Chapter 64
AUDREY
‘Beau, I don’t know about this dress.’
Sitting on the sofa in his Sydney apartment, he looks up from his laptop, takes his glasses off, and assesses the sparkly gown. I wriggle uncomfortably, wishing it didn’t hug my body, and feeling far more attracted to a night on the couch in trackies.
‘The dress is perfect, Hepburn. I just don’t know how you’re going to walk in those shoes.’
‘I didn’t bring anything else,’ I say, anxious that we’re out of time now and I could break my neck and photographic evidence would end up in The Sydney Morning Herald.
‘I was always partial to those Wellingtons,’ he says.
I laugh. ‘What did you really think when I ran into your ute? You played it so cool that night.’
He puts the laptop aside and gets up. ‘Playing it cool was an act. When I met you, I remember thinking my whole line of work is about made-up stories. It’s about trying to convince an audience that fake people exist. Most of the people I know are either making up fiction or acting it out, and then you crashed into my life … ’
‘Suffering, flawed …’
He frowns. ‘Will you ever let me forget that? I was trying to tell you what I loved about you!’
‘Can we table this conversation for after the event?’ I ask, conscious of the time.
He strips off his Tshirt for the shower, my eyes dropping to the familiar lion on his chest. I trace it with my fingertips, geography I know intimately now, right down to the new swirl in the mane covering the part that used to say Lucinda. Then I move to the compass on his arm.
‘What’s this?’ I ask, confused.
He twists his arm to look at it. ‘That’s a compass, Audrey. It’s a device that shows the cardinal directions for navigation—’
‘Am I losing my mind, or has it changed direction?’
He smiles. ‘I wondered how long it would take you to notice. I had the needle reoriented while I was in LA.’
Reoriented? Sounds painful!
‘And these coordinates?’ I trace the new string of numbers on his skin.
‘Last time I had a woman’s name tattooed, it didn’t go well,’ he explains. ‘Thought I was fairly safe with a beach.’
I feel my eyes widen. ‘Our beach?’
‘The very same accident hotspot, yes.’
I’m worried I’m going to mess up the professional makeup I had done this afternoon at April’s insistence. He sees the tears forming and expertly snaps me out of it: ‘Look, we can’t stand around all day while you admire my six-pack, Hepburn. Unhand me—or we’ll be late for the premiere!’
Minutes later, we’re out of the apartment, into an Uber, zipping around Darling Harbour, and climbing from the car onto the red carpet, camera flashes bursting in our faces.
It’s a situation to which Beau is well accustomed and to which I will never acclimatise, so he squeezes my hand for reassurance.
‘Who are you wearing tonight, Audrey?’ someone asks, with a microphone stuck in my face. I have no bloody idea. I borrowed it.
‘She’s wearing April’s Wardrobe,’ Beau responds, deadpan, supervising the confused reporter while she jots down the words as if he’s given her a hot tip on an up-and-coming designer.
I slip my hand through his arm as we walk along the carpet, pausing to look up at Darling Harbour’s Lyric Theatre, with an enormous flashing billboard that takes my breath away.
The next runaway Australian hit!
WIDOWED: The Musical
‘Wildly heartbreaking. Dazzlingly hopeful!’ —Time Out
‘Life-affirming in every note.’ —Who? Weekly
‘Look at that, Hepburn. Now do you believe in yourself?’ I scoff. ‘You led me to believe the tabloids were full of trash!’ The screen flashes and the credits appear.
Music by Audrey Sullivan and Parker Miller
Book and lyrics by Audrey Sullivan and Beau Davenport
We gaze at the sign together, and I look at our names and say, ‘Fortiores una.’
‘Stronger as one,’ he agrees. ‘Any closer and we would have cycled through the entire welding process, right?’
I turn to face him. ‘You remember that? From when I crashed into your RAM? You were investigating the damage. I thought I’d try to lighten the mood. You didn’t seem impressed—’
‘Remember it? That was the second I fell for you! Well, between that and the fascinating brag about your talent for spreadsheets.’
I glance back at the billboard. ‘How did I ever attract a big-name, Oscar-winning screenwriter …’
‘To this project,’ he asks, ‘or—’
I can’t answer his question, because we’re ushered inside and swept through a crowd and into the best seats in the darkened theatre, where we meet Parker and Sara, with her new wife, Jodi, and my parents and Maggie, who’s brought a date with her, Lachlan.
He’s a barista with a mop of shaggy sun-bleached hair.
A younger man who surfs and writes poetry in a coupling with Maggie makes absolutely no sense, and I’m utterly mad for it.
The Bookies are here. Well, Jess and Clair, anyway. April talked her way into a role in the chorus.
Rach pushes herself forward, so proud of me she might burst. Ever my closest, most faithful friend, there hasn’t been a step I’ve taken where she hasn’t been by my side.
As I look at her, I just know. ‘Do you have something to tell me?’ I ask. I’ve been desperate to know the outcome of the last cycle.
‘Not tonight,’ she whispers, her face doing the talking the way it did when she first told me Jasper was on the way. ‘But yes.’
So I’m already emotional as she takes my hand and we look at the stage.
The red curtains are closed, and in white font projected across the folds are the words In memory of Fraser Miller.
For a moment, the sight steals the breath from my lungs.
As the air in the theatre moves the material gently and the light undulates, the letters of his name ripple, the way I’ve always pictured the two of us, our proximity ebbing and flowing through invisible folds in the fabric of time.
If Fraser was right the night he proposed, then I am here now, in this theatre, watching a musical I would never have written had he not died, with a man I would never have met.
And somewhere, perhaps in another dimension of this mysteriously tangled, incomprehensible universe, Fraser has written a new story, too.
I watch in endless, excited disbelief as characters born from my own imagination light up the stage, music swirling that I feared for so long that I’d lost. I remember the moment in the storm that first night at Pretty Beach, when it hit me that I wanted to live again.
Really live. With trumpets and drums and disco balls and confetti cannons and brassy eleveno’clock numbers—the whole sparkly, glittery extravaganza of it all!
And look at me now! Doing exactly that, my lap around this gorgeous country in Miss Bennet having produced this show, then led me home. To Beau. Struggling, despite how very much I loved Fraser, to imagine my life having played out in any other way.
At intermission, Beau takes Parker aside. ‘Need to talk to you later about a new script. The composer they’ve hired just isn’t getting it, and I’d love your thoughts. Pay you for your time, of course. We’ll draw up a contract.’
She looks from him to me, eyes wide, secretly thrilled.
Fifteen years old and already in demand!
She’s so like her uncle, at least in terms of her precocious talent, and I have one quick flash of the text message I haven’t replied to—Break a leg tonight, Sully—before Parker reaches for my hand.
She’s in a bright red, showstopping, sleeveless dress, taking up space the way she deserves to, faded scars on show for the first time.
And when she catches me looking at her arms, she says, ‘It’s part of my story, Audrey. Sara told me to own my narrative!’
‘You are my role model,’ I tell her. ‘I am fiercely proud of you.’
‘We are, too,’ Mum says, tears in her eyes. ‘Always choose music. Both of you.’
As the lights dim for the second act, my heart is bursting for this little group. My family. My dearest friends. The daughter I adore. The man who has become an equal ‘love of my life’.
I thought I’d have survivor guilt, being this happy. It shouldn’t be possible after a loss as shattering as mine. But Fraser took care of that the night he proposed.
Because somewhere else along the timeline, there’s a version of him who’s still alive. There’s a version of us that’s still together. There’s a place that will always be ours and a song that will ring endlessly into the universe, where he’ll be in every note that I’ll ever play.