Chapter 28
28
Evie
This man! I find it impossible to believe I would ever have seen something in him that suggested “best friend potential” when he is so cagey about our background. Yes, he’s been doing a lot to take care of me, but he’s been keeping years of history from me in the process.
Now he’s wandered along the footpath, having a very earnest phone conversation under a tree outside the antiques store, presumably with the woman who called yesterday in the car. He doesn’t realize the breeze is carrying his voice.
“I’ll take Harriet to the zoo on the weekend,” he promises. “How’s Sunday?” He glances over, notices me staring, and angles his body away. It takes me back to primary school and the time I was inexplicably dropped by my two best friends, who’d whispered about me behind their hands and left me stranded awkwardly on the playground, trying to look busy.
“Sure, put her on!” I hear him say. There’s a pause, and then a shift in everything as he turns around. Tone, volume, body language. He’s like a whole different person. Guard down. Lit up. “How are you, sweetheart? How was kindy?”
There’s a long pause while he listens and I catch the smile on his face, crinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes and washing away all the stress of our encounter to date. Eventually he gets a word in.
“I thought I could take you on an adventure,” he suggests. And even I can hear the squealing, a few feet away. As he holds the phone out from his ear and laughs, his gaze falls on me, and I’m the recipient of a full-bodied smile so genuine and warm it floods me with refracted adoration. But the smile dissolves just as fast, and I find myself willing it back, wanting to bask in its warmth even a second longer. Wishing I wasn’t its kryptonite.
I’m certain that child is Drew’s flesh and blood. Which means Chloe is whom, exactly? His ex-girlfriend? Worse, his existing partner?
“I’m not running away to Adelaide with somebody’s boyfriend!” I announce forthrightly, once he ends the call.
My statement catches him off guard and he stares blankly at me for a second. “Chloe and I aren’t together,” he replies. “It’s—”
“Complicated?” I accuse him. Of course it is. She might be his ex-girlfriend, but Harriet is her daughter. Their daughter. Why else would he be taking her to the zoo? “She’s not your sister?” I confirm.
“No.”
“So, just a friend?”
“Evie!” He’s exasperated now.
Is he daring me to ignore every red flag he’s waved at me since yesterday and just trust him? I don’t know much about my almost thirty-year-old self, but I hope I haven’t become this gullible. I was always attracted to men of honor, with manners and standards. Yes, they were mostly fictional, but isn’t art supposed to imitate life?
Friends? Come on, now! Drew was your best friend, Evie. Don’t you remember?
Rose’s words echo in my ears. Rose, whom I do trust.
I survey Drew again, sunlight beaming through the giant Moreton Bay Fig tree behind him. His earnest brown eyes bore into mine, trying to convince me to believe in him. A big part of me wants to, the one who has nobody else. The part who doesn’t want to get on a plane on my own and face the music in South Australia. The part buried deep beneath this unrelenting amnesia, violently trying to push its way out of it.