Chapter 15
CHAPTER
If Ferne had two functioning ankles, she’d kick the couch in frustration. Instead, she had her left ankle in a moon boot with crutches propped nearby, so she lay on the couch feeling sorry for herself.
Damn her clumsiness. If she believed in karma, she’d think that all the bad thoughts she’d been harbouring towards Mac since she’d entered the apartment yesterday had cursed her.
But her fractured ankle had more to do with her lack of coordination than any residual bad juju Mac might’ve left here or his malevolent spirit haunting her.
She’d waited for eight hours in emergency before her ankle had been X-rayed and the awful news delivered.
Though it could’ve been worse; with a hairline fracture of the fibula, she could get away with a walking boot rather than a plaster cast, but the recommended six weeks’ immobility meant no hiking across New Zealand glaciers for her.
Bette had dropped her home an hour ago, with a promise to return with dinner.
Ferne initially refused, but she had a feeling not many people said no to Bette.
The woman ran her own advertising agency and had her boss voice down pat.
Ferne could imagine her ordering a bunch of underlings to do her bidding, but Bette’s kindness since Ferne had taken a tumble this morning had been a welcome surprise.
Having no friends in the city hadn’t mattered when Ferne had plans to travel, but with her intention to join the jet-set crew on hold, she could do with a friend.
Thankfully, the ultra-modern apartment could be controlled from an app on her phone, so when Bette buzzed to be let in downstairs, Ferne tapped a button on her phone to open the apartment building’s front door.
A few minutes later, Bette opened the apartment door Ferne had left unlocked and breezed in, brandishing two brown paper bags emitting the most delicious aromas of garlic, ginger and chilli.
‘There’s a great Asian restaurant two blocks from here that serves a mix of Korean, Chinese and Thai food, so I grabbed a bit of everything.
Pork and chive dumplings in special chilli oil, bibimbap and a beef massaman curry.
’ Bette placed the bags on the kitchen counter.
‘How’s the leg? Is it okay if I serve a bit of everything for you and we eat on the sofa? ’
‘The ankle is throbbing a bit, but I took the anti-inflammatories the doc prescribed. Feel free to eat at the table if you want.’
‘I live on my own and often eat on the sofa while watching TV, so it’s no big deal if I join you over there. Where are your plates and cutlery?’
Ferne hated sounding like an idiot, but she had a feeling nothing would shock her new friend. ‘I don’t know. I only arrived last night, remember?’
Bette’s eyebrows rose a tad. ‘But I assumed you owned this city pad when you said you’re from the country?’
Ferne had two options: lie to Bette like she’d been lying to herself for years about the state of her marriage—and more recently, the extent of Mac’s treachery—or tell her the truth.
‘This place was my husband’s love nest. I only discovered it existed after he died five months ago.’
Bette gaped at her, before recovering her wits and lifting plastic containers out of the paper bags. ‘Was he the love of your life?’
Ferne respected her for not offering condolences. If stating that this apartment was Mac’s hidey-hole for his lover wasn’t enough of a clue to how she felt, her acerbic tone would’ve clued Bette in.
‘Hell, no. We were nothing more than housemates for many years and when he died, I discovered why he never came near me.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Yep.’
‘Want to talk about it?’ Bette pulled a bottle of chardonnay out of one of the bags. ‘I’ve got some truth serum here.’
Ferne laughed. ‘Right now, I’d rather eat.’
Bette smiled. ‘Coming right up, queen.’
Ferne watched Bette open cupboards until she discovered crockery and glasses, dished their dinner onto two plates, and poured wine into two glasses.
Mac and Jesse must’ve entertained, because they had eight of everything: champagne flutes, wine glasses, martini glasses, whiskey glasses and beer schooners.
Once again, it struck her how little she knew about her husband and the alternative life he’d shared with someone else.
But seeing evidence of his relationship with Jesse explained his foul mood whenever he returned to the farm after one of his ‘business’ trips.
‘Here you go.’ Bette handed her a plate laden with food and Ferne’s stomach gave an embarrassingly loud rumble.
‘This smells so good,’ she said, inhaling the spicy aromas and salivating. ‘The only good thing to come out of today was meeting you.’
To Ferne’s surprise, Bette’s eyes misted over a little.
