Chapter 62
AUDREY
‘So, my friends and I have already decided we’re writing a kickarse composition together about what happened tonight,’ Parker says as we gather in the foyer after the concert.
I’m not sure she appreciates the family complexity here, or that her uncle had his chance and blew it.
‘Like, to stick it in his face even more, you know? We’re not going to let him get away with it.
Full-blown social media takedown. It’s already trending! ’
That’s what you get when you stage a public stunt in a room filled with clever teenagers. It’s probably too late to warn them about interfering with the carriage of justice, but either way the man is undone.
‘And you know what else?’ she asks, glowing.
‘You know how you see those farewell concerts where music teachers retire and all their former students come back and everyone cries? What if we got, like, every student this guy stole from, including you, and put on a huge concert together to reclaim our music from him? We could raise money for something, like schools that don’t have musical instruments … ’
Maggie and I beam at the remarkable child we are collectively raising.
‘Five minutes after this was revealed, you’ve come up with this plan?’ I exclaim, throwing my arms around my stepdaughter.
She hugs me back, shrugs like it’s just another day, and runs off again, and we look at her go, amazed at her talent and spirit and confidence.
‘Audrey, she gets the music from you,’ Maggie says.
It’s a bit awkward, as her maestro uncle is standing here with music in his genes.
Maggie glances at him, having joined the dots using her understanding of human behaviour and tonight’s dramatic unveiling of evidence, and adds, in the pointed and some might say mildly cutting tone that I’ve come to know and appreciate, ‘She gets her courage from Audrey, too.’
My phone starts pinging. It’s April in the group chat.
She’s linked one of the kids’ viral reels from tonight—this one taken from the side of the stage, focused on our row in the audience.
It pans along as Parker makes her speech, my face alight with pride, Maggie’s too.
Then it lands on Josh—who is shrivelled, stripped of every shred of self-importance.
‘I.M.P.O.T.E.N.T… .’
She types it as a caption.
The definition of.
The crowds disperse and it’s just me now, in the courtyard outside the music school, staring up at the building in the silence, trying to wrap my head around everything that’s happened.
I seem to drag heartbreak in my wake, my life filled with losses in every direction—my higher degree, Fraser, even the spark I’d felt for something new with Beau.
But after tonight, thanks to Parker, for the first time I am not held back.
How could I be, with her taking the lead?
She is back in my life. Music is back. In front of me now, there’s clear, open space, and the distant rumblings of the big future I was originally reaching for, before everything went wrong.
Ideas are crowding into my brain—for music, for travel, for helping Parker pull together her composition and concert, although something tells me the kids can smash that together all by themselves.
I am flooded with the desire to stretch and climb and conquer.
To cut ties with everything that’s stopped me.
I’m channelling me at twenty-two. Parker at thirteen.
The reallife incarnation of the ‘I want’ song in a musical.
That one that sets up the narrative trajectory for the entire show: ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly? ’, ‘I Have Confidence’, ‘My Shot’.
The drive back to the beach feels like the start again.
Is that what life is? A series of overlapping cycles—some years long, some just days. Each ending kicking off another beginning, new directions, fresh pages.
The first thing I notice after pulling into the Pretty Beach camping ground is Beau’s caravan, still parked there, along with his black RAM.
My stomach sinks at the sight. I’d hoped to creep in and pack up my campsite quickly, extract my little caravan and make an escape.
I’d drive north to Queensland. Or perhaps south, down the New South Wales coastline into Victoria.
Maybe I’d head for the Great Ocean Road.
The freedom of being able to go anywhere for a while is intoxicating in the best possible sense of that word.
I plan to spend the next few months drunk on life.
Hungover from late nights stargazing, dreaming up fresh music in new places.
I take a deep breath—just one more goodbye—as I back up the Jeep, perfectly this time, and realise he is watching me from his doorway, hands in his pockets. Looking destroyed.
I shut off the engine. The door, which is always jammed, opens first go and easily. He must have fixed that during our road trip, along with the damage to the back of my caravan since he returned, I notice now.
I climb out of the car and try to heave the trailer into place, having parked slightly short.
He jumps down the step and comes over, picks up the tow hitch, pulls the trailer over, and settles it on the ball.
Then he tightens the socket and checks the pin, shaking it to ensure it’s all safely attached for my journey.
