Chapter 25
NOW
For the rest of the week, I kept my head down.
Alex was in some of the bigger meetings I couldn’t miss, but other than that, I managed to avoid any direct contact with him.
If our team had a burning question, I sent Adrian or Lucas to talk to him, making a note to add ‘provides growth opportunities’ to my promotion application.
If the team noticed that I was actively avoiding my ex-boyfriend, they were kind enough to only talk about me behind my back.
The work was absorbing. When we were under the pump, I was normally pretty good at working out the twenty per cent of information I needed to get across and tasks that needed to be prioritised that would make eighty per cent of the impact.
But with this case, I found myself reading all the materials that Lucas, whose chronic online-ness extended to brilliant research skills, had pulled together.
I found myself filling pages of my notebooks with reflections in my still-schoolgirlish handwriting.
The weekend arrived much more quickly than I’d thought was possible. And on Saturday morning, Matt and I turned up to Arlo’s birthday party right on time, converging at the front door with Lily’s little sister, Mia, and her parents.
Mia was a junior lawyer at an international firm, but this morning looked like death warmed up.
She wore pyjamas she was clearly hoping to pass off as a linen set.
But given that most of her eye makeup was aligned with her nose and her hair was exploding out of her scrunchie, she hadn’t pulled it off.
A few shrieks from presumably overexcited babies and toddlers wafted down the hallway and through the flywire door.
Mia turned to me, her eyes wide. ‘Are there going to be kids here?’ she asked in a concerned whisper. I laughed then realised she was deadly serious.
‘Well, we’re at a kid’s birthday party, so I’d say yes.’
‘Like more or less than five?’ she asked, again without irony.
‘I think Lily invited her whole mothers’ group, so...’
The colour drained from Mia’s already washed-out face. ‘Okay... I’m going to need to get a coffee before I can do... this,’ she announced as she waved her hands at the front door.
She almost jogged back down the pathway.
I turned to Lily’s parents, waiting for them to admonish their daughter for bailing on her only nephew’s first birthday party.
‘She had a client event last night,’ Lily’s mum said proudly.
‘A box at the tennis,’ her dad added, his eyes soft as he watched the back of his youngest daughter disappear down the street.
‘Wow,’ Matt said politely.
I loved Mia but it was slightly bizarre to watch her ascent to unequivocal favourite child after she’d gone to law school and then nabbed a job at a big firm.
We were saved by Lily’s appearance at the door, with the birthday boy in her arms.
‘Happy birthday! Congratulations on surviving the year!’ I squealed, knowing that a first birthday was as much a celebration for the parents for making it through a year of the lowest lows and highest highs.
In the kitchen, Lily pulled open the cake box we’d brought and her eyes widened.
Matt and I snuck a glance at each other and smiled.
I’d baked a two-tiered Funfetti cake and Matt had decorated it with fondant figurines inspired by the circus-themed mural that Lily had painted on Arlo’s nursery wall in her final trimester.
‘You guys. This is incredible,’ she said, looking touched.
‘Everything looks amazing!’ I enthused. The living room was already beautiful, painted peach and totally covered with framed paintings that Lily had bought online, at small galleries and from artists she met through work.
It had been festive to begin with, but she’d leaned into the colour of their house and gone for a retro party vibe – all primary-colour balloons, streamers festooned from brass light fittings and bowls of nostalgic party food.
Then I noticed someone from the past, helping himself to a Cheezel – Alex.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I hissed at Lily as soon as Matt went to deliver Aaron a beer.
‘He reached out and asked if he could drop off a present for Arlo. So I invited him,’ Lily replied. I retreated to the corner of the kitchen, out of earshot of the rest of the guests. Lily followed me.
‘So, he heard you mention Arlo’s birthday last weekend, guessed there’d be a party and basically angled for an invite,’ I replied. ‘Jesus. He’s at work. He’s in my bedroom. And now he’s bloody here.’
‘He was in your bedroom?’ Lily asked, raising her eyebrow.
‘Well in a medical capacity,’ I said, my tone tinged with defensiveness. ‘I had a capsicum-based incident and he was keeping an eye on me until Matt got home.’
‘Be careful,’ Lily said, putting her flute of champagne down, her expression serious.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s normal to get cold feet before your wedding,’ she said, choosing her words carefully.
‘I haven’t done anything!’ I said, my voice an octave higher than normal.
