Epilogue Sadie
Epilogue Sadie
‘Oooh, that sounds promising,’ I said to Chess, phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder as I tried to pry the cork out of the wine bottle without breaking it.
‘Do you have any time in your calendar in the next couple of days? I can set up a Zoom with you, me and Julia, and we can talk about next steps.’
‘Tomorrow’s a fourteen-hour day for me, but I’ve taken Friday off,’ Chess replied.
‘I was thinking about flying down to Hobart Thursday night. Maybe we can all have lunch on Friday?’
‘Absolutely. I’ll text Julia.
And I’ll make up the Bunbury Suite for you.
’
‘Don’t do that.
I’ll stay in a hotel.
’
I did my best to suppress a sigh.
Chess had visited Hobart several times over the past few months, working with us and the union on the anti-Renewniversity campaign, but she was so intent on this Sadie is an adult who needs space thing that she’d steadfastly refused to stay with us, no matter how many times I told her that I wanted her to.
Well, either that or she was terrified she’d hear me and Jonah having sex and didn’t want to admit it to me.
That, I supposed, I could understand.
‘You’re not getting out of Friday night dinner at Fiona’s, though,’ I said, finally managing to get the cork out of the bottle.
‘She tells me to thank you every time I see her.’
Chess snorted.
‘She’s probably spent more time thanking me than I’ve spent working on her case.
’
That definitely wasn’t true.
Chess had found Fiona an incredible family lawyer to represent her in the divorce, but she’d also gone digging into Matt’s finances personally.
Fiona had nearly fainted when Chess had revealed to her what she’d be entitled to in child support once the divorce was finalised.
‘And yet you will be thanked again,’ I said.
‘In words, and probably in wine. Thank goodness you like Bibliophile.’
‘Thank goodness,’ Chess echoed.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Jonah, can you get that?’ I called.
‘It’s the pizza!
’
‘On it!’ he called back.
‘He’s not cooking tonight?
’ Chess asked.
‘I ordered him to take a night off,’ I replied, pouring the wine – a Bibliophile syrah – into two glasses.
‘We just finished writing the last of our lectures for the semester and we’re both completely exhausted.
Plus, we’ve got our workload meeting next week and fuck knows how many more Petrovski is going to heap on us in retribution.
’
It hadn’t taken much for the university to back down on laying Jonah off.
Chess had barely begun to terrify the university lawyers when the media campaign started rolling out, portraying us as a sort of academic Romeo and Juliet, two lovers being torn apart by cruel institutional forces outside their control.
A clerical error led to Dr Sadie Shaw and Dr Jonah Fisher’s positions being considered in scope for the Lyons University ‘Renewniversity’ major work-force realignment project, came a swiftly issued public statement.
The Faculty of Arts looks forward to employing both Dr Shaw and Dr Fisher for many years to come.
They’d clearly been hoping that with Jonah’s job saved, the media campaign would fizzle out and they could go on their merry way with Renewniversity Phase Three.
And, to an extent, it had – we’d kept juicing it all we could, but there was only so long you could keep the public interested in stories about layoffs, particularly ones in an industry they didn’t really understand or care about.
But there was no tiring Francesca Shaw, The Lawyer Who Eats Lawyers.
She’d been as good as her word.
I didn’t understand half the things she’d done – give me academic jargon and I’ll tell you exactly what it means; give me legal jargon and I’m completely lost – but she’d done exactly what she’d told Jonah that night in Tsundoku.
She’d buried them in red tape.
With her help, the union got the first arm of the Renewniversity agenda thrown out.
There would be no adjustments to 40-40-20 contracts, which meant that Veronica, Lin and all the other people in the Lyons precariat would still have work next semester.
Casual academics were not going to be the first casualties, not this time.
Now we were working on getting the other arm – the academic Hunger Games arm – tossed too.
The end of the academic year was coming up, so we were running low on time, but given Chess had begun this phone call tonight with, ‘so I have an idea’, I was pretty sure we were going to make it happen.
‘I should let you go and eat,’ Chess said.
‘I’ll see you in a couple of days, okay?
I love you.
’
I had a sudden vision of her pacing around her high-rise apartment in Sydney, and for a moment I felt profoundly sad.
I hated to think of her being there every night, all on her own.
‘I love you too,’ I said.
‘To the end of the universe and back again. Always.’
Jonah and I ate dinner on the couch in our pyjamas in front of an episode of Superchef , the pizza – pesto chicken with a side of garlic bread, same as always – on the table in front of us.
‘I know this is very easy for me to say from here on the sofa, and I know I no longer need this show as a backup career plan,’ he said, nudging me with a socked foot, and then nodding at the screen, ‘but I genuinely think I could take some of these people. You can’t tell me that I couldn’t make a better attempt at coq au vin than whatever that guy’s trying to do.
’
‘Do you want me to play devil’s advocate and tell you that you absolutely could not take that guy, and then let you convince me that you could?
’ I asked, swallowing.
‘Or do you want me to be your devoted wife and tell you that you’re the best chef in the entire universe and there’s not a person in this country who could defeat you?
’
‘Wife,’ he said instantly.
‘Jonah Fisher,’ I said seriously, licking a finger clean of grease so I could hook it under his chin and turn his face towards mine, looking him dead in the eye, ‘you’re the best chef in the entire universe.
There’s not a person in this country who could defeat you.
’
He grinned.
‘Why the fuck did I waste so many years arguing with you?’
‘It wasn’t wasted time,’ I said, taking another bite of garlic bread.
‘How would we have written a hundred and four battle lectures – and counting – without spending all that time becoming the masters of bickering like an old married couple?’
Our first journal article about our pedagogical approach had come out last month in Studies in Higher Education , a prestigious journal that would score us some decent research points.