‘Maybe Obi does have the Force after all, because I was in the doldrums this morning and the only reason why I left the house was because I needed dog food and thought I’d get a coffee on the way.’
Doldrums could mean anything from a bad start to the day to clinical depression, and while Ferne didn’t want to pry, the thought of this bright, confident woman putting on a brave face and caring for her while going through her own tough stuff made Ferne feel a tad selfish.
‘Everything okay?’
‘Nothing a few glasses or ten won’t fix,’ Bette said, lifting her wine in a toast. ‘Here’s to forgetting exes exist.’
Ferne picked up her wine from the coffee table and raised it to clink Bette’s glass. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
Bette sat on the armchair next to her, and they fell silent as they ate. A comfortable silence, nothing like the tension that had existed between her and Mac at the dinner table.
Ferne savoured the spicy curry with its lemongrass and coconut milk undertones, the flavourful rice, pork and vegetable bibimbap, and the succulent dumplings in a chilli oil that lingered long after the final mouthful.
She patted her stomach and sighed with contentment after she’d scraped her plate clean.
‘You need to give me the name of that restaurant, Bette, because I see a lot of Uber Eats in my future.’
‘Lee’s House of Fusion.’ Bette kissed her fingertips. ‘The food is always incredible.’
The meal Ferne had practically drooled over turned to lead in her stomach. Lee was Jesse’s surname, and while it was a common Asian surname, the proximity of this apartment to the restaurant made her wonder if Jesse Lee had an association with it.
‘What’s wrong?’ Bette took her plate and handed her a wine. ‘You look like that last dumpling didn’t agree with you.’
‘Jesse Lee was my husband’s lover. The surname could be a coincidence, but considering how close the restaurant is to this place …’
Bette’s eyes widened and she paled. ‘I’ve never seen Jesse, his grandmother does most of the cooking, but apparently he’s incredible in the kitchen too.’ Her gaze flicked to Ferne’s empty plate. ‘He makes all the dumplings from scratch.’
For the second time that day, nausea swamped Ferne in an unwelcome wave. What were the odds she’d just consumed dumplings that Mac had probably sampled countless times?
‘I’m sorry, Ferne.’
She shook her head. ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. How could you envisage serving me food cooked by my husband’s lover?’
‘Did you know your husband was gay?’
‘No. We met in our late thirties, and I had my son Cruz at forty, so we never had the full-on giddy sparks of youthful love. I’d resigned myself to being single and childless, so when Mac came along and charmed me, I thought, why not?
Once I had Cruz, the sex dwindled to nothing, and I thought it was me. ’
Stricken, Bette grabbed Ferne’s hand. ‘That’s awful, his selfishness affecting your self-worth.’
Ferne shrugged like it meant little, when in reality she’d cried herself to sleep some nights back then, wondering if pregnancy had changed her body to the extent her husband couldn’t stand to be inside her.
She’d read up on it, how vaginas stretch and loosen, but had never had the guts to come out and ask Mac directly.
In that manic first year of Cruz’s life, she’d almost been relieved Mac didn’t want sex, but as Cruz became a toddler, she wanted answers.
She instigated sex a few times, trying everything from sexy lingerie to porn, but Mac had been gruff in his rebuttals, and when she finally plucked up the courage to ask him why he didn’t want to have intercourse anymore, he said he was having erectile dysfunction problems and didn’t want to burden her.
Turned out, his impotency had been a result of her being a woman.
‘I prefer not to think about those wasted years,’ Ferne said, wanting to lighten the mood. ‘To think, I could’ve been rooting every farmer in the district to get satisfaction.’
Bette laughed, squeezed her hand and released it. ‘Does that mean you haven’t had sex for almost thirty years?’
‘Who said anything about not having sex?’
Bette’s mouth formed a shocked O before she rubbed her hands together. ‘Tell me more.’
‘You’re not disgusted by my infidelity?’
‘Honey, after discovering your connection to Jesse in some weird six degrees of separation, nothing surprises me.’
‘Actually, I didn’t have sex when I bumped into my first boyfriend, but I wanted to. I ran into him about ten years ago, not long after Cruz left home and moved to Melbourne to work. He’s a chef. Cruz, I mean, not my first love.’
Bette’s eyebrows rose. ‘Is it weird that your son and your husband’s secret lover are both chefs?’
