Chapter 13
AUDREY
I’m going to tell Fraser this story if only to distract us from the mood in this kitchen, because I swear I’m imagining bedroom eyes.
‘My professor’s argument, as is so often the case when you’re a man, and a woman has a hot idea, was that he thought of it first. He showed me samples of his unpublished work and claimed it was me who had lifted his ideas.’
He arches an eyebrow.
‘I wrote the music, Fraser. Every single note of it. I brought it to him, the DNA of it fully formed.’
The accusation marinates and I focus on the tick, tick, tick of Fraser’s watch on the table between us.
It pushes time forward dispassionately, carrying me further and further from the incident that derailed me, every soft flick of the hand another wasted second.
How quickly it adds up. Minutes. Hours. Years, in this case—
Fraser’s arms are crossed on the table, the rest of the toast untouched, body poised for a brawl, despite the absence of an opponent. ‘What happened next?’
That’s the question that has haunted me.
The one that’s kept me awake not just tonight but for years.
Because what I did next was open an enormous void of inaction into which I should have poured the fight.
I should have stood up for myself. I should have ripped my music from his thieving hands and raised academic hell.
‘He included my piece in his bestselling solo piano album, passed it off as his own, and gave zero credit to me. The album won an ARIA. It all feels very William Shakespeare and Emilia Bassano. Not that I’m saying my music was in that league …’
‘Plagiarism is a criminal offence, Audrey. You know it can involve prison time?’
I get a flash of Professor Ridges in solitary confinement.
Guards passing inedible slop through iron bars, while he’s entirely deprived of music.
That would be punishment enough for him.
Of course, in reality he’d probably know the judge—he had that sort of network.
He’d evade punishment altogether, or end up in some state-of-the-art detention centre where he’d be the hero, offering free music therapy classes for fellow inmates and discovering some protégé.
He’d be like the Martha Stewart of the music world.
‘Are you with me?’ Fraser is saying when I finally come to.
Am I with him how?
‘I was fantasising about Professor Ridges and Martha Stewart.’
The way he ignores this statement, as if it’s a completely normal thing to have said, suggests he can handle even the quirkiest parts of me. The aspects former boyfriends used to criticise and try to change. He is not your boyfriend, Audrey!
‘Did you report this at the time?’
Now I’m really off my toast.
There is no way through this part without involving Joshua, and I can sense my face rearranging itself, searching for the expression that says, Don’t take this personally, Fraser, but your brother’s a dick.
‘It’s not too late,’ he goes on, before I can articulate it. ‘At the very least you could sue him for royalties, but the man should lose his job.’
‘That’s what Joshua said,’ I cut in. ‘When I first confided in him.’
Fraser sits back and runs both hands through his hair, a long, slow breath rising out of his chest. I know he’s angry, but, wow, he has no idea that the action, in that singlet and those pyjama pants, makes him look like a billboard model.
‘Josh and I had been partnered for a film score assignment,’ I forge on.
‘So we got to know each other pretty well. You know how intense he can be. There wasn’t a piece of mine that he didn’t know so intimately he might as well have written it himself.
I mean, if anyone had been in a position to steal my work, it would have been him—’
Fraser is looking at me like I’m a first-year student whose various great-aunts’ deaths are mystifyingly on the same timeline as their assignment deadlines. Or like I’m the vice-chancellor after the announcement of a departmental funding cut.
‘Anyway, Josh worked with Ridges as a grad student. He promised to help me confront him—’
‘Ridges? Wasn’t he Josh’s mentor?’
I’m glad he’s putting this together himself. I won’t have to spell out every part of it.
‘Let me guess. Instead of helping you plead your case, Josh gave Ridges a heads-up?’
‘By the time I confronted Ridges, he’d got the university legal team involved. He’d fabricated this whole body of supporting evidence showing he’d had the idea first. He completely gaslit me.’
‘So they ambushed you.’ He hangs his head as if he were the one who did it, taking a collateral hit.
‘Your brother was just so ambitious, and he went in with the right intentions—’
‘Oh, I can imagine,’ Fraser says, darkly. ‘He would have gone in all heroic, guns blazing, then jettisoned you and his morals at the first whiff of a career break. What did Ridges offer him?’
The biggest opportunity of his life.
‘He recommended him for that position with the Vienna Philharmonic.’
He stares at me. ‘Fuck, Audrey. How are you not enraged?’
Not enraged? It’s nearly consumed me! ‘I’ve been furious with Josh since the day it happened. You saw that!’
‘When?’
‘At the concert!’
He stares at me, anger forced aside by confusion. ‘I thought—’
I watch as his mind seems to recalibrate the way that he’d always read this. He proceeds quietly. ‘I thought he loved you. We all thought that. He all but said it. After you left, he was a mess.’
A laugh bursts out of me. ‘You’d be a mess, too, if you were riddled with that much guilt.’
His brows knit, the way they do when he’s talking about rising sea levels or warming temperatures. ‘What was that in the wings at his concert? That … longing?’
‘Oh, that was definitely longing. For the career I’d given up.
Look, Fraser, it’s true that I’ve never met someone as professionally compatible as Josh.
Whenever I write something, even now, it kills me that I can’t show him—like when you forget for a second that someone is dead and you want to call them to share your news?
All that bad behaviour can’t erase the infuriating fact that he’s just so fucking clever, musically.
We were clever together. And he destroyed that.
