night. Yes, I know.’
‘I’m totally worn out,’ I say. But instead of thanking me for my dedication, he sighs, pulls out a folder of climate change project summaries he’s already read and flicks through it – pointlessly, as far as I can tell. Maybe I should follow his example. I dig into my laptop bag and pull out my notes, but my eyes swim on the page. I’m basically pretending to read, like I’m three, Hugh is my overbearing older brother and I’m playing copycat.
‘You did do a bit of work last night then,’ he says, glancing at my notes on the page.
‘A bit of work?’ I flick through pages and pages of carefully considered background notes on the attendees. ‘This took hours! What did you think I was doing all night?’
He looks chastised. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Binging Netflix? Astrophotography tutorials on YouTube?’
He knows about the astrophotography? I thought I’d kept that obsession to myself.
‘I’m kind of offended you think I’d mess around with that stuff instead of—’
‘Maybe you gave Mad Max a private housewarming after I left,’ he says, more guardedly.
Wow.
Hugh is a person who has sat there and held on through various badly timed emotional meltdowns at work when everyone else just made themselves scarce. He’s let me cry without ever trying to fix it. He’s seen me at my very worst. Utterly destroyed. Seen things no ordinary boss would, things even close friends are barely privy to. When I think of the way he was there for me the day Cam died . . . This is someone who has picked up pieces that were never his responsibility to reassemble.
But, despite that closeness, we rarely stray onto the topic of each other’s love lives any more. Not my now non-existent one, nor the Top Secret and highly populous one I always imagine him having. And we particularly don’t go there since the fiasco with Grace. If we talk about relationships at all now, it’s always in the context of my suddenly not having one and the resultant single-mother logistics that frequently run rampant through the team schedule.
‘Sorry,’ he says, as if he’s reading my mind again. ‘It’s none of my business.’
He is visibly uncomfortable right now, trapped on a plane with me, seatbelts fastened, incoming turbulence, regrettable topic opened, but I refuse to let him slam it shut the way he’s clearly dying to. He’s practically squirming under my gaze, and I’m not going to pretend there isn’t a small part of me that loves this sliver of uncharacteristic vulnerability.
‘I’m in love,’ I make clear. ‘With Cam. And even though I’m perfectly at liberty to do so, I’m not going to succumb to Justin’s unarguable charms and have a fling with him on his first night in his new house as a neighbourly thankyou for his assistance with the missile crisis.’
‘Grenade.’
‘Or even just because he’s undeniably gorgeous. I am human, after all, and technically unattached. And you saw him. But—’
Hugh shuts his eyes for a second. ‘It’s all right, Kate. This is not my area.’
‘There is no area!’
The tut-tutter in front of us turns around and frowns at me. I pass her frown straight on to Hugh, as this is directly his fault. He rolls his eyes and leans closer so he can lower his voice, as if he’s finally accepted that the fastest way out of this conversation is through it.
‘It’s just, you turn up on the back of a motorbike at sunrise looking like . . .’ He’s struggling for the right descriptor. Deep blue eyes flit over my face and drop to the silver zippers on the borrowed leather jacket and back again, and I’m reminded of how I felt on that bike with Justin. Reckless. Liberated. Exhilarated.