Chapter 9
AUDREY
After a minor scuffle about who is sitting where, Rach pushes me into the front seat of Fraser’s sensible sedan and slips into the back, beside his daughter’s empty booster seat.
We buckle up and wait as he gives way to Joshua, who roars off in a sleek black Mercedes, fierce energy palpable through the accelerator.
‘Where are we heading?’ Fraser asks, absolute Teflon to his brother’s showboating. Another green flag for our list.
‘Could you drop us in Dickson at mine?’ Rach asks. ‘Audrey’s staying with me.’
His eyes flash at me as he pulls into the stream of traffic, but he doesn’t pry into my private affairs, so naturally I take that silence and shovel into it an unnecessarily detailed explanation about my living situation.
‘You might recall I was sacked,’ I say.
He checks his blind spot, changes lanes, and says, ‘Something about your sudden interest in polar marine life?’
‘To be fair, Auds, you did immortalise your boss’s pompous arse in song,’ Rach argues.
‘It was good, too,’ I defend. ‘I was particularly fond of “Six Minutes”. You know, the tap-dancing number about billable increments?’
As Fraser swings into a side street, I notice the crinkles around his eyes, and for a moment I’m disproportionately proud that my comment has placed them there.
Perhaps it’s the former doctoral student in me, and maybe I’ll forever grasp for validation from his ilk, but I am quietly thrilled at the idea that I might have said something clever enough to amuse him.
‘Anyway, my theatrics in the office have brought my rental situation undone,’ I explain. ‘It’s fine, though.’ It really isn’t. ‘I’m sure Rach’s couch is just temporary.’
She has said I can stay as long as I like, but she’s in a tiny one-bedroom apartment and there’s only so long I can couch surf without scuffing the friendship.
Fraser inches his window down and clears his throat. Then he’s honked at from behind for missing a green light, and we’re all forced to wait out another cycle at the intersection.
‘Everything okay there, driver?’ Rach asks from the back.
‘It’s just …’ He glances at me, unsure. ‘I’m currently sifting through a disenchanting bunch of applications for someone to take my spare room and help with Parker.’
Is he suggesting—
‘I should have admitted I was out of my depth months ago. Just couldn’t bring myself to have to navigate around my own kitchen with someone I don’t know.’
‘GO!’ Rach yells as the lights change, and Fraser and I all but leap from our seats.
‘But you don’t know me,’ I remind him. Not really.
‘Nonsense, Audrey.’ Driving off, he seems to regain control of both the traffic and his composure. ‘You saved my life at Zoe’s party. One more second with Rachael’s ruffian of an ex-boyfriend and he’d have gone for a knockout blow.’
There is no way this man would be volunteering to involve me in his domestic affairs if he’d seen Rach and me at her place last week, scoffing Pringles and wine, surrounded by piles of my worldly belongings and huddled over her laptop, forty minutes through his presentation on ‘Advances in Oceanographic Data Assimilation Techniques’ from some Toronto climate conference he headlined eighteen months ago.
I’d nearly searched him on LinkedIn before she reminded me he might have a member account that shows who’s stalked his page.
‘I don’t think renting a room from you would be a very good idea,’ the logical part of me declares.
My unemployed self argues that house-sharing, rather than renting a whole place, would ease my financial quandary, and the musician in me is thrilled.
But I’m meant to be running miles from this man, am I not?
‘Speaking of Connor, I’m thinking of rejoining Tinder,’ Rach announces.
It’s an outright lie designed to push me out of my comfort zone and into Fraser’s spare bedroom.
She’s never been on Tinder. With all her cybersecurity expertise, she doesn’t trust the apps.
‘Things are getting a bit cramped in Dickson. Of course, you could always move in with your sister,’ she suggests.
No, I could not.
They’re moving me around like a chess piece, and I can’t help feeling woefully behind.
Career at a standstill. No partner. No home.
No kids, not that I want those, and—Oh! That’s my perfect out!
‘The thing is, I’m really not great with children,’ I admit.
‘I mean, your daughter seems delightful, but I’d be a bad influence, so—’
Waiting patiently now on Northbourne Avenue, he turns to me and says, ‘A bad influence how? All the classical music and kickarse heroism at parties?’
This man seems to be labouring under the mistaken impression that I am a far more interesting version of myself than I really am; nevertheless, I’m positively flushed at the compliment.
‘I am a failed musician,’ I confess. ‘And a failed office manager. Honestly, the least reliable kind of flatmate.’
