Chapter 23
AUDREY
Rach envelops me the second I step into the hospital foyer, and we’re adrift. As if we’re twenty again, with no clue how to handle life. Back then, we thought we knew everything. We bluffed our way through study stress and romantic calamities like endearing heroines in Richard Curtis rom-coms.
There is no bluffing now. We’re free-climbing on the edge of an abyss. No safety gear. No ropes. Clinging to rocks by our fingernails, petrified of the height and the dark and the cold.
It would be so easy to let go. So tempting to unfurl my fingertips and fall. I’d black out before I even hit the ground. It would be merciful. All I want is for Fraser to climb up behind me, wrap his arms around me, and guide me to safety, one tentative footstep at a time. But he isn’t showing up.
‘How is this possible?’ Rach demands, her voice fractured, shaking in my arms. She never cries.
She is always strong. Always calm. She doesn’t overreact or get hysterical or do things she’ll later regret.
Her brand is chilled. Professional. Serene.
So when she lets go of me and bends double as if this physically hurts, I realise we are in huge trouble.
For a few seconds I can only look at her, the emotion locked inside me, churning, gathering steam, searching for a broken fissure from which to explode.
Finally, she grasps at some strength, drags herself upright, blue eyes determined, and pulls me towards her again, whispering, ‘I’m sorry, Audrey. Sorry. Sorry.’
Her body straightens in my arms. ‘I’m just so broken for you,’ she explains.
We can’t debrief any further, because Clair and April arrive on the scene with Jess. Collectively horrified.
‘This is a fucking nightmare!’ April says, squeezing me hard, her language sending an elderly couple nearby scampering.
At the sight of my bridesmaids, I’m freshly crushed by the timing of this tragedy, which we can’t even keep private while I digest the shock, or sixty people will show up at the church on Saturday expecting a wedding instead of a funeral.
‘Come on, we’re taking you home,’ Clair announces. ‘You need a nice cup of tea.’
‘Or something stronger if you wish? You won’t be left alone for a second,’ April assures me, flicking dark curls confidently from her forehead.
A kernel of instinct tells me the stronger beverage is somehow the wrong move, and a quiet night with Rach is probably more sensible, but when I look to her for backup, she seems to have collapsed in on herself again.
The concept has already taken flight anyway, and April, Jess and Clair will hear nothing of my tackling this unfolding catastrophe untethered.
It’s an echo of all the times some man broke one of our hearts and we’d obliterate the crisis as a team. Often with tequila.
But I don’t want to obliterate Fraser. I’m scared I’ll forget this happened, only for the shock to hit just as hard again in the morning. We’re not in our twenties anymore. We have sensible jobs and responsibilities and mortgages.
Oh, God!
Fresh panic descends, shock and grief shoved sideways for a second by a mental picture of the balance owing on our townhouse.
‘I’ll have to sell the house,’ I say, feeling sick. It’s another layer of terrifying on top of everything else.
Rach shakes her head. ‘Don’t think about logistics now. We’ll sort it out.’
No offence to Rach, who has been beside me through every failure, but we’ve never ‘sorted out’ something of this magnitude.
Can losing your almost husband technically be construed as failure?
And am I going to be trapped in this torment of calling him my ‘almost husband’ for the rest of my life?
We were so close to earning those titles.
He’s my husband in every way. I feel as much of a widow as someone with the piece of paper I would have held in my hands two days from now, if only I’d picked up that phone call before he did.
Except, if I had … who’s to say I wouldn’t have been the one? Wouldn’t it be him here in this foyer, staring at dashed wedding plans and panicking?
No. Fraser doesn’t panic.
Didn’t.
Past tense.
What is wrong with me? Why am I even playing God in my mind, twisting the outcome, flipping our misfortunes? Why am I thinking about money and semantics when it’s been a mere hour since he died?
‘Slow down!’
I think it’s me who says this, but it could have been April. She places an arm around my shoulders and says, ‘Seriously. Slow down. We will get you through this.’
I have a flash of Fraser on that bed. ‘He only looked like he was asleep,’ I say, panic strangling me. ‘I have to go back!’
What if I made this up? What if I called them all in unnecessarily, and they left meetings and kids, in Jess’s case, and a date in Clair’s, and my fiancé is about to bring the car around and ask what on earth I’m playing at: I knew you had a wild imagination, Audrey, but this is preposterous!
I grip Rach’s hand. ‘I don’t think he’s dead,’ I assure her, more confident about this than I’ve ever been about anything. He can’t be. ‘They made a mistake. He was unconscious. Can you check? I have visions of them burying him alive. I can’t do this to him!’
They exchange glances. I’ve seen this look before. The time I gave serial cheater Declan Maxwell a third chance. The day I dropped out of the Con. Every decision I made on that Contiki tour after Declan’s final, deal-breaking fling with my second cousin.
‘Sweetheart,’ Jess says, flicking long red hair over her shoulder. I hate it when anyone calls me that. Even one of my best friends. ‘You’re in shock, which is why it doesn’t seem real. It’s okay that you don’t want to believe it yet …’
Will there be a time when I do want to believe it?
‘Will they give him a blanket?’ The nonsense words that are coming out of my brain now.
But I imagine him becoming colder by the second and then being …
Ugh, I see him being refrigerated, and I simply cannot bear the idea of him not being wrapped in something warm.
I’ve watched enough episodes of CSI to know that he won’t be.
They will cover him in a sheet or put him in a bag and reserve the blankets for people who really need them.
People with oxygen in their lungs and blood pumping through arteries.
People with thoughts and emotions. And a future.
‘We can drop off a special one if you like?’ Rach assures me.
I don’t even understand where we would deliver it. But my heart skips a beat at the desperate chance of seeing him one last time. Of checking, again, for the miracle my brain won’t allow me to abandon.