‘What would be weirder is if they know each other.’ Ferne snorted. ‘But Melbourne isn’t Rosevale Grove, where everyone knows each other, so in a city with thousands of restaurants, I think it’s safe to say they haven’t crossed paths.’
She hoped. She hadn’t told Cruz the truth about his father yet, and the thought of him knowing Jesse turned her stomach.
What if they’d met and Cruz liked Jesse?
Worse, what if they were friends? Crazy, because as she’d just said to Bette, the chances of them knowing each other in a city of millions because of their profession would be remote.
‘Tell me more about this grand first love.’
‘I was a late bloomer, so dated him in my mid-twenties. We had a scorching attraction, but he had zero ambition, whereas I was already a social worker hellbent on saving troubled youth. He worked part-time jobs so he could travel, but I wanted nothing more than to help teens doing it tough. I got tired of his laidback attitude and broke up with him because I envisioned a stable future, not one where I followed him around to the ends of the earth.’
Ferne knew the reason why she’d never had a serious relationship between Taj and Mac.
Taj had been ‘the one’ for her, that kind of physical connection that is rarely replicated, and in marrying Mac, she’d settled.
Jaded with her job and living in an increasingly violent city where teens as young as thirteen committed crimes with machetes and worse, the prospect of living on a farm far removed from Melbourne had held a certain appeal.
Mac had been gentle and charming, and she imagined growing old with him in the sun-dappled shade of their avocado orchards.
And while her marriage had become an empty ruse, she always counted her blessings in having Cruz when she’d resigned herself to being childless.
‘So how did you cross paths again?’
‘Mac and I own an avocado farm, and we hire seasonal pickers and packers. Mac was on one of his business jaunts, which I now know meant a rendezvous with Jesse, and I ran into my ex on the farm.’
‘Serendipitous.’
‘It felt like it at the time.’
Ferne remembered the way her heart clenched when Taj loped towards her through the avocado orchard, his smile still packing a powerful punch after decades apart.
His green eyes, all the more startling with his olive skin, lit up in the way they always had when he saw her, and her legs had crumpled.
She’d sagged against the nearest tree, bumping her head on an avocado in the process, and that had broken the tension as they’d laughed until tears streamed from their eyes.
When he took her into his arms, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to kiss him, until reality crashed over her in a tsunami of reality.
She couldn’t escape Kinstead Avocados no matter how badly she yearned to, because the farm was Cruz’s legacy, and she’d put up with a lot to ensure her son inherited it.
Her parents had left her with nothing, and she’d vowed when she had Cruz that she’d do whatever it took to ensure he never wanted for anything.
Bette tapped her on the forearm. ‘You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful.’
‘Not much to tell. We didn’t sleep together despite a residual attraction that made my hair stand on end, and he left, but not before he asked me to go with him and I refused. He wanted to stay in touch, but I didn’t want to be reminded of what I wanted but couldn’t have, so that was that.’
‘Have you ever researched him online?’
Ferne shook her head, a pang of yearning surprising her after all these years. ‘Why put myself through that?’
‘Even after your husband died?’
‘No. I was too busy seething over his stupid will stipulation to think about an old flame.’
Ferne expected Bette to ask about Mac’s will but to her credit, her new friend had class as well as being a good listener.
‘Want to know what I think?’
Ferne chuckled at the mischievous sparkle in Bette’s eyes. ‘I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.’
Bette pointed to the walking boot. ‘Between that thing and the crutches, you’re not totally immobile, so if you want some fun, why don’t you look him up?’
The thought had crossed Ferne’s mind on more than one occasion since Mac died, but what would be the point? Taj could be anywhere in the world. Besides, she finally had her life back, and she had clear plans of how she wanted to live it. The last thing she needed was a man.
‘Did you bring dessert?’ Ferne asked, unable to eat another thing but wanting to distract Bette.
Bette laughed. ‘Nice diversion. I got some delicious mango pudding, but I don’t think you should eat any, in case Jesse made it.’
Ferne joined in Bette’s laughter, glad she’d made a new friend despite the circumstances.
She may have loved being part of the Rosevale Grove community but could count the number of close friends she had on one hand.
Meeting Bette had been fortuitous. Having company in the weeks ahead would help time to pass quicker.
Being stuck between the four walls where her husband had loved someone unconditionally would be painful enough without adding loneliness to the mix.