Chapter 6
6
Evie
The funeral must be over. My phone erupts from the front seat with six calls in a row from my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and their lawyer. It’s like I’m being hunted. I fling it into the back seat as if the device is scorching hot and slam the door.
“I shouldn’t have ditched the funeral,” I admit, my voice quivering. “I’ve made it worse.”
All the scaffolding in my life has crumbled and I’m stranded on a mile-high ledge. Maybe my in-laws should try waking up in a reality they don’t even like, grieving the life they had, the years they missed, and the people they’ve lost. Right now, it’s all I can do to focus on my immediate problem. My driver. And the fact that he appears to be having some sort of very inconvenient personal crisis of his own.
This guy has me all wrong.
“I don’t wear Versace,” I argue. Obviously, I am wearing it, but I don’t usually. “The last memory I have of shopping for clothes was at a pop-up vendor in an outdoor secondhand market in Newtown.” I might have spent time on weekends dressing up as Austen characters at the Regency Reenactment Society, but I didn’t only wear Empire-waist dresses. “I snagged an amazing pair of burnt-orange seventies hotpants that day!”
His eyes travel critically to where the hotpants used to be, then snap back to my face. “People change,” he says.
Maybe I became more like Bree. She was always trendy and stylish beside my retro mishmash, with her jet-black hair and striking feline-like features that stopped people dead in their tracks. We had part-time jobs that summer selling flowers in a stall at Paddy’s Markets. A jolt of nostalgia washes over me for simpler times and a life nobody cared about or followed or commented on.
Drew doesn’t seem to care about my high school fashion statements, standing here, hands on hips, staring at the pavement while he contemplates his problem. Our problem. Me , to be exact. He’s definitely that guy you warn your friends about. It’s the unreadable gaze. The volatility—acting all tough and distant one minute but charging your phone, playing your music, and making sure the air vents are pointed squarely at you the next. Bree and I would have a field day analyzing his behavior, but I have more than enough problems without my overactive imagination latching on to James Dean here.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks.
I can’t tell him. It’s way too big a favor to ask.
“Evie?”
This feels like a cross-examination. “I don’t know where to go, because I don’t know who I am now.” Being open with him is probably the shortest way through this conversation. “Listen, Drew, I’ve been diagnosed with a type of amnesia. I remember everything about my life up until I was sixteen, and nothing after, until I woke up in the hospital last week.”
He raises an eyebrow. I knew he wouldn’t believe me. “How is this happening?” he mutters.
“The doctors said it can be a response to trauma,” I start to explain, as if secondhand medical evidence will convince him.
“No, I understand that bit. I mean, how are we here? You and me?” He’s all furrowed brows and irritation.
“You picked me up.”
He uncrosses his arms. “You forced yourself into my car.”
“I thought you were the Uber driver.” I step toward him.
“You’re meant to check the license plate and the driver’s credentials.”
“I’ve never done this before!” I argue, up close to him now, voice shaking, eyes stinging. “And by ‘this’ I mean all of it . It’s like I’ve arrived in a foreign country and don’t understand how anything works. Everything looks the same on the surface, but nothing is exactly like it was.”
There’s no stopping the wave I’ve crested. Burning emotion rises to my throat. It’s the crash I’ve been resisting all week since I woke up and found out just how much of a mess my life had become.
“I have to tread carefully back into my memories, they said. So far, I haven’t even tiptoed. I’m effectively a sixteen-year-old trapped in a twenty-nine-year-old’s body. Like Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30 but without the magic-dust explanation, or the cool magazine career, or the long-suffering childhood love interest hovering reluctantly in the wings.”
He stares at me as if he can’t believe the words exploding out of my mouth, and no wonder.
“And now you want me to tell you where to take me, and it’s just piling even more pressure on an already impossible predicament!”
I’ve never been a delicate crier. I wish I hadn’t thrown my phone into the car. I feel the addictive urge to scroll, again, down the contacts list in case the names I need have reappeared. But they won’t have. There’s not a single person I could reach out to now and fall upon, in my hour of need.
Years of need?
It’s a quiet voice that pushes that thought to the surface. I don’t recognize it. Don’t want to dance with it, either. I can sense the way it wants to pull me into a sinkhole.
Empathy flashes across Drew’s face. A photojournalist’s professional witchcraft, perhaps. He places both hands on the hood of his car and thinks. I hate the fact that I am entirely dependent on this man. No access to money. No ride. No capacity to come up with a workable solution on my own.
“I have nowhere to go,” I confess. When did I become so pathetic? “I can’t go …” The word home gets stuck in my throat.
He nods as though he agrees. “Let’s see your phone. We’ll go through it and ring someone.”
I barricade the door. Suddenly, I’m ashamed of how short my contacts list has become. I was never the popular girl at school, but I had friends . None of whom I appear to have kept.
“Come on, Evie,” he says, stepping closer as I push my back harder against his car, heart pounding, mouth dry. For a millisecond, trapped between intense brown eyes and the heat of black metal, I feel sheltered from it all. Until he puts a hand on my shoulder, coaxes me aside, unlatches the door, and reaches into the back seat.
“It’s like the list was erased,” I admit quickly as he retrieves the phone. “It’s mainly my husband’s family, and the doctor and dentist and the cleaner and people like that. Oh, and someone called Chloe.”
He reemerges from the car, slams the door again, and stares at me. “Maybe you should be careful who you call from your past.”
“Calling someone was your idea.”
“I know.” He shakes his head.
“I need to get home,” I blurt. “To Newcastle. I really want to see my parents. I’d go on the train, but—” It’s a huge ask, but I’m desperate enough to voice it. I follow up, taking the phone out of his hand, and show him my home screen. It’s filled with notifications from podcast followers I’ve never met tagging me to tell me #runawaywidow is trending. It sounds like a rom-com, but it does not feel like one.
