‘Now, for the audience participation section,’ he announced. ‘I need a volunteer to stick green thumb tacks on all the places we want to go.’
I crawled to the end of the bed and knelt in front of the map, while he dished out thumb tacks and I pinned them on New York City, Prince Edward Island and Florence. Technically we’d already spent a morning there, but I wanted a week. Then I took another one and pinned it on Norway.
‘I thought this might happen,’ Cam said, grinning, and he put the thumb tacks down and produced a sheet of gold and silver stars. ‘That’s for the aurora borealis.’
Always number one on our bucket list.
Still top of mine.
4
I surface from the memory and crash back into my domestic security incident, flushed with something that feels like homesickness, but can’t be. Justin is inspecting the half-constructed Lego set with Charlie. Grace is giving her details to Constable Wentworth’s partner, with Charlie’s backpack in hand. Hugh notices me blink back tears and pull myself together again. That’s the problem with grief. It’s not packed tidily in a box that you can bring out in appropriate, private moments and sort through. It’s threaded inconveniently through everything.
‘What have we got here?’ Justin asks Charlie, with genuine interest.
‘It’s the Minecraft Jungle Abomination,’ Charlie explains eagerly. ‘And see, this is the articulated plant and the enchanted creeper.’
‘This is an Iron Golem, right?’ Justin picks up some kind of creature. What is he? The Minecraft whisperer?
Grace walks over and nudges me, nodding at the two of them. I know exactly what she’s thinking. Charlie doesn’t usually warm to strangers this fast. Ever since his dad died, he’s been inherently wary of any strange men around me. I’ve been wary of that myself.
But thinking about Cam just now, and our adventure list, I sense the distant rumblings of a rather unwelcome epiphany. Ours was always an adventure list for two. Not one. Have I really lost all interest in living the big life we imagined together now he’s gone? Is the plan just to go to work and drag Charlie through every school week, pining for Cam, on rinse and repeat until we get from Kindergarten to Year Twelve? And then what? Charlie leaves too? Who will I be without both of them?
It’s only now, standing on my front lawn, adventure chart lit up by a disco of police lights, that something profound strikes me.
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?’