But what you saw at the concert was pure fury at him for letting me down. And fury at myself.’
‘Why at yourself?’
‘Because instead of getting up and moving on, instead of fighting back, I stayed where they left me. I used to listen to Ridges’ version of my piece on repeat.
I couldn’t get it into my brain that he had taken it and made it a hit on the classical charts.
He didn’t just steal it. He stripped the emotion, wildly ruining it.
I was young and naive and a chronic people pleaser.
I convinced myself I’d imagined the plagiarism.
Maybe he’d come up with it after all? Perhaps, as he said, I just wasn’t talented enough to have written something like this.
And my place wasn’t on the stage. It was in the audience … ’
Fraser’s chair drags along the wooden floor as he pushes it back.
I’ve watched this man wait on hold with an airline over lost luggage.
I’ve seen him handle a meeting with the chief finance officer at the university when his research grant application fell through the cracks and cost him an important opportunity.
I hear him on the phone with Maggie most weeks, working through disagreements in parenting style. His blood pressure never rises a blip.
But he is not like that now. This is a caged animal, muscles flexing, blood boiling as he rises and paces the room, processing all that Ridges and Joshua did to me.
‘Do we need to see a lawyer?’ he asks, taking a pragmatic turn. ‘Surely you weren’t the only one he did this to.’
‘When did this become your problem?’
He seems taken aback and stands still. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to barge into this. I just feel … partly responsible somehow.’
‘You’re not your brother, Fraser. You said so yourself. Lawyers are expensive. I’ve been tempted to confront Ridges again in person, now that I’m older. See if the threat of legal action is enough? Demand to know why he butchered my piece …’
He smiles for the first time tonight, swings the chair in front of me again, and sits on it. ‘Maybe don’t use the term “butchered” in your defence. Stick to the crime itself and not a creative critique? Focus on high-level strategy.’
‘Which would be what, hypothetically? A public apology? A redaction of the album? Payment of some kind?’
I’m back into the mind-blowing mess of imagining the way it would all implode, knowing the collapse would take me, too.
I am a woman. I’d be the troublemaker. This is an adored teacher and revered composer.
He got away with this because he could, and I let our power imbalance intimidate me right from the start.
‘I’m scared if I stir this up, it will push me even further from my path. You’ve only seen a fraction of what I can do, because this has been holding me back for years. You asked what I was afraid of?’
He nods.
‘I’m scared I’ll never find that creative part of myself that feels like fireworks. The part that Josh knew, before it all exploded. We’ve been living together for months, and you’ve barely met the real me, Fraser—’
We lock gazes for a long moment in the stillness.
Then, without breaking eye contact, he reaches for the chair I’m sitting on, grabs the wooden seat between my legs, and in one strong, fluid motion, pulls it and me across the floor and between his thighs.
Seconds tick in the shocked silence, hearts hammering as the time that seemed to push me away from my past starts pulling me towards him instead, an electric rush of sparks and yearning and hope.
‘What did you say?’ he half whispers, leaning forward, forehead touching mine while an alchemy of florals and cedar and sage and cinnamon swirls between us.
‘We barely know each other,’ I repeat, his hand gripping harder on the chair between my legs, which are trembling now.
None of this is what I had imagined. If it had felt dangerous having his gentle warmth near my wounds, now that the urgent heat of his obvious desire is this close to mine, I can barely take it.
‘Allow me to reintroduce myself, Audrey Sullivan,’ he says, voice low, chest rising and falling as he waits for my word.
This is a hundred times hotter than I thought a science nerd could orchestrate, and my pulse is thundering now, the seconds blaring, every nerve ending screaming at his proximity.
‘Is this some sort of elevated, articulate request for consent?’ I ask, my breath quickening.
Dark eyes flash as they meet mine. ‘Is it approved?’
My lips brush his mouth in a kiss that starts gently and deepens quickly into the promise of something confident and assured.
He lets go of the chair, hands travelling to my waist before he scoops me across his lap, scaffolding me as he dismantles me—my anchored past, all the bad dates and failed relationships trying to hold me back from this bliss until the rope snaps and I’m drifting, untethered, into a rapid new current.
It’s all soft touches and firm intention, as if he’s never done this before and done it a thousand times.
Cinnamon between our lips, fingers cradling my neck, thumb at the thrashing pulse beneath my ear, he whispers a redundant ‘May I?’ as fabric falls from my shoulder and he plants a line of kisses that feel like they’re being scorched onto my skin.
He may. Anything. Everything. All thought leaves my brain as my senses take over, back arching, hips sliding towards his, body angling to give him everything. Then, as the mess of my life collapses, long-forgotten music surges into my brain, clamouring for air as he touches me.
‘It was the second you dumped that ice at the party,’ he whispers between fevered kisses, one hand threaded through my hair, the other at my hip, under my top.
I drag up his singlet, palms trailing over the sculpted muscles of his chest as I pull it over his head and off his shoulders onto the floor. ‘It was your keynote address in Toronto for me …’
He pulls us apart, laughing.
‘What, you think you’re the only one who’s good at research?’ I challenge him.
And that’s it. In this moment, in his eyes, I am his match. It’s all music in my mind—his body and mine, sounds and colours I couldn’t speak into words if I tried.
When we finally break apart, we’re left with just our ragged breaths and the reliable ticking of Fraser’s watch. That, and the inevitable future that rolls out spectacularly in our path like a carpet.