“I don’t even know if Mum and Dad are alive, but I need to see for myself,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “Why else wouldn’t they have been at the funeral?”
Or the hospital. Or in any of the social media posts I’ve curated over the last several years. They should have been my next of kin, instead of the in-laws I don’t remember. They should be in my phone. My inbox. My life .
“If my parents can’t come to me, I have to at least try to go to them. I’ve lost everyone that ever mattered to me, Drew. I need to figure out what happened. I know none of this is your problem, and I’m grateful you even brought me this far …” I trail off, my desperation hanging in the air between us in a way that I hate.
“I’ll take you,” he says, simply. Off-load me , I think he means.
“You’ll do it?” I can hardly believe he’s suggesting it. I find myself walking around to the passenger side before he changes his mind.
“Except, from the sound of it, Evie, I think you need to be prepared—”
I’m back in the car with the door slammed before he can finish that sentence. I don’t want him to voice the possibility that, when we arrive in Newcastle, I might not find what I’m looking for.
An hour later, we’re crossing the Hawkesbury River bridge. That first glimpse of the sunlight dancing on water dotted with houseboats and fishing vessels and water-skiers was always a symbolic promise that I was heading home. All those years boarding in Sydney as a scholarship kid, I’d watch excitedly for this view, proof we were truly north of the city and heading for the Central Coast. I used to imagine that bridge was magical. A portal between school and home.
Today, there’s no magic as we cross. Instead, I’m increasingly anxious about what I’ll find when we get to Newcastle. Or what I won’t find.
I envisage a car crash, and my body flinches.
Drew glances at me from the driver’s seat. “You okay?”
I see my parents gone, instantly, like Oliver. Mathematicians would say the probability of that is low when I’ve just survived a fatal car crash myself, but right now life feels precarious and explosive. Stats don’t mean a thing.
“If my parents aren’t alive …” I can’t continue the thought. If they’re gone, I’ll have already wrenched myself through the indescribable grief of losing them once, and now I’ll have to repeat that agony, from scratch. Can a human body even put itself through something like that twice over?
Drew focuses on the freeway as he threads in and out of traffic and overtakes semitrailers. “Try not to second-guess it,” he says, settling back into the left lane.
Second-guessing is all I’ve got, thanks to this horrible sinkhole in my memory. This not knowing has made me so hungry for answers that a spontaneous road trip with a strange man seems like the safest option, despite my intimate knowledge about serial backpacker murders along a stretch of road just like this. Each time we pass another turnoff down a dirt track into a national park, I breathe a sigh of relief that Drew isn’t swinging into it.
His phone, cradled in a holder on the dash, lights up with a call. Someone called Chloe. Is this that “frequency illusion” phenomenon, where you’ve never heard of a certain word and suddenly you hear it three times in a week?
He slams the red button fast, sending poor Chloe straight to the purgatory of voicemail. Sudden death. Have I ever evoked that reaction from a man?, I wonder.
“What’s your last name?” I ask him.
“Kennedy.”
I resist the temptation to google him right here. As if he’s a step ahead, he elaborates: “I’m at DK Imaging, if you want to verify me.”
“Why is a serious photojournalist covering a funeral?” I take up his invitation and type his business name into the search bar.
“Did I tell you I was a serious journalist?”
“Come on, everything about you screams brooding, artsy content.” Black car. Dark windows. Restless energy. “I bet you’re big on monochrome imagery. Haunting shadows. Negative space …”
I seem to be spouting artistic terminology like I have some idea what I’m talking about. The psych team warned me that this could happen. Pockets of unexplained knowledge can burst through the fog. It’s like those cases you hear about where people have a head injury and wake up fluent in Spanish or rattling off piano concertos, except nothing that impressive, in my case.
But as soon as Drew’s landing page fills the screen, the images take my breath away. My instinct was right about the black and white. But there’s also vibrant color. Clifftop sunbursts and crashing ocean waves. Wintry scenes of gnarled, high country snow gums. Deep, lush forests—mist curling through ferns and over waterfalls—and even photos of nebula and constellations and stunning aurora skies …
I drag my eyes away and look at him, still focused on the road, not giving the slightest hint of these depths. The artistry only makes me more confused about why he was mixed up with the media pack at Oliver’s funeral. Because he’s right. He’s not that kind of journalist.
“Drew, these photos …”
He shakes off the compliment in my tone.
“If this is the kind of work you do, I don’t understand why you were at the church. Do you moonlight for the tabloids?”
Silence.
“What were you doing there?”
He frowns. Am I skating too close to an off-limits topic? Next thing I know, he’s pulling off the road again, into a deserted rest stop beside the freeway—one of those places visited only by overwrought travelers who can’t stay awake until the next coffee opportunity, or have a sick kid, or need to discuss something that can’t be said in a moving vehicle, in our case. There’s a battered wooden picnic table and no other signs of civilization. I grab the dashboard to steady myself.
He shuts off the engine and opens the window. The buzz of cicadas pulses as hot air rushes in and I put my window down too, trying to make the inside of the car feel more spacious. Between the exquisite photography and the erratic driving, I’ve never felt more alive with someone, or more on edge.
Meanwhile, he grips the steering wheel, even though we’re stationary. It’s like he’s buying time, turning words over in his mind in a thoughtful, steady way that only makes me nervous.
“I wasn’t at the funeral in an official capacity,” he explains, eventually. He looks … is tortured too strong a word?
Unsettled?
Unnerved.
“I am a journalist,” he reassures me. “But I wasn’t there for the story.”
Even the cicadas go silent as he twists his body to face me. It takes just one second of looking into his intense brown eyes for me to catch up with the fact that I am not the only one here who is suffering.
“Evie, I was there because of my history with Oliver.”