We were working on a second one, but now the semester had ended, we were daring to dream that we might actually get to return to our own individual research at some point.
‘Oh my God, I forgot to tell you.’ He swallowed.
‘My dad texted me today. He asked me if that man had given us our workload allocations for first semester next year yet and if I needed any advice on how to push back if he did anything unreasonable.’
That man was new Professor Fisher code for Petrovski.
Jonah hadn’t said as much, but he’d been terrified about how his dad was going to react to the media campaign and the news that he might give up his future in academia for me.
It had turned out much better than expected, though.
Instead of jumping straight to You have shamed this family!
Death, dishonour, disowning!
, Jonah’s dad had latched onto the fact that Petrovski was responsible for the fact his son might lose his job and had sworn blood vengeance.
I didn’t think it was the main reason the university had backed down on firing Jonah, but it was almost certainly a reason and, for the first time in my life, I’d found myself feeling somewhat warm about Christian Fisher.
…
Right up until Jonah had admitted, cheeks pink, that his dad had also said why don’t you just knock Sadie up like I did your mother, that’d solve your problem .
Professor Fisher would forever have to be graded on a curve.
‘What did you tell him?’ I asked.
‘I said that we don’t have our workloads yet and that we won’t meet with that man without our union rep present, but if we need his advice, we’ll ask for it.
’ He nudged me with his foot again.
‘Emphasis on the we . What’s mine is yours, and that goes for unfair advantages as well as all my worldly possessions.
’
‘I’m glad to hear you think that way,’ I said, nudging him back, ‘because you know that grey cardigan of yours? You’re never getting it back.
’
A while later, after the show had ended and we’d put the remnants of our dinner away – ‘You know I love you, but this really is unacceptable,’ Jonah grumbled, ‘pizza is just not an appropriate breakfast food, Shaw’ – we curled back up on the couch, with Jonah’s head resting in my lap.
‘When you do that, it makes me think I should have just let the uni get rid of me,’ he said, making a satisfied noise as I scratched at his scalp.
‘This is my real dream career. Lying on the couch while my wife babies me.’
‘The pay is pretty shit.’ I combed my fingers through his hair.
‘Mmmm, but the perks are great.’ He found one of my hands and pressed it to his lips.
He tried to let go, but I wouldn’t let him.
‘The finish is coming off your wedding ring,’ I said, running my thumb across it.
‘We’re going to have to swap it out again.
’
‘We should just bite the bullet and get real ones.’ He kissed my hand again.
‘We’ve got some money saved up.
We’re both employed.
I know there’s still two years until our probation is up, but Petrovski wouldn’t fucking dare fire us now.
And we can’t keep wearing fake rings forever.
’
Forever.
A warm, honey-golden feeling started to bloom deep in my belly.
‘Okay,’ I whispered, leaning down to kiss the tip of his ear.
Then I shoved at his shoulder.
‘Up.’
‘No,’ he groaned.
‘Come on, up,’ I said, pulling him into a seated position and then tugging the ring off his finger.
‘I’m not having you go around with a wedding ring in this condition, Fisher.
I have my pride.
We need to swap this one out until we can get real ones.
’
The idea came to me as I was rummaging through my underwear drawer for the last of the three-for-$12 pack of rings.
It wasn’t a sudden realisation; nothing sharp, nothing piercing.
It settled over me gently, like one of Jonah’s cardigans wrapped around my shoulders, and it left in its wake not the ecstatic joy of eucatastrophe, but something more akin to satisfaction, contentment.
It was a different, gentler, more everyday form of joy, but it was nonetheless deeply profound.
I put a pin in that thought, deciding to interrogate it later.
That sounded like a concept I needed to theorise.
‘So, about that money we have saved up,’ I said, tossing the last of the wedding rings up into the air and catching it again as I came back into the living room, ‘I have a thought.’
‘House deposit?’ There was something slightly nervous in Jonah’s expression.
We’d talked a little about starting to save up for a house of our own.
I love this apartment, but it really is so small , I’d said to him a while ago.
He’d agreed, and replied, especially if we decide we want to…
And then we’d both blushed and looked at each other for a long moment, the memory of his dad making that crack about him knocking me up hanging awkwardly over us.
‘Before we start seriously saving for a house deposit,’ I replied.
We weren’t ready for the rest of that particular conversation yet.
It was a when , not an if , and I was pretty much positive we were on the same page, but we were still so new, in so many ways, and that could wait.
I perched on the edge of the couch beside him.
‘How would you feel,’ I asked, ‘about having a wedding?’
He blinked.
‘A wedding?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, our first wedding was lovely, but I wasn’t exactly in the right headspace for it,’ I said.
‘And I didn’t realise what I was actually proposing, when I proposed to you.
Why I was even doing it.
What I really felt.
That I couldn’t live without you.
’
‘Oh, Sadie,’ he said softly.
‘Plus, neither of our sisters were there, which feels like an obvious omission.’ I took his hand and pressed it to my lips.
‘I know Fiona still doesn’t know that our first wedding wasn’t exactly for romantic reasons, so we might have to think a bit about how to explain it, but…
it’d be nice to do it again.
To choose this – to choose each other – properly, and forever, instead of kind of doing it by accident.
’
‘ Sadie ,’ Jonah choked.
I glanced at him.
He took his glasses off so he could wipe the tears away from his eyes.
‘Oh, darling.’ I wrapped my arms around him and he hugged me tightly.
‘I love you so much,’ he whispered into my hair.
I stroked my fingertips against his beard and drew back so I could kiss him as I slipped the ring on his finger.
‘Then hopefully,’ I said against his lips, the clever lips of this brilliant man who had bound himself to me with the most unbreakable bonds in the world, ‘you’ll say yes.
’