Chapter 52
AUDREY
‘Let me get this straight,’ Sara says, all librarian vibes, dark hair in a bun, pushing glasses up her nose as she sits opposite me at a coffee shop near her place for breakfast. ‘You crashed into this guy, the Viper, on Thursday, less than a week ago? And you’ve already got the doom sparkle?’
I shake my head while swallowing a sip of my iced tea. ‘Doom sparkle? Is that what we’re calling it now?’
‘Don’t you remember phoning me a couple of nights after Fraser’s funeral and telling me never to let you step near another man if I ever saw the “doom sparkle” in your eyes?’
I don’t even remember the phone call. ‘Was I drunk?’
‘That’s beside the point.’
‘And what did you reply?’ I don’t really need to ask. It would have been music to her ears. She’d have been all, Yes, yes, good plan, Auds. Stay clear, I say.
She puffs up. ‘I said you were my sister and I just wanted to see you happy.’
What kind of half answer is that? I cut the slice of carrot cake we’re sharing and pick up a piece with my fork. ‘So you agreed to stop me?’ I’m recalling every previous conversation we’ve ever had about romance and all the times she’s warned me to stay safe, by avoiding entanglement like she does.
Sara softens in a way that makes me instantly suspicious.
‘Actually, Audrey, I said that I’d never, in more than forty years, seen someone as destroyed as you were over Fraser, which made me extrapolate that I’d never loved something or someone so hard that it could hurt this much to lose them.
You broke apart. It made me realise I’d never properly lived—not full-out and recklessly in love the way you do. ’
I pause eating the carrot cake, mid-chew. Of all the conversations for alcohol to have erased.
‘I knew you wouldn’t remember this, but when you asked me to step in and stop you if you ever found happiness again, I promised you I would do no such thing.’
I put down my fork.
‘So to see you talk about Beau and look at me like this … after all the time we’ve watched you break, willing for the day when we’d see this expression in your eyes again—this hope …’ Now she’s crying. Actually crying. My sister! ‘I just think you have to risk this, Audrey. Risk everything for it.’
This is the pep talk I was one hundred per cent certain she was not going to deliver. I came here to be talked out of this.
‘But he walks red carpets, Sara. He’s in magazines.’ I scramble for my phone and pull up the screenshots of Harlow and Lucinda that April sent me. ‘He dates women like this!’
‘And he cooked you breakfast after you crashed into his car, engineered some clifftop creative epiphany, jumped with you into the ocean, rescued you from drowning and sunburn, and dropped everything for a road trip with you.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Is that everything?’
No. I think of the gentle way he listened to my sobriety story and supported it, but Sara needs no further ammunition. ‘That’s the gist.’
‘And that was just the first long weekend. What kind of sister would I be if I warned you off this?’
‘He thinks I’m not strong enough to withstand the spotlight.
He said journalists will uncover my history—the drinking—and there’ll be all these headlines about him dating an alcoholic.
He’s scared it will kibosh the career I’m scrambling to get back.
So now I’m imagining them latching on to the fact that I am currently of no fixed address and living in a caravan and not realising it was a deliberate bid for creative freedom. ’
‘Write what you know,’ Sara says.
Why is she giving me writing advice at this crucial moment?
‘You’re writing a musical about being widowed. That experience drove you to alcohol, which took over your life until you pulled yourself out of it again. Write a song about that. Write a whole character arc! Put it in the show. Take control of the narrative. Then what can they possibly do to you?’
Sara works with numbers. She doesn’t understand music or theatre or creative writing. But she does understand risk. She strategises risk every day, for enormous corporations. And she understands me.
‘Imagine the good you could do, talking about this. You could help people. Instead of seeing Beau’s public persona as a threat, think of it as a platform. Embrace it. Run towards it. You’ll strip the journalists of their power.’
My sister’s role in my life is to keep me grounded. She’s meant to dampen all my dreams to keep me safe.
She doesn’t know it, but Sara’s idea has injected an unexpected sense of purpose into my life that I think I’ve been missing for decades. It’s not just music. It’s storytelling.
‘Also, Audrey, the fact that he has halted this conversation while you think about the potential impact on your life says a lot about him. He might be off rushing through his screenplay revisions, rewriting this film character, heavily inspired by you—but he’s also giving you the space you need to figure this out. I have to respect the man.’
What has got into her, rushing through this landscape, tearing down all the red flags?
‘What you had with Fraser is more than most people get in a lifetime,’ she says, and I know she’s talking about herself. ‘If you get a second chance at this, don’t fuck it up.’