I push his hand off it, in the end. ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’
‘Audrey, please hear me out?’ he says, agony in his eyes. ‘Just give me five minutes before you go?’
The remorse seems real, at least. I stand there, hands on hips. Viperish myself.
‘I need you to know I didn’t write that scene. I had no idea it was even in the script. I would never have put it there.’
I cross my arms. ‘Let me guess, technically your ex-fiancée wrote it? And she is, what? Psychic, as well as brilliant and stunning?’
I could have done without the last adjective. It adds a layer of jealousy to this conversation that detracts from the power of my case.
‘I was as surprised as you were when she turned up. I didn’t know she was even involved until she walked in yesterday afternoon. I haven’t spoken to her in months.’ He’d done a convincing job of acting as if this part was at least true.
‘Beau, how does she know the entire blow-by-blow scenario from the clifftop so perfectly?’
He seems heartsick over this. ‘She didn’t hear it from me. I would protect you, and that whole experience, at any cost. I know how much that moment meant to you and how hurt you were to think I exploited it. You have to believe I would never have done this.’
But he did do it. I cannot believe the man is standing here, lying to me, when the evidence is so blatantly undeniable.
‘We are the only two people in the whole world who were there. How else has it wound up in the script?’
He’s crushed.
‘It nearly killed me when Fraser died. I almost drove myself into the grave, via the bottle, with grief. I vowed that I would never get close to someone else. Not like this. Ever again. Because it would be so easy for me to unravel.’
He steps forward, his face lined with concern, but I step away from him, holding my hands up to stop him touching me.
‘That day you spent writing music after Tathra? I spent it writing, too.’
‘You spent most of it washing your caravan,’ I counter. Washing his caravan and caressing my shoulders with sunscreen.
‘You process your thoughts in music. I do it in words. I didn’t write that scene.
Not in the screenplay. But I hadn’t been able to write for so long, and finally, having been with you, I felt something.
I had one of those once-in-a-lifetime amazing experiences with someone who was worth writing home about. ’
Writing home?
‘Beau, who is at home? Lucinda?’
‘Nobody. It’s an expression. I listened to the music pouring out of your caravan and put pen to paper—just snippets of lines about you and how impressive you are, and how confused I was … Do you know how hard it is to compete with a man like Fraser?’
How can someone like Beau be insecure about a romantic rival? Particularly one who is dead!
‘The journal was only ever meant for me,’ he explains.
‘But even if what you’re saying is true, it doesn’t explain how she ended up in possession of this private source material, does it?’
He has the courtesy to look sheepish now. ‘Harlow’s got a key to my caravan.’
Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? Because on top of the existing debacle, he appears to be admitting that tabloids don’t always make things up. It’s no surprise, of course, after that first night, when she waltzed in and opened that bottle of wine like she owned the place.
‘She’d been helping me with the film admin. The mentoring had been going well. She wanted to try her hand at writing a scene herself, but I wouldn’t let her. Not with this project.’
I feel some tiny piece of anger dislodge and dissolve inside me, even though I still don’t understand.
‘I can only assume she came looking for me after you and I had left for Canberra, let herself in, and found the notebook I’d left on the bed.’
‘Does she have no respect for privacy?’ I ask. I’m furious that she’d take something so desperately personal and do this.
‘I didn’t write your name in my notes. She must have read them, recognised the cinematic potential, and, when days passed and it didn’t appear in the script—especially with so much riding on it all—sent the scene to Lucinda, who had already been called in.
They were trying to rescue me from failure … ’
What am I doing with this man? As annoying as all of this is, I can almost believe it makes sense.
He’s been nothing but kind and caring and thoughtful and compassionate since the second we met, and didn’t I just decide only last night that I had cut ties with everything that’s held me back all these years? My distrust of people, included.
‘Anyway, I want you to know I’ve written you out of the story,’ he says firmly.
‘You don’t have to worry anymore. And I had my lawyer draw up a new NDA and had everyone who was at that meeting yesterday sign it.
I won’t bother you from now on. You can keep going the way you are and write music and travel and expand your world again the way you wanted to at the start.
But as far as I’m concerned, don’t think about it for another second.
All traces of you from my story have been completely erased. You can forget we even met.’
He touches me on the arm, just once, offers a weak smile, and steps backwards towards his caravan.
‘Drive safely, Hepburn.’