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.
It’s very different, I realise now, from how I felt watching my boss on the footpath, all responsible and executive and frustrated at my tardiness as usual . . . until he noticed me.
Confession: if being welded to Justin made me feel like a bad girl for the first and only time since I got detention for a momentary lapse in judgement in the school chapel in Year Eight, that wholly unexpected, unprofessional once-over from Hugh had felt wicked.
I hope he can’t read my thoughts now. They’ve gone to a place they’ve never dared occupy before. We’re still locked on each other’s eyes, stuck in the flashback, and I try to convince myself this isn’t about Hugh. It can’t be. It’s about the way he made me feel, looking at me as though I am something more than the overwhelmed, falling-apart widow he works with, complete with a devastated child, trying to make ends meet and keep everything afloat. For all Justin’s accomplished flirting this morning, it was turning the head of strait-laced, always-above-board, declare-your-conflicts-of-interest Hugh Lancaster that had jostled that long-relegated experience of feeling desired to centrestage. Because Hugh doesn’t do this. I don’t know what came over him, to be honest.
‘Looking like what?’ I prompt, not ready to release him from this agony. ‘Calamity Jane?’
He takes an almost imperceptible breath, and his eyes darken even more. ‘No.’