He’s never made me feel that way. This feels like we’re breaking up. Again, making Mum’s point!
‘The thing is, Kate, you’re the only person in the organisation who I’m genuinely scared to lose. But you’re also the one I really should stop trying so hard to retain.’
26
I’ve spent the last two years trying to build a fortress for me and Charlie, clinging to the idea of certainty and safety and security. I guess that’s what people do when chaos wipes them off their feet and they lose control of everything. Suddenly it all feels precarious.
‘The future I imagined just combusted,’ I tell Hugh. ‘It was my own personal apocalypse. And then I was forced to stagger to my feet and pull Charlie out of the rubble and rebuild everything from scratch. I’ve had to cling hard to my own life. I’ve needed help to stay in a world that felt impossible to exist in without Cam.’
He knows this; he’s provided some of that help. He rests his hand on the banister and waits for more of the monologue that I sense is about to pour itself out of my runaway mouth.
I sit on a step, clearly settling in to deliver quite the lecture. Hugh lets go of the banister and props himself against the wood-panelled wall, putting more space between us. Giving me the floor.
‘Mum said something to me tonight and I can’t shake it. She said the fact that Cam died at thirty-eight should scare me into taking action towards the things I really want. She thinks I’ve—’
No, don’t go into the dependence on the connection stuff!
‘She thinks I’ve got comfortable with you. And vice versa.’ It’s an incredibly ironic statement, given right now I feel like a cat on a hot tin roof.
‘I think she’s right,’ Hugh agrees. ‘Don’t you?’
Of course she’s bloody right.
I feel like I’ve arrived at a clearing, in full sunlight. No shadows here to hide in.
‘With Charlie and the house and all of Cam’s notes at home, being here I finally feel uncaged,’ I reply. ‘I feel like Kate, the woman. Not the widow. Not the wife. Not the mum. Not the employee. Just a woman, with a blank page in front of her.’
He nods.
The emptiness of that blank page that was so confronting two years ago is starting to feel like this delicious invitation to write the next part of my story. A tantalising glimpse of how it might look to have purpose and forward momentum into a new life.
I look at Hugh. ‘I know I’m crucial to you,’ I tease, pulling myself up on the step again. ‘And to all your charts and spreadsheets and whatever the hell all those data schedule things are.’
He laughs.
‘But sometimes I wonder, seriously, if I’m just staying around because you make it so easy for me.’
He shrugs.
‘You know, if you see me sitting there, staring into space, don’t always assume I’m upset about Cam. I am, about seventy-five per cent of the time. But I reckon twenty-five per cent of it, I’m actually dreaming up the plot of a novel. The other five per cent I’m wrecked from dragging Charlie around with a camera at midnight trying to capture the Milky Way.’
He laughs. ‘Is this a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree feedback session?’
‘Maybe?’
‘In that case, I need bonus points for overlooking your deplorable maths.’
‘See! Even now, faced with concrete evidence of your staff member’s lamentable professional skills gap, you’re letting yourself become hopelessly charmed by her above-average public-speaking abilities.’
‘Which are seriously underused in her current position,’ he finishes.
‘Another oversight. I mean, have you been paying attention at all over the last four years, Mr Lancaster?’ I have my hand on my hip now, fishwife style.
His scrutiny flicks down my arm to my waist, and back to my eyes. ‘I’ve paid attention every second,’ he answers succinctly. And now it’s him taking a step up, so we’re at eye level.
If this was one of my incomplete novels, he’d forget his professional ethics at this juncture, put his hand on my waist and pull me into the kiss I imagined this morning on the plane, and several times since if I’m honest.
He smiles. ‘You’re an open book, Kate.’
I hope not!
‘If I was doing my job right,’ he explains calmly, ‘I’d take everything you’ve just said and schedule a career-planning session with you at your earliest convenience. A good boss would help you manoeuvre yourself to where you want to be.’
His eyes are High Stakes Negotiation Blue, and my appetite for doing something irrational and impulsive is at an all-time high.
‘What would a bad boss do?’ I ask fatefully.
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re going to die. Apparently mine flashes before my eyes when I’m about to dust off the old feminine wiles and unleash them, full throttle, at the innocent man who employed me. Somewhere early on in this highlight reel, I realise none of it is familiar. It’s not my past that’s flashing before my eyes at all. It’s my future. Am I psychic, suddenly? What is this?
Halter-neck dress on the stairs. Tangled sheets. Ardent blue eyes. Sunrise. Panic attack.
‘Kate?’ he says, leaning closer. He’s going to kiss me. That’s obvious. And for some inexplicable reason, I think I want him to. ‘Are you hyperventilating?’ he asks.
What? No!
I hold my hand up like a stop sign and shake my head and act like I can breathe, but, now he mentions it, I actually cannot. There is not enough air! Everything’s starting to spin. I sink onto the step and put my head on my knees, hair dangling, along with the last shred of my dignity.
What would a bad boss do?
‘Can we just rewind, Hugh?’ I say. ‘Can we start again?’
‘From where?’ he asks. It’s a fine question. My life is such a mess that it would be next to impossible to pick a starting place for a proper do-over – one that I could bear living through twice. Or that he could.
‘I don’t care. Just erase what just happened,’ I say, hoping this is a blanket clause: erase everything.
‘Nothing happened.’
I pull my head up. Messy curls fall across my face and I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror on the wall opposite. I am a certifiable wreck. Stricken with remorse and embarrassment.
‘Just erase what I said,’ I suggest, into my hands this time. ‘About the . . .’ Cringe. ‘The bad boss thing. I don’t know where that came from.’
He laughs and sits down beside me on the step. ‘Really? You don’t know where that came from?’
A few moments pass while I consider the question. Did this really come out of the blue? It feels that way, but it also feels like it’s coming from some other, amorphous timeline. ‘I have my suspicions,’ I hear myself say. ‘Just need one of those police department whiteboards and a ball of wool to join all the contributing factors.’
‘It is pretty complex,’ Hugh agrees. ‘And that’s when you’ve only pieced together your side of it.’
He has a side? I let my hands drop from my face and look at him. What is he saying, exactly?