‘You haven’t failed. Day jobs don’t foil raw talent.
They just make it harder to squeeze it all in.
’ His tone is professorial and authoritative, and as he accelerates across the intersection, I realise there’s something experienced and steadying about him.
Then he gives me an electric jolt as he looks sideways and adds, ‘I remember the way Josh used to talk about you.’
I squeeze the seatbelt tight and restrain myself from fishing for details, helped by the car’s side mirror being tilted at such an angle that I catch the reproach on Rach’s face.
It used to feel like a drug, the way Josh talked about my music.
The endless quest for extrinsic validation was always my undoing.
It’s why I am ‘temporarily unmoored’, as Rach kindly puts it.
And to think I was once the subject of a music journalist’s headline: ‘Girl Most Likely: Meet the Teen Composing Sensation Taking the Contemporary Classical World by Storm’.
Where has that girl gone? Why am I messing around writing The Office meets Wicked?
Musical theatre? Josh and the rest of my classical cohort would be appalled.
But there I go again, measuring my choices by what other people think.
It’s hard when everyone else—Fraser, his brother, his ex-wife, Rach, even Hormonal-Chicken Jill—managed to get their act together while I squandered my twenties in a zigzagging haze of failed dreams and self-doubt, botching things so badly that I am currently living on someone’s couch.
I rub my chest, willing myself not to hyperventilate. I can’t keep living like this—on the run from my own potential.
‘Sometimes you just need a hard reset,’ Fraser says, oblivious to my spiralling, delivering exactly the antidote to it.
Was it only an hour ago that I vowed, rather dramatically, to steer clear of Miller blood?
I said I couldn’t let this warmth near these wounds.
This man is inextricably linked to the person I blame for my now being light-years behind my peers.
Not only that, but I’m pretty sure Fraser’s ex-wife loathes me.
Oh, God. It would be an unmitigated disaster …
My phone illuminates with a text from my back seat wing-woman: A hard reset from Fraser Miller sounds utterly delectable.
I let out a nervous laugh, and before he can ask me what’s funny, I pull down the window and stick my head out, letting cold air blast onto my face and hopefully blow some sense into my brain.
‘It’s this driveway here,’ Rach says as we pull into the residential street behind the ABC studios a few minutes later. ‘Thanks for the lift!’ She’s up and out of the car and halfway to the secure entrance of her apartment building before I can so much as fumble for my handbag in the footwell.
‘Wow. Is she an Olympic sprinter?’ he inquires, dryly.
There’s a beat or two of silence, during which I become aware that I am supposed to be following my best friend out of this car. I unlatch my belt, which seems to retract in slow motion, as if conspiring to delay my departure.
‘Cards on the table, Audrey,’ Fraser says, a moment later.
‘My ex-wife and I lost our heads the other day and bought Parker a puppy. We thought it might smooth the handovers if she went with her between households. Of course, in our desperation to make life easier, we did the opposite. The little devil has taken to blocking my exit from the house and feigning injuries whenever I put shoes on. I can’t bear the guilt! ’
I coach myself to stay immune from this puppy sorcery. ‘Cute story, Fraser, but how do I fit into your dog’s separation anxiety problem?’
‘Oh, Betty isn’t a problem. She’s adorable!’ he explains. ‘Parker named her. Some sort of Swiftie reference.’ Then his smile fades as he says, ‘As much as my brother irritates the hell out of me—’
‘And out of me—’
There’s a flicker of surprise, as if he hadn’t expected me to pile on. ‘I think my daughter has inherited her uncle’s gift. She won’t leave the piano alone. He wasn’t kidding about that xylophone. She’s pretty extraordinary. I know all parents say that—’
‘If she’s anything like her uncle, she needs careful nurturing,’ I cut in. ‘Who’s teaching her?’
He rubs his forehead, as if soothing a sore spot. ‘She’s almost entirely self-taught. The kind of kid who refuses instruction. She’s already burnt through three teachers who couldn’t keep up.’
‘I’ve met kids like this before.’ I don’t divulge that I was one. ‘Sometimes they have more music in their little fingers than their teachers have in their whole bodies.’
When I look into Fraser’s face, it’s not that of a world-class scientist on top of his game.
It’s that of a parent without wings trying to show his child how to fly.
His genius lies elsewhere. I know that from all my snooping.
If Parker is half as talented as her uncle and Fraser isn’t musical himself, he must be wildly out of his depth.