‘You tracked him down at Parkrun. You invited him to coffee. You had him in your bedroom. I mean, what does Matt think of all this?’ Lily asked.
I felt a rush of exasperation shoot through me.
Lily was painting a picture of the kind of woman who couldn’t be trusted – the kind who inappropriately slid into DMs or touched an arm for a moment too long.
‘I did those things to try to create boundaries,’ I protested. ‘And he was in my bedroom because I didn’t want to die before my wedding! Or like, ideally, at all.’
‘Okay,’ she said, and held up her hands. ‘I’m just saying that my therapist told me that heaps of people actually end up getting back together with their school or uni boyfriends later in their life.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s a total thing. Which I thought you might be interested to hear in the context of your curse and Alex and whatever.’
‘Wait. Did you speak to your therapist about me?’ I asked.
‘I plead the Fifth!’ ’
‘Not a thing here,’ I said. ‘You really should have gone to law school.’
She gave me a withering look then sighed.
‘I have a working theory that if there’s anything unresolved in your life,’ she said slowly, ‘planning a wedding will expose it. That a wedding is the event equivalent of that dye that’s injected into your veins so doctors can see if there are any blockages not visible to the naked eye. ..’
‘An angiogram?’ I clarified.
‘The medical term isn’t important for my theorem. What I’m saying is that... all your family in one room, a weird relationship with money, body anxiety – a wedding will shine a giant spotlight on whatever you’ve spent your life not facing up to.’
‘So, Alex is my... blockage?’ I worked through Lily’s theory out loud. Lily shrugged as she topped up both our drinks.
I was my father’s daughter – I knew via osmosis that an angiogram was a diagnostic test that looked for weaknesses in the heart.
Was Lily right? Was that what wedding planning was – something to stress test your heart, to ensure it was strong enough to endure, for better or for worse, life with another person?
‘So, what’s your hang-up about marriage?’ I asked, keen to deflect the conversation away from myself.
‘Maybe there’s a reason Aaron will be my boyfriend forever,’ Lily said with a cheeky laugh.
‘I’m going to talk to Alex,’ I said, feeling resolute. ‘I’m going to find out exactly what he’s doing here.’
‘Okay,’ she said. She looked down at the cake and then across the room to where Matt and Aaron were cheering on Arlo as he attempted a few tentative steps. ‘Just be careful.’
‘I’m always careful!’ I protested.
‘I know you are,’ she said, with a bit too much pathos.
I crossed the room to the trestle table where Alex was still manning the Cheezels bowl.
‘These are exactly as good as I remember them being, which is a rare thing,’ he said.
‘Some palates mature with age, some don’t,’ I said archly.
‘I can’t believe Lily is old enough to have a kid. That she’s a parent,’ Alex said, watching Arlo proudly shuffle behind the walker he’d just received from Lily’s parents.
‘That’s a refreshing take,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ He turned to face me.
‘Well... I feel like people are more surprised that I’m a woman in my thirties without kids, or at least a baby belly.’
‘Do you want kids?’ Alex asked. He seemed surprised by the notion, as if one of the experiments he was conducting had just reacted in a way he hadn’t predicted.
‘Yes,’ I said, as usual struggling to be anything but honest under his inquiring gaze.
Matt and I hadn’t worked out an exact timeline – neither of us wanted to upset the gods of fertility.
But I’d upped my health insurance to include maternity.
And when he’d got his job, Matt had been thrilled by their generous paternity-leave policy. ‘Do you want kids?’
‘No,’ he said, without hesitation. ‘Though I guess I’ve only thought about it in the realm of the hypothetical.’
I stared at him for a second. If ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ was the defining question of our twenties, this question and its variations – ‘How many?’ ‘When?’ – was the question of our thirties.
I’d only known Alex for two months in my early twenties.
Of course there were a million things I didn’t, couldn’t, know about him.
The twenty-page questionnaire that Belinda had inflicted upon us had many categories: ‘Approaches to money’, ‘Resolving conflicts’, ‘Work–life balance’, ‘Your future family’. Could Alex and I have agreed on any of those sections?
‘Is it a coincidence that we’re working together?’ I finally asked Alex the question I’d come over to discuss, the one I’d convinced myself was my mind spiralling.
My phone started vibrating before he could reply. I looked down at the screen in case it was Miranda. My eyebrows involuntarily shot up with surprise. It was Dad.