Pictures of You

Chapter 5

5

Drew

Definitely should have trusted my gut.

If I had, I wouldn’t be stuck with a grieving widow on an arterial road in the lunchtime rush, heading in the opposite direction from where I need to be. I feel bad that I stood up a first date. A Tinder match, Sally. Perfectly nice woman according to our chats. A nurse in neonatal intensive care.

That makes it worse, the nurse thing. She probably worked all night being heroic saving babies. Forced herself out of bed when she should be sleeping, shaved her legs, maybe, only to go to the café in Coogee and wait, while I changed my mind at the eleventh hour and got the guts to face my past. One part of it, anyway.

“Hey, Siri …”

“Sorry,” my passenger interrupts. “I think you’ve got me confused …”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that,” Siri replies.

“Send a message to Sally Engels …”

“Okay, how do I do that?” She’s pulling the seat belt loose and leaning forward so she can hear me.

“Could you possibly stop complicating my life for five seconds?” I mutter.

“Could you possibly stop complicating my life for five seconds,” Siri answers. “Send message to Sally Engels?”

Bloody hell!

“Message sending. You can press the crown on your watch to cancel …”

Shit! A taxi lurches into my lane and I swerve to the left. “Siri! Cancel! Stop! Delete! ”

“Message sent.”

I think I’m losing the will to live.

“Hey, Siri … message Sally Engels … Sally comma, profuse apologies, full stop … unexpected personal problem, exclamation mark … face palm emoji … exploding head emoji …”

I risk a glance into the back seat and am met with a face like thunder.

“Give me a chance to explain, question mark. Send message.”

Where would I even begin?

I’d been looking for any excuse not to go into that church, until Evie Roche burst out of it and handed me one. What was I meant to do, pull her back out of the car? Feed her to the media? Worse, hand her back to the Roches?

Yes, Drew. Any of those options. Then maybe a big part of the past I’ve worked so hard to forget wouldn’t be ensconced in the back seat, a wrecking ball in my love life yet again, acting like she has no idea we used to be friends.

I glance at her now in the rearview mirror. She looks atrocious, even with a six-hundred-dollar haircut and some sort of high-end blazer and skirt, courtesy no doubt of the platinum credit card she’s blown to pieces. For someone so put together, the woman is a mess. Fraught. Fiddling with that chocolate blowout with manicured hands. I know that body language. She needs to calm down before she hyperventilates.

Oh, great—and now she’s crying.

“Hey, Versace,” I say. Anxious blue eyes meet mine in the mirror and a nanoscopic part of me loses its cool. The rest of me isn’t so reckless. “Sorry for your loss.”

I’m not sorry Oliver Roche is dead. I just can’t say as much to his widow. I’ve read tabloid reports that she has some kind of amnesia—information leaked by a teenage employee in the hospital cafeteria—but this is pretty intense.

“It’s Evie,” she replies.

I know who she is. I guess I just arrogantly assumed that, after everything we’ve been through, the awareness would be mutual, despite the blow to her head.

“And thanks,” she adds, delivering the words without a shred of emotion. Maybe she’s still in shock from the accident. Maybe she’s become emotionless. Either way, I won’t waste any more time trying to figure out the kind of woman who’d look at Oliver Roche and see marriage material, while remaining so totally oblivious to—

“Who are you?” she asks, cutting off my train of thought in the most ironic place possible.

I can’t believe I have to introduce myself. “I’m Drew.”

“Are you going to write about me?”

“What?”

“You said you’re a journalist.”

“Not the kind you need to worry about.”

“You said photojournalist. Please don’t take pictures of me.”

A mental collage of the hundreds of pictures I’ve already taken of her flashes through my mind. I read up on amnesia the other night. I’m worried if I stampede into our shared history now it will only damage her. I’m not even sure how I’d position the story, given how things ended.

“I’m just trying to give you a lift,” I assure her. The statement isn’t untrue. “I’m sorry about the exploding head emoji.”

I need to bring this nonsensical encounter to a close. But before I can thrash out a solution, the radio cuts to a news break with a reporter outside the funeral.

“It’s like a scene from one of her viral podcasts, as popular true crime commentator Evelyn Roche sensationally vanished today from the funeral of thirty-year-old investment lawyer Oliver Roche, who was killed last week when he lost control of the couple’s car on Macquarie Pass and plunged several meters into a ravine. Speculation is rife after Ms. Roche, who survived the accident, was seen rushing from the church in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, fleeing in a black Range Rover driven by an unidentified man with whom she is rumored to be romantically involved. It adds fuel to the developing scandal around the accident, with sources claiming—”

I jab at the stereo buttons and curse my decision to show up at that man’s funeral.

