Chapter Nineteen 2020 #4
Since Georgia left a few weeks ago, a curious energy had hummed between us.
“You didn’t need fixing,” he said, leaning towards me across the bench. “You were perfect just the way you were.”
I smiled, knowing he was lying, but also that he wasn’t. I picked up the bamboo steamer, which was so ridiculously large I had to hoist it onto my hip. “Save me a dance, will you?”
I went back into the crowded main shed, wondering if he was watching me leave. By the time I’d distributed the sausage rolls, the evening had reached its raucous peak and everyone was ready to dance. Finn and Louis were singing along to the band’s rendition of “Free Fallin’.”
“I want to move here!” Louis shouted in my ear when I was nearby. “I’ll become a vintner and we can live here together!”
The band began playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and the shed, packed with sweaty dancers, immediately paired off into couples.
Louis and Finn were swaying to the music, arm in arm.
Jack appeared, and he pulled me into the centre of the dance floor, his big hands on my waist. It was one of those moments when it feels like the movie credits are rolling on your life, when all the thoughts in your head go quiet, and you can only feel gratitude for the people around you.
I slung my arms around Jack’s neck, unbothered by the consequences of our proximity for once.
The heat of his body was radiating through his shirt collar and the band’s plodding bass reverberated through me.
We stayed intertwined through four songs, ignoring Paula’s curious eye and the smash of a dropped glass from somewhere in the shed.
Unchecked, my fingers combed through his bristly nape.
When two sweaty hands landed on our shoulders, we broke apart, guilty and confused.
It was Tom the wine wholesaler, who’d arrived at the party late, drunk and thrilled to see Jack.
Jack’s arms left my waist, and he reached forward to shake Tom’s hand, looking dazed.
I left them to catch up, relieved and disappointed in equal measure.
It wasn’t until I went outside to cool off that I realised I didn’t know where Louis had gone.
I looked for him in the crowds hovering around the bonfires and in the grape arbour before heading back into the shed to search for him among the slow-dancing couples.
“He said he was off to bed,” Paula said, collecting the abandoned glasses that had accumulated on every surface. “He’s got an early start tomorrow.”
It had been a good night. Everyone was sweat-slick and drunk and stinking of woodsmoke.
As the crowd dwindled, I wheeled the recycling bin inside and began picking up empty glass bottles and napkins.
The band packed up their gear and chatted in low, hoarse voices.
I could see Jack through the shed doors cleaning up the kitchen and farewelling the guests as they wandered past him and into the dark.
I was weary, but my heart was full. As I started to sweep up, Paula came over and took the broom from my hands.
“You’ve done enough—go to bed. We’ll finish everything off in the morning,” she said. She looked over my shoulder as Jack approached the shed doors. “You too, love. Thanks, but go to bed.”
We left the shed in silence, heading back to the cottage on the hill.
It was a clear night, laden with stars. I wrapped my bare arms around myself to stay warm, and Jack draped his jacket over my shoulders.
How many times had we done this? On so many nights, we’d walked out of noisy bars and movie theatres and fallen into a companionable silence as we approached our shared cottage and the wall that separated us.
“Want to come in for one more drink?” Jack asked.
“Sure,” I said lightly, trying to pretend it was nothing. “Did you have a good night?”
“Yeah. I think Louis had a good time—once he stopped worrying about everyone looking at him to make sure he was having a good time.” He glanced at me. “You used to do the same thing.”
I felt my face go warm. We were cutting through the narrow path between the vines, the grape leaves brushing our arms as we walked.
“I did?”
“Not so much anymore,” he said.
I imagined him watching me in those first few years, when we were new to each other and I was still coming out of the fog of my old life.
When Finn and I first met Jack, we were practically children—immature and half-formed, spoilt and largely incompetent, learning how to save lives rather than tending to our own.
“You’ve been comparing Louis and me,” I said. “I’m the experiment, he’s the control group.”
He stopped and looked at me in the dim glow of the stars.
“You’re the wine stored in oak—he’s the wine stored in steel,” he said, smiling. His jacket wrapped me in the scent of him, and I pretended not to enjoy it. We kept walking, the gravel crunching under our feet.
“It’s not a comparison,” he added. “I just feel like I understand you better, that’s all.”
“We’ve been watched our whole lives.”
“I know.”
“It makes you… I don’t know… unable to tell the difference between reality and what you’re trying to make seem real.”
“It makes sense. Everyone’s probably doing that. For you two, it’s just on a whole different level.”
“I don’t know what happened to him, actually,” I said, eager to change the subject before I said too much. “He must have gone to bed an hour ago.”
As we turned the corner on our verandah, we saw them: Louis and Finn kissing among the vines.
They were under a halo of starlight, and they were oblivious to us.
They were laughing and necking, two young people drunk on wine and each other.
I glanced at Jack, who seemed briefly stunned but rearranged his face when he caught my gaze.
He must have sensed my discomfort, because he looked at me kindly and shrugged.
“Time to call it a night,” he whispered. I watched as he slipped through the cottage door. Before he closed himself in for the night, he gestured with his chin towards my barn, telling me without words that it was none of our business. I was to go to bed and leave my brother to his own reality.
Louis’s flight was at dawn, but when I came to the cottage at the agreed-upon hour, the living room was dark and empty.
My irrational anger rising, I found the guest bed empty.
I went back to the living room again and stood there, wondering what to do, wondering what Jack would do.
But there was no other option. I stalked over to Finn’s door and knocked softly, though my fist was ready to punch it wide open.