If nothing else she said has penetrated, that last statement has smashed through what was left of my crumbling resistance. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever heard my sister swear.
‘Sara, this is a one-eighty spin on romantic advice. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’d met someone!’
She picks up a piece of cake, holds it near her mouth, and smiles. ‘Can’t have my little sister cornering the market on epic love stories, can I?’
I get in my car after a surprising breakfast and remember a similarly thought-provoking conversation I had with my now sponsor, Ali, in my kitchen that night after my first support meeting.
We had a cup of tea at the table, two bottles safely in the recycling bin, the wine having been tipped down the sink in possibly the second-scariest moment of my life.
‘You don’t have to explain how you arrived here,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to know. Not unless it’s going to help you.’
I was intrigued to figure out where the wheels had fallen off, having long blamed the way we swamped those drinks that first night after Fraser died. But one misjudged, completely understandable, reality-blocking binge in a crisis does not necessarily lead to this. It had to be deeper.
‘I guess I should start at the end,’ I said. ‘The moment when I thought my life was over?’
‘Start wherever feels best.’
And I wondered, where does a story start and finish, really? I read something about world wars and how we never really know when they begin. It’s often a gradual slide into conflict, the series of triggering events only obvious in retrospect.
‘I’d chosen a Pride and Prejudice quote for the orders of service for our wedding,’ I told her.
‘You know that one where Elizabeth says, “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation … I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun”? It’s like that, this story.
I think it really goes back to my twenties, when everything first went off the rails. ’
Ali pulled her chair in and sipped her tea, in that way that some people pull chairs and sip tea that just seems to open sacred space for quiet honesty.
I’d run through the order of events. The doctoral program.
The scandal. Josh’s betrayal. The way I let it eat me alive.
And a familiar disappointment had crawled up my frame as if its tentacles were grasping me from some underworld.
A place where lapsed dreams lurk, endlessly hoping for revival that never comes.
‘I had been molten glass back then, thrust in and out of a roaring furnace, scared I would cool and solidify before I’d been properly sculpted into the shape everyone wanted.’
‘You know, Audrey, glass can be melted and reformed over and over again. It’s inherently recyclable. Even years later.’
I reached for my wine. Surprised to find that it was tea. Forgetting who I was talking to, and the meeting we’d just left. Realising for the first time that the roots of my addiction may have stretched further back than I thought and that perhaps it wasn’t too late.
‘We can hold injustice like a crutch,’ Ali said. ‘We can preserve failure as a theoretical concept. If you don’t try, you can’t lose.’
‘You mean, if I blamed my professor and my friend for wrecking my career—which they did temporarily—I was safe from wrecking it myself?’
‘It must have been hard,’ Ali said.
‘Oh, this is not the hard part,’ I answered, quickly.
I wanted to rush out the rest of the story in case she thought I’d plunged myself into addiction over only that.
Though that’s not always how addiction works, either.
You don’t need something to have gone terribly wrong to find yourself trapped in it.
I told her about the Zoom meeting. The silent phone on my desk that haunts me. The missed calls. The accident.
‘Fraser left his meeting and ran to her, but when he was crossing the road outside the school … I know intellectually it was an accident. It wasn’t my fault. It could just as easily have been me, if I had taken that call. But, Ali, I’ve never forgiven myself.’
That’s where the alcohol had come in. Via guilt. I wasn’t helping myself get through. I was punishing my body. I was making things harder, destroying any chance to find even an atom of purity or happiness in the midst of all that loss. Because underneath it all, I didn’t deserve it.
‘It’s the driver’s fault,’ Ali said, simply. ‘Nobody else’s.’
I dismissed the argument for the hundredth time.
‘The campaign by the students to take down the plagiariser just all sort of died off once they heard what had happened. They really needed me, and my music, to make it work. I’ve never followed up on our idea to bring Professor Ridges to justice.
I’m too furious at myself for folding in the face of it when it first happened. ’
I was properly crying then, and I’m crying again now, pulling into the music school car park. Because this one loose end still plagues me and angers me and feels like it will forever stand in the face of my progress.
‘Don’t you see?’ I said to Ali. ‘If I’d believed in myself and argued back when this first happened, Fraser would still be alive!’
That’s when she frowned and said, ‘By that logic, couldn’t it be equally true that if you’d faced up to it then, which, given what you’ve said, would have been an enormously difficult thing for a vulnerable young adult to do, your career might have taken a different path, perhaps even taken you overseas, and you might never have met him? ’
But I dismissed that. We had our timeline. Surely he and I would have found our way to each other no matter which paths we’d taken, in every single version of events?