“I was meant to be a forensic linguist,” Evie explains, and she’s got that right. But it’s a weird part of the news story to unpack. I’d have deconstructed the vastly more problematic insinuation that we’ve got a thing for each other.

“I can’t go home—they’ll be looking for me there,” she says, as she pulls an elastic band out of her bag and shoves her expensive hairdo up as if she’s settling in for a night on the couch watching The Bachelor . No, not that. Bridgerton would be more her style. Then she strips off her blazer. Unbuttons the cuffs of her blouse, rolls up the sleeves, and pulls the shirttails out of her waistband, fanning herself with the fabric.

I switch the AC to max, swivel the vent, and blast cold air into the back seat before she takes anything else off. I’d drop her at the nearest hotel, but she claims she has no money.

“Is there a friend you could call?” I’m dying not to be the one stuck with her. There was a time when I would have done anything for this woman. When she would have phoned me first, even before Bree. But that was before she made it manifestly clear she didn’t want either of us in her life anymore. I refuse to get back on this roller coaster.

“I don’t know who to trust,” she admits.

Surely she has connections these days. Even one of the many thousands of true crime enthusiasts who hang on her every fascinating revelation about psychopaths and mass murderers.

We’re overtaken by a convertible, and I notice the passenger is filming us. Have the paps followed us from the church? I accelerate rapidly, threading through traffic until I lose them, heart pounding. I can’t allow myself to be linked to her.

“Don’t let them find me,” she says, echoing my thoughts. She’s rattled as hell, and I know it’s because of the family. Not the media.

It’s not instinct that tells me that.

It’s experience.

We’re on the M5 when Coldplay’s “Fix You” comes on the radio. The opening bars are enough to fling me straight back to the scene Oliver made at their 2012 concert. I’ve already got my finger over the button to change the station when she pipes up from the back seat.

“Can you put something else on?”

Does she remember it too? She can’t possibly. Or she’d remember me being there trying to intervene.

“I don’t know what it is about that song,” she says, shivering. I dial the AC down a notch.

It was the soundtrack to your first fight.

“Is it okay if I charge my phone?” It’s a rhetorical question as she passes it over my shoulder. “It’s on eight percent.”

It always is. I grab it from her and plug it into the charger in the front. The car picks up her playlist and starts blasting Niall Horan’s “Arms of a Stranger.” She’s not still obsessed with him at nearly thirty! I’d rib her about it, except the lyrics are cutting surprisingly close to the bone.

“I don’t even know if I can trust you,” she admits. I need to get my head together. After all this time, surely I can summon enough long-overdue perspective and keep her safe. That must have been some knock to the head. She’s so vague, she’s practically two-dimensional. How do you just forget ?

Maybe it’s grief.

No. I know grief. You don’t forget details. It’s the opposite. Details torment you. They swirl through your mind in a relentless, agonizing loop until you think you’ll go mad. The phone call you let go through to voicemail because you were too busy reading a book. The offhandedness of that last text message. The endless, haunting, unchangeable dance of all that was said and unsaid as life pushes you further from the opportunity you lost to make things right.

Evie is not struggling with any of that .

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I assure her.

Now that she’s ditched the airport idea and we’ve wound up on the motorway, we’re heading toward Parramatta. Glimpses of houses and commercial buildings flash between the trees up off-ramps, just as a pair of cars weaves in and out of multiple lanes in a game of cat and mouse around us. My conscious instinct is to roar out of here, but my foot lifts off the accelerator instead, putting extra space between our car and theirs—betraying a leftover protective streak I don’t want to think about. Will I ever get her out of my system?

Road signs point to Canberra or the Blue Mountains and either option suddenly feels like a massive overcommitment. This is hurtling badly out of control, and I run up an exit ramp at Moorebank Avenue, pull the car into a side street, and cut the engine outside a strip of commercial offices. All I can hear is her ragged breath, and mine. That, and the deafening silence of the gaping void from which a sensible plan needs to materialize, because I’m sure as hell not running away with Oliver’s wife .

“Where are we?” she asks.

I open the car door and get out, gulping smog and heat. Exhaling history. Shaking my head, as if trying to rattle sense into it. As I hear the click of her door opening, I step away from the car. Away from her.

Away from … me and her .

“Drew? What are we doing?”

When I turn around, she’s standing in front of me, a masterclass in contradiction. Power. Wealth. Fragility. Despair. She’s staring at me like I’m her lifeline.

I can’t be that. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer her question. All that’s clear is that it’s not my responsibility to clean up Oliver’s mess. Or hers.

Not again.