“Louis,” I murmured, “we’ve got to go. Your flight’s in an hour.”
There was a deep silence, then a rustling of bedclothes, the padding of bare feet on the wooden floors. The door opened a crack and Louis peered through it, his hair a mess but his face still perfect in its hungover state.
“Come on,” I urged. “Are you packed?”
“Yeah,” he croaked. “Give me a second, would you?”
“I’ll be in the car.”
Through the windshield, I watched the clouds turn gold to herald the rising sun.
The clock counted down the minutes to Louis’s flight.
By the time he came out of the cottage with his bag over his shoulder, his security guards had twice knocked on my window to ask where he was.
He barely had the door shut before I hit the pedal and kicked up a spurt of gravel as I accelerated down the path.
A van was idling outside the gate, and it flicked on its high beams once I turned onto the road.
I had no doubt it was a photographer. Someone must have posted photos from the party on social media.
They would have torn through the internet in a few hours, landing in the inbox of a tabloid editor with just enough time and plenty of hustle to hire a stringer in southern Tasmania.
Louis was silent in the passenger seat as we drove. His security team managed to put their four-wheel drive between us and the photographer’s van.
“Louis,” I said.
“What?”
“What happened last night—”
“Is none of your business.”
“Okay, sure, yes. But I have to say this.” He sighed and looked out the window, but I went on. “You said you’re being careful. Do you really think going to a party with a bunch of strangers and then sleeping with a guy you barely know is being careful?”
He sighed again.
“Are you sure no one else saw you but me? What do you know about Finn except that he’s my friend?”
“Are you saying you’re friends with someone who’s not trustworthy?” he snapped.
“I just…” I faltered. “What about Kris?”
“You don’t know anything about us.”
“Look, do what you want,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just saying that you’re taking a lot of risks. You’re skiing down volcanoes and hooking up with guys you don’t know that well. It just seems like you either have a death wish or you want to get caught.”
We were silent for the rest of the drive to the airport, which didn’t take long since I was doing ninety in a sixty zone.
He was making this flight and getting off this island if it killed me.
I couldn’t contemplate the possibility of him missing his plane and having to mope around the vineyard for another day.
When I pulled into the drop-off zone, he got out of the car and retrieved his bag from the boot.
The four-wheel drive pulled up behind us, and Rory, a long-time officer on Louis’s detail, got out and approached us.
“Sir, we should get you inside immediately,” he said. “There’s press arriving, but we’ve called ahead and the airport staff will let you wait for your flight in a private area.”
“Thanks, Rory,” I heard Louis say. “Just give me a moment.”
The boot slammed and my brother came around to lean through the open passenger window.
“Look, you don’t get to tell me what to do,” he said in a low voice. “You left. You left me to carry this whole thing on my shoulders. You want me to come out and tell everyone the truth. But even if I wanted to do that, I couldn’t. And you know why? Because you left me.”
I stared through the windshield as a flush of adrenaline made my heart race. “You stole her ring.”
“Huh?”
“Mum’s ring,” I said, louder. I looked over at him. “She left that to me. You and Papa stole it.”
He rested his head on his forearms and sighed. When he looked back up, I could tell he was through with me. “And what are you going to do with it, Lexi? Pawn it so you don’t have to rely on James for money anymore? Grow up.”
All around us, travellers were getting out of cars. Their loved ones got out too, helping them with their bags, hugging them tight and wishing them a safe journey. Meanwhile, I stayed where I was.
“The photographer’s back there,” I said quietly. He had pulled up to the kerb opposite us and cracked a window open just enough to reveal the glinting shark eye of a camera lens. “You should go.”
Louis smiled at me, but the smile was for the camera.
“See you at the wedding,” he said.
That was the last time Louis and I were alone together.
The next time I saw him, ten days later, I would be invited to as many prenuptial celebrations as a problematic distant cousin.
I stood at the altar behind Amira in a gown made according to measurements I had sent to her designer’s atelier via email.
It was baggy around the waist, but there was no one to ask about a seamstress who could help me, so I’d pinned the inside with safety pins instead.
Kris stood solemnly behind Louis, his best man and the love of his life.
All three of them avoided my eyes for the thirty-six hours I was in London.
After the wedding pictures were taken, Stewart took me aside and slipped me a manila envelope.
It was a non-disclosure agreement, demanding that I acknowledge the intimate relationship between Louis, Papa and myself and vow never to disclose confidential information to outsiders.
If I spoke about my father or my brother, I would open myself to legal action.
It was a unilateral contract: while I was silenced, they were free to talk about me.
We had always kept each other’s secrets. But now theirs would be protected by law and mine could be wielded like a weapon.
“Have your lawyer look it over,” Stewart said.
“I can’t afford a lawyer.”
He bowed his head and said nothing. I knew that he had delivered the same papers to Mum when the divorce became final.
That was the moment she knew she’d been cast out of the family.
When he handed me a fountain pen, I scrawled my signature on the lines marked with cartoonish yellow arrows and handed the papers back to him.
“Goodbye, Stewart,” I said and went back to the room in the palace where I was staying, removed my ill-fitting dress, packed my things and took a train to the airport.
When I got home, I lay on the couch in the cottage for three days and stared at the television while Jack silently fretted and brought me buttered toast and tea.
But back then, as I idled at the kerb while Louis swung his bag over his shoulder and walked away from me, we didn’t know that was it.
If I had known what was coming—a terse text exchange every year on our birthday, a wall of snow that would obliterate him—I would have climbed out of the car and thrown my arms around him.