All the green pins were mine.
Cam grew up in the UK. His parents are in their eighties now and live in a town called Wallingford, between Oxford and Reading. They travelled a lot together when Cam was a kid. In our family, it was only Dad who travelled, until distant shores lured him away from Mum and me permanently. So, that rainy Sunday, when Cam had held out a handful of green pins, it felt like he was offering me the world.
The sight of an attractive new man – or any man – talking Minecraft with our son while I stand here having a midlife identity crisis brings on heart palpitations. I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t know what I want. Don’t even know who I am any more, minus Cam.
‘The estate agent promised me this was a nice, quiet street,’ Justin says conversationally, almost as if he is not talking to a rudderless woman with six bras and a pinboard in her hands and a bomb in her kitchen. He gives me a teasing nudge, and the brief touch of his skin on mine makes me jump. My physical response to Justin sets off a counter-reaction in Hugh, which freaks me out in turn, until we’re all so skittish I wonder if we’re hooked up to the same invisible circuit.
The military team arrives and several uniformed officers stride past us and enter my house. As we step further out of the way to facilitate their delicate weapon-seizure operation, I stuff the bras behind a potted magnolia and Grace glares at me for being weird in front of men.
‘What should we do with Charlie now?’ Hugh asks. He’s the kind of hyper-responsible man you can throw all your underwear at during a weapons crisis and he won’t even notice.
‘I was trying to get him out of here just before you arrived.’ I am actually a responsible parent, despite this evening’s solid attempt to disprove that.
‘You didn’t think to remove yourself at the same time?’
I can tell he’s frustrated. But then so am I. This entire situation and the personal epiphany it’s provoked is snowballing in ways he couldn’t begin to imagine.
‘I had every faith in my husband.’ I straighten to every inch of my five foot seven and challenge him to an argument he can’t win. Battling with my logic would equate to accusing Cam of putting his family in danger, and Hugh would never do that. The two of them were tight. I’d introduced them at one of our work barbecues early on, after which I used to joke about being the third wheel in their bromance.
The real answer to his question about why I didn’t think to remove myself from danger is something I dare not admit aloud. Since Cam died, I’ve secretly walked a dangerous tightrope. I know I need to stay alive – for Charlie. But if an accident befell me, well . . .
Hugh looks from me to Justin, and it occurs to me I’ve forgotten my manners.
‘Justin, this is my long-suffering boss, Hugh Lancaster. Justin is my, er . . .’ Crush? Hero? ‘Neighbour.’
‘Your saviour, did you say?’ Hugh responds, a picture of innocence. The man is starting to get on my last nerve.
‘Expect a lot of after-hours entertainment,’ Grace warns Justin, somewhat redundantly. Is anyone here on my side? The idea of Justin becoming tangled in my after-hours anything sends a bolt of heat straight to my face and, as if to draw unwanted attention to it, my hand shoots to my cheek in a failed mission to cool the area.
They all notice it. I frown at Grace and Hugh and wonder again why my matchmaking tanked, when they’re so clearly on the same wavelength.
‘Kate and I have only just met,’ Justin explains, sweeping in to rescue the conversation. ‘Just landed here today actually, from Adelaide. Can report the festival state has nothing on Braxton Street.’
Grace finds this vastly entertaining, and Justin lights up at her feedback.
‘What brings you here?’ I ask, keen to steer us off the topic of my drama.
‘Twelve-month gig in Finance,’ he says. ‘I’m an actuary.’
A public-sector actuary? I can virtually hear the cogs in Grace’s brain rapidly reworking her policies on both public servants and maths.
‘Imagined we’d start off with a neighbourly drink, Kate,’ he says. ‘But this whole Tomb-Raider-SWAT-team experience is . . . equally captivating.’
I laugh aloud, properly, for the first time in ages. His brown eyes sparkle, and I warm to him even more.
‘She has a knack for first impressions,’ Hugh observes, almost under his breath. I silently implore him not to excavate that deeply into our shared history, and certainly not to do it publicly, in front of a stranger I have to live opposite.
‘So you’re just here for the career stuff?’ Grace quizzes him. ‘Tell us you’re not a trailing spouse with a wife or girlfriend in the area?’
Her unveiled motivation is hair-raising.
Justin grins and looks at me, when he should be looking at her. ‘Not yet,’ he says.
Lord!
I’m still analysing his comment when Constable Wentworth appears and says, ‘Right, which one of you is Kate’s husband?’ He has a clipboard and pen poised to record official details.
It’s one of those unexpected moments when I’m sideswiped. Grace stops the playful flirting and looks crushed for me as the officer’s question cuts deep. Emotion I’ve buried, repeatedly, gushes to the surface again, white hot.
Justin steps back as if to distance himself and Hugh steps forward, beside me, his arm briefly touching mine. No physical jolts at his touch. Just a much-needed sense of understanding and solidarity.
‘Did the dispatcher not tell you?’ I ask, clearing the emotion from my throat. ‘My husband died.’
It’s a line I’ve delivered countless times, but it still sounds like fiction escaping my mouth. I’ve become good at disguising the grief in my voice. Good at managing other people’s discomfort when they ask about my partner, or query what Cameron does for a living. Once, on a work trip in Sydney, when an Uber driver asked about my husband, I pretended he was still alive.
‘He’s an English professor,’ I’d said, luxuriating in the present tense. ‘And a great dad. He loves to cook. He makes this incredible Thai chicken dish . . .’
‘The grenade is no doubt a defused battlefield souvenir,’ Hugh is saying beside me. ‘Cameron was careful. He would have made sure it passed every regulation.’
He can’t have seen the tears that have sprung into my eyes during his defence, and I know he doesn’t need to. The earlier teasing is over now and we’re a united front. Hugh tunes in to my emotions like he’s conducting a symphony. The nuanced tones. The look on my face. Even the way something takes my breath away. I swear he knows what I’m about to feel before I do. Like right now, when I really don’t want to explain Cam’s death to a stranger for the millionth time.
‘Thanks for calling this one in,’ one of the military members says, while his colleague carries the grenade down my front steps.
‘We’ve examined it,’ the officer says as she walks past with the weapon in hand. ‘You’re right, it’s not live, but in the wrong hands it could provoke a serious terrorist scare. They’ll take it up to a base near Sydney for safe destruction. I’m sorry about your husband.’
‘So am I,’ Justin says, the thrill from our twilight weapons raid drained right out of him. ‘Kate, I’m really sorry.’