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?’
Yes, I know those couples. I was half of one, remember? And I get the general vibe about Genevieve and Hugh, so can we move on now?
‘We lived together in this tiny, one-bedroom flat. You could barely turn around. But we travelled a lot, working. It was the most idyllic, extraordinary . . .’
‘Okay!’ I interject. ‘Got it. Go on . . .’
He laughs. ‘Kate, I might be off base here, but is it possible that you are jealous of Gen?’
Fine question. Pretty straight-forward answer. I don’t respond.
‘I proposed to her in a medieval town in Tuscany. San Gimignano. Do you know it?’
No, and I’ve struck it off my bucket list now. Hugh was engaged? To the most idyllic, extraordinary, knockout of a woman ever to have walked the earth. Isn’t that how he described her?
This tea is insufficient for this job, but I can’t have something stronger. I need to have my wits about me for this conversation. ‘Can we skip to the part where you break up?’
‘Oh, we didn’t break up,’ he answers.
‘What, never?’
He edges closer to me on the couch. I can’t decide if I want to back away from him or lean in.
‘Gen started getting really tired. Unusually tired, for such a high-energy woman. The type of tired where you can’t stand on your feet.’
I feel my eyes widen as realisation dawns.
‘The doctors thought it was glandular fever. Took a blood test. That was meant to come back in a couple of days. They phoned within the hour.’
‘Hugh—’
He puts his hand up, as if pausing for an interjection now will derail the entire story. ‘Immediate treatment. They started that day. Went on for months. At one point, it looked like she’d beaten it, but . . .’ He shakes his head.
I sit back in the couch, suddenly needing its full support around me, and stare at him. Horrified. I don’t interrupt now, because I can’t find any words to interrupt with.
He waits as this information properly sinks in and my brain travels right back to the day Cam first got sick. The way Hugh first responded. The fact that he read me like a book, all through my grief, and seemed to understand what I was feeling more deeply than anyone else, often before I did.
‘I thought you were psychic,’ I whisper.
He shakes his head. ‘More like a time traveller. I know grief, Kate. Intimately. So, when Cam was diagnosed . . .’
‘It stirred everything up?’
He doesn’t reply.
‘It took you back,’ I suggest. ‘I am so incredibly sorry. For your loss. And for dragging you through . . . everything, like I was the first person this had ever happened to. But you didn’t say anything. Why?’
‘It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t appropriate at first. People are quick to compare someone’s suffering with their own and it’s not about that. I just wanted to help you. Pay it forward, you know?’
I think about exactly what that meant. Hugh had been there for me in ways that floored me. Floored Cam, too, until he couldn’t appreciate things any more. I’d told him intimate, graphic details of Cam’s gradual descent from vibrant husband to someone virtually comatose. I’d gone over and over the moments when Cam died, what happened, when it happened, the way his breathing changed, the sense I had of him being taken from me against my will while I grappled with a deep desire for him to be at peace . . . How could Hugh have withstood all of this without ever once asking me to stop, or asking for an opportunity to share the burden of his own, equally tragic story?
‘When I met you, at the gym—’ he says.
Let’s not rehash that.
‘—you lot accused me of having a string of one-night stands, remember?’
To be fair, it was Purple Pants who accused him. I blush with shame on her behalf.
‘Kate, that was true.’
Oh, the ugly twisting in my heart is back.
‘When Gen died, I knew I couldn’t go through that again. That agony. The loss. It nearly killed me. And the way to protect myself from that was just to—’
‘Avoid the risk.’
‘Yes. I had an outright ban on getting close to anyone. Decided it wasn’t better to have loved and lost – it was much worse. I made a promise that I’d never put myself in a situation again that carried that much danger.’
I nod. This bit I totally get.
‘But what about Ruby?’ I ask. I’m embarrassed to raise the office yum cha rumour, but he saw her too many times for it not to have meant something.
His face softens. ‘She turned up around the time you were throwing me at Grace,’ he explains, and my heart sinks. She was the ‘something personal’ he was occupied with.
‘You were seeing someone!’ I can’t believe he lied!
He shakes his head. ‘Kate, she’s Genevieve’s daughter.’
Genevieve’s daughter? I don’t understand. How is that even possible?
‘Gen and I broke up for a couple of years in the middle. I thought she told me everything, but there was one big thing she’d kept to herself.’
Why wouldn’t she have told him?
‘She’d adopted the baby out at birth. When Ruby went looking for her biological mother and found she’d died, she started the search for her father.’
Does Hugh have a daughter? Lord, this conversation is exploding beyond all expectation.
‘I knew she couldn’t have been mine,’ he goes on, quickly. ‘Gen would have told me that. And I confirmed it with her closest friend, who’d always felt bad having to keep Gen’s secret from me. She said the only reason Gen didn’t tell me was she was scared it would drive me away somehow. It wouldn’t have. I would have loved that little girl.’