And that’s all he’ll say about it, too. It might be barely eight in the morning but he casts a forlorn glance in the direction of the drinks trolley, which is grounded for the anticipated turbulence. Then his attention is redirected – not on me, but on his work folder, checking everything’s in order, which it always is, so there’s no need to check at all, but he always does. He’ll be berating himself for having said too much and crossed a line he shouldn’t have and likely never will again. He might be generous with his duty of care for his colleagues, but he’s also a stickler for exemplary behaviour at work. Sexy motorbike shenanigans don’t fit the brief.
Which is totally fine because it’s not Hugh I’m theoretically interested in. But as soon as I think those words, I feel sick. How can I be interested in anyone?
They say it’s just like having a second child, falling in love again. That when you’ve lost a partner, you can eventually love two people at the same time. But the idea of that is so distant from me right now that I can’t accept it as true or understand how it would work.
You’re allowed to notice other men.
I know Grace is right. I know it’s natural to face loneliness and wonder ‘what if’. To imagine what it might be like to fill the abyss of Cam’s absence someday. But I haven’t wanted to imagine it. Not once since he first started showing neurological symptoms and I began that drawn-out, years-long, pre-grieving before we even started closing in on his actual death.
Grace thinks I have some arbitrary ‘rule’ about when I can start dating again. ‘What are you waiting for, Kate?’ she challenges me. ‘The deathaversary to hit double figures?’
I see other widowed people dipping a toe back into the dating scene and, whether it’s been six months or six years, they’re always judged. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ people say, loved up and secure in a relationship they think is bulletproof. But until you’re in a situation like this, you can’t conceive of the loneliness. You can’t know in advance how you’ll grieve. Can’t understand that time doesn’t operate the way it used to. Seconds are hours. Days are years. Your person was just here. Now they’re flung beyond the fringes of the universe.
When Justin showed up yesterday, suave as all heck, with his big actuarial brain and his creative photography and that bike, he nudged open a door I’ve kept slammed shut.
I met Cam at nineteen. That makes me one of the least experienced adults I know. I don’t have a ‘type’. Not unless you count the type I fall for in rom-coms. Mark Darcy over Daniel Cleaver. Mr Knightley over Mr Darcy. Gilbert Blythe over every man in existence, living or dead.
Perhaps my celibate life along with last night’s domestic security incident, and the sleep deprivation, and the flying phobia, and the anxiety attack, and the dangerously thrilling commute to the airport this morning are all combining to give me sex hallucinations. Is that a thing?
‘What are you thinking about now?’ Hugh asks, hopefully out of professional interest but possibly because my filthy expression betrays me.
Kate, I’m begging you, do not use the term ‘sex hallucinations’ with your boss.
The plane drops to the bottom of an air pocket with a thud. I push Hugh’s elbow off the armrest – it’s everyone for themselves – and grip it as if it’ll somehow prevent me from plunging to my death. Then there’s another huge thud and several of the overhead locker doors fling open. Bags and coats fall into the aisle and onto people’s heads. This is my worst nightmare. No, actually, I’m already living one of those, but this is right up there.
Finally, I see everything with a near-death clarity. These uninvited thoughts about Justin. The wild ideas of impressing something upon Hugh other than my capacity for missed deadlines and stranger-than-fiction excuses. I don’t need this type of complication interrupting what should be my sole focus: Charlie. My darling child. Thrown too soon into a world of grief he shouldn’t have known until he was much, much older. He doesn’t need his mother gallivanting about on motorbikes with virtual strangers, feeling reckless and sexy and inventing fictitious love triangles to boost her plummeting self-confidence.
‘Charlie’s biggest fear is he’s going to lose me too,’ I divulge. If he doesn’t start each night sleeping in my bed, he always ends it there. ‘He asks me what will happen if he comes home from school one day and I’m dead.’
Hugh’s face falls. He couldn’t love Charlie more if he was his own nephew.
‘And I can’t promise I won’t be. You can’t lie to kids who have been forced to become miniature death experts.’
I feel this immense responsibility to stay alive.
‘Kate.’ Hugh puts his hand on my arm, which, of course, with all his boundaries and rules and standards and irreproachable work ethic, he’s never really done before, even when things were at their worst. Because we’re about to plunge to our deaths, I allow it. There are no boundaries when you’re falling out of the sky.
‘I know this must seem hypocritical after the motorbike this morning, but that was risk management,’ I explain. ‘I was more scared I’d let you down than I was of crashing.’
This admission makes him wince. We both work hard, even if my hours are all over the place, but he has never been the kind of hard-nosed boss who wouldn’t understand that car trouble is just a thing that happens.
‘So when the car wouldn’t start, I knocked on Justin’s door,’ I explain.
‘At six in the morning?’
My cheeks flame as an image of Justin lounging in the hallway in his underwear presents itself.
Hugh smiles. ‘And the poor guy just capitulated?’
Yes?
‘You didn’t think he deserved a sleepin after lugging a houseful of furniture and being dragged into your ballistics predicament?’
‘The porch light went on,’ I argue weakly. ‘In hindsight, it was probably a cat.’
‘I think this story tops the way we met.’
He has to be joking. Nothing tops that.
8
One-year-old Charlie pops off the breast, disgusted.
‘Look at him. Screwing up his face like he’s a food critic sending a dish back to a five-star Michelin kitchen.’ Cam flings a suitcase on the bed and zips opens the lid.
I’ve never been great in the kitchen, so it doesn’t shock me that what I’m cooking up here is falling short of expectations. I sit Charlie up on my lap and re-hook the clip on my nursing bra, defeated. He’s been fussy for days.
Charlie reaches straight for Cam and says, ‘Dadda!’ Cam groans as he picks him up, pretending he weighs a tonne, and I take in the two of them. Charlie’s a genetic miniature of his dad. Dark blond curls, intelligent blue eyes. Same dimpled smile that Cam flashed at me in second year uni, which Charlie now flashes at me when he should be asleep in the middle of the night.
‘I think it’s called a “nursing strike”,’ Cam suggests, reading from a breastfeeding FAQ page on his phone.
‘Oh, no you don’t, Buddy!’ I say, and Charlie giggles as Cam lowers him to the floor of our bedroom. ‘We didn’t put ourselves through that feeding gauntlet just for you to reject Mummy now.’