Chapter 53
FRASER
Some widowed people go through everything. Emails. Messages. Google searches. Perhaps they’re desperately seeking even more of the person they’ve lost. But I haven’t touched Audrey’s laptop since she died.
We might have been two days off getting married—what’s yours is mine and mine is yours and all that—but we still had our own lives.
We all put so much in writing these days, every message is part of a giant web of communication with friends and family, questions asked, secrets shared, support given.
I never felt it was my place to go somewhere she didn’t invite me.
They’re not always big milestones. Having her computer on my lap is another first. Some of the hardest moments are these little ones. Touching something no human hands have touched since hers. Something once covered in her DNA. Long gone now.
The photo on the screensaver wrecks me, for starters.
It’s of the three of us on a holiday in Sydney, down near the Opera House with the Harbour Bridge and the water gleaming in the background.
We’d picked up ice creams and wandered through the Royal Botanic Garden—such an innocent, happy little family, unaware of the detonation that lay ahead.
I don’t think I’d ever felt so content as I had that weekend.
So filled with anticipation for our future.
We’d seen a show that night. Audrey had told us maybe she’d have a go at writing a musical again.
She’d wanted to distance herself from the kind of music she’d made when she was younger, and her eyes burnt bright with ambition.
Her password is engraved in my head. I was forever encouraging her to choose something less hackable, but she claimed she couldn’t remember anything else and she was sick of trying to change it only for the computer to say the new password can’t be the old one.
It opens up like a time capsule of the final minutes before the accident.
I’m looking at the last computer screen she ever saw.
The notification that she’d left a Zoom meeting.
Behind that, her email folder, now with three years of unread newsletters and promotions flittering into it, along with an internet window with her unnecessary number of open tabs—the florist, the venue, the photographer.
It’s as though she was poring over everything, imagining how it would unfold two days from then …
seeing herself in that future, carrying a similar bouquet, dancing with me at the reception pictured on the venue’s website.
I can’t look at those pages. Or close them. It would be like closing the tabs on our dream.
She opened the email to her fellow students in a window of its own, so I click on that—all their names are there—and forward it to myself.
It was Rachael who had contacted one of them after the accident.
One of their mutual acquaintances, who had asked the group, on my behalf, not to pursue this any longer.
At least, not to pursue it as far as Audrey’s music had been concerned.
I knew that probably meant an end to the whole process.
It was her music that had taken the worst hit.
But it felt like agony, having anything to do with this then.
I was so angry about all that was stolen from her, I couldn’t go anywhere near it.
I close the laptop and put it back in the drawer near her piano.
Back then this was only about Audrey. At the end of the day she was an adult.
It was her fight. But now it’s about my child.
Someone just as talented, with the same amount to lose—but too young to protect herself.
A kid who’s already been through multiple traumatic events, with fragile mental health.
For the first time since Audrey died, I lift the piano’s key lid. I run my fingers along the keys, not heavily enough to make a sound, wanting somehow to preserve Audrey’s last notes, and rage roars to life beneath my grief.
‘Dad?’ Parker says, coming into the room and stopping still when she sees where I’m standing, this tiny concession to music opening a world of hope in her eyes.
I will not let Ridges near her. I’ve avoided music all this time, but I’d listen to every note that Audrey wrote and the entire catalogue of modern classical music to find the evidence I need to bring that monster down.
My brother mightn’t have the fortitude to finish what Audrey started the day she died, even with his own niece’s music in the firing line.
But after all these years of pushing this away, I do.