Hugh is in an armchair opposite, firelight playing across his face as he sips his hot chocolate. Invisible wall up, like always. Someone like him will never know what this is like. To let yourself go and fall so deeply into the life of another person that their loss almost breaks you. That it renders you simultaneously as terrified of loving again as you are of not loving again.
‘You’re like Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor,’ I challenge him, which of course goes right over his head. ‘He never lets a woman stay over, because God forbid he becomes attached. Do you ever wonder what you might be missing out on with this chronic habit of pushing women away all the time?’
‘Yes,’ he says unexpectedly. Nothing else. Just ‘yes’. This is the problem with Hugh. You inch a tiny bit closer to him and he clams up. Grace and I had spent way too much time trying to determine why it never worked out between the two of them, despite their being perfectly each other’s type in theory. She said they just didn’t have the chemistry. But I think he’s scared of love. Being around me so much when I lost Cam would have driven home the risk. It’s too dangerous. You might break into a million pieces, like Kate did, and never fully re-emerge . . .
‘Why didn’t it ever work out with Grace?’ I ask. I want his perspective now I have hers. I’m not picking for a midnight fight. It was all just so awkward, my having introduced them in the first place. Her being my best friend. Him being my boss.
‘Just didn’t work out,’ he says. ‘She’s a lovely person.’ Exactly how she’d described him.
‘Yes, and she’s all the things you want. She’s funny, she’s unpretentious, what you see is what you get . . .’
‘She’s all those things, yes. I don’t know what you want me to say.’
‘Do you know how maddening it is that you’re such a closed book?’
He sighs. He’s staring at me like he’s trying to figure out whether or not to proceed. ‘It wasn’t Grace,’ he says reluctantly.
‘That’s obvious.’
‘There was someone else.’
WHAT?
‘You just sort of threw us together, Kate. I wanted to be polite, and she really is great. I wish it could have worked out.’
Hugh was very definitely single when I introduced them. At least, I thought he was. ‘Who else was there? Ruby?’
He looks suddenly disconcerted. ‘Kate—’ he says firmly.
‘I was convinced you were single when you met Grace!’
‘I was.’
‘Then who, Hugh?’
The one who broke him?
Ah. It dawns on me now. He couldn’t be with Grace because, as lovely as she is, he was still in love with Mystery Heartbreaker. Still is in love with her, by the agonised look on his face. Wow. She must have been something else to have led him to swear so definitely off everyone else, forevermore.
‘I’m going to bed,’ he announces, draining his cup and getting out of the chair. ‘You should too. Writers festival tomorrow. I’m meeting my uni mate in Byron late morning for brunch. Want to join us before I drop you off?’
I stand up too, and take his empty mug. ‘I’m sorry for prying,’ I say. ‘It’s none of my business.’
He smiles ruefully. ‘It sort of is.’
29
He means because it’s my best friend who he dumped. Surely.
I can’t afford another fitful night, trying to unlock the Hugh Code. If he wasn’t ready for a relationship, he shouldn’t have done what I instructed him to do and dated Grace. He is emotionally unavailable. Hung up on someone he can’t have. Always will be.
Just like I’ll always be hung up on Cam.
I manage to get a few hours’ sleep until the crash of waves on the beach wakes me before dawn. Semi-conscious, I wonder if Cam is there, waiting for me on the sand. It makes no rational sense, I know, but I crave the fleeting whisper of his soul. Those passing moments of strong awareness that he is with me, the way I’d once feel his presence when he was out of sight across a crowded room.
I creep to the bathroom, then scoop up a crocheted blanket from the foot of the bed and tiptoe onto the balcony and down the steps outside. The sandy path through the garden is cool underfoot, and I should have worn shoes, but don’t care enough to go back.
It’s just me on the beach. I can see the far-off flicker of the lighthouse, shrouded in sea mist, and from here it feels like I’ll be the first in the country to see the sun. My footsteps carve a path in the sand as I walk a little way along and choose a spot. If I was the type to meditate, that’s what I’d do, but it always makes me anxious when I try. So many thoughts. So much noise in my head. So many traps. It’s like a game of snakes and ladders.
There’s one spot on the horizon slightly lighter than the rest, where the sun will appear. I’ve seen more sunrises since Cam died than I’d seen in my life up until then. They’re a promise; no matter how bad everything is, the world keeps turning. What was Rachel Lynde’s advice to Anne of Green Gables? ‘The sun will go on rising and setting whether you fail in geometry or not.’
That used to bring me comfort, during maths-inspired freakouts in high school. My current self shakes her head at the naivety of my Teen Self. Life was going to get so much bigger and more anxiety-inducing than how badly you do in algebra, girl . . .
‘Couldn’t sleep either?’ Hugh says a few minutes later, giving me a fright as he arrives on the beach beside me. With the roar of the waves, I hadn’t heard him approach.
‘This is the free sunrise, right?’ I reply, wanting to clear the tension of last night. ‘I’m not going to be slapped with hidden extras?’
He smiles. ‘There’s no catch, don’t worry.’
We sit in silence for a long time as the tide washes in and waves crash on the sand in front of us. So much power. Unstoppable. The longer our silence goes on, the less inclined either of us seems to break its spell. I wanted to find Cam here, but I’m surprised to learn it’s different, but just as nice, to sit here with Hugh. The thought confronts me, the way thoughts like this always do. I feel uneasy about any development that seems to push me further away from where I was when I last saw Cam, and I wrap the blanket more tightly around me – a barrier to change.
Hugh has made himself at home, leaning back in the sand on his elbows beside me, long legs stretched out and crossed lazily at the ankles. I glance at the lines of his calves, covered in a smattering of dark hair. Then I shiver and look back at the horizon.
‘Cold?’ he says.
‘No, it’s more that I’m . . .’ I don’t really know what I am.
‘Happy?’ he suggests.
It’s like he’s a chapter ahead all the time. I’d never in a million years have categorised myself as ‘happy’ yet, but when I think about it, that’s exactly how this feels. Being here, mesmerised by the ocean, anticipating the sunrise, I do feel . . . something. And for so long, I’ve been so flat. This is like a hopeful blip on the heart monitor after a long period of flatlining. A sign of life.
‘Hugh, how do you always know—’
‘Psychometric testing when you were recruited, Whittaker,’ he says. ‘It’s my job to know how you tick.’
I tap him on the arm. ‘Seriously, though. Are you psychic?’