Chapter 51
FRASER
‘I need to come clean about something,’ Josh admits, over a beer. ‘It’s about Audrey.’
Here we go. ‘We don’t have to get into this,’ I say. I know how he feels. I’ve probably always known. But do I actually want to hear him voice it in so many words?
‘It’s not what you think,’ he says, downing several mouthfuls for courage. ‘I mean, it is. Obviously.’ He frowns into the glass. ‘Always.’
Is he forgetting we aren’t talking about some random woman here, but the one I almost married?
‘That’s not what I want to talk about, though,’ he clarifies. He may look polished in his designer suits and flashy accessories, but there’s something desolate about the way he’s propping himself up on the bar, as if the weight of what he’s carrying is beyond his strength.
I tap my fingers on the countertop and check my watch. ‘Aren’t we years beyond this?’
He shakes his head. ‘I wish we were. But this is about Ridges, and that summer.’
I’m hit with an instant flash of anger.
‘Josh, I know this story. He stole her piece. She confided in you. You promised you were in her corner. He bribed you with the recommendation for the Vienna position. You let your ego win. You two had a falling out, and our mother has blamed Audrey ever since—’
‘No, I’d already been offered that position in Austria.’
Well, that makes no sense. Why would he sell her out if he didn’t need to?
‘She’d written this incredible piece. She was the outlier, not just in her own year but our whole cohort. But she was plagued by this pressure cooker inside her head telling her she wasn’t ready. She never believed in herself. Thought every success was a fluke. It made her an easy target.’
‘For you?’
He winces. ‘For Ridges!’
I let out a low breath. The way he’s describing her rings so true, my chest clenches that he knew her this well, long before I did.
‘So, what, you rode in on your white horse, intending to save her from her own impostor syndrome?’
‘We were both on this trajectory. I could see it, even if she couldn’t. We were going to crush the classical world.’
‘And you succeeded.’
He rubs the back of his neck, mouth tight, and nods at the bartender to refill his glass. For the first time in over a decade, he looks miserable about his wild success.
‘Fraser, when I confronted Ridges about her piece, I was on her side. But I’d barely mentioned her name before he reminded me of an incident a couple of years earlier.
I’d been tutoring for one of his undergraduate courses.
There was a … regrettable episode with an exchange student from Amsterdam.
Entirely consensual, of course. Just probably not quite—’
‘Ethical?’ How predictable. My brother finding historic ways to disappoint me.
‘The point is Ridges made it disappear. Said it saved him a load of paperwork as my supervisor. Totally understood how these things happened.’
I bet he did.
‘I was angry about what he did to Audrey. But he completely cut me off. Argued that if either of these things had come out … my indiscretion or his—’
‘It would have been the academic equivalent of a murder-suicide?’
He nods.
‘So it was blackmail. Not bribery like we’d all assumed?’
He looks gutted. ‘He only asked me to stall her a few days. That didn’t seem so bad. I thought she’d still have an opportunity to argue her case—’
‘After he’d taken advice from a crack legal team, fabricated evidence to prove she was wrong, and detailed a comprehensive gaslighting strategy?’
‘Yeah, I know. I knew it then. Ironically, if I hadn’t stalled her and he’d followed through on his threat to expose me, I probably would have received a discreet slap on the wrist and moved on. You know what the system is like.’
‘Why buckle to him, then?’
He looks me straight in the eye. ‘I was young. I’d just been appointed to the position in Vienna.
I was so hungry for it all, I couldn’t risk it.
And she was so fucking talented, Fraser.
I told myself this would be a blip. I was always so desperate to impress her, I couldn’t bear the idea of her thinking badly of me if the story about the undergrad student came out. So I panicked.’
I wish Audrey had known how scared both men had been. Scrambling to protect themselves in the wake of her genius, crushing her underfoot while they scuffled to victory.
‘I had no idea she was going to take it the way she did. It was one piece. I’d spent all summer watching her churn out magnificent compositions, prolifically. I made the mistake of thinking she was unstoppable.’
He could not have been more wrong. ‘Why are we talking about this now? You can’t undo it.’
He looks even more pained. ‘He never stopped. He teaches to this day, still pulling accolades for his “original works”—stealing Audrey’s at least taught him to be careful, but he constantly flirts with the line beyond which “creative sampling” becomes thievery.
I feel guilty every time he does it, because I knew all along and could have done something, and still haven’t.
So it’s this enormous, retrospective monster of a backlist now—an entire body of other people’s work.
And I want to expose him, I really do, Fraser.
I want to do it for Audrey. But I have so much further to fall now. ’
He pauses. Takes a breath. And when I look at his face, I know he’s never going to follow through.
‘Why are you really here, Josh?’
He makes sure I’m concentrating, glued to his final, agonising point: ‘Because he’s worked his way through the students at Australia’s top tertiary institutions.
And if someone doesn’t step in and stop him, he’s about to steal a whole lot of original compositions from a bunch of gifted high schoolers at a summer music school. ’