Chapter 30
‘Leave,’ I repeated. ‘Sick leave?’ Was Matt under the weather? Was he still feeling dusty from the weekend and had decided to have a doona day? Is that why he hadn’t replied to my messages?
‘Umm... a day in lieu, I think,’ she said.
‘We’ve all been working such long hours, so we got given some extra leave to make up for it.
Matt emailed the team last night to let us know that he was taking a few days to get on top of wedding stuff.
Oh shit... maybe that was a surprise, and I’ve ruined it! ’
‘Don’t worry, Jen, I’m a good actress,’ I said with a forced laugh. ‘I’d better go. I just had a break between meetings and wanted to say hi to Matt.’
I made it out of the lobby before I began to breathe heavily. I stood on Castlereagh Street in the shadow of skyscrapers, hoping that no one I knew would spot me. Where should I go next? I’d planned to go to Matt’s hotel room and wait for him to finish his workday.
Our Sydney office was just around the corner. I knew that I could go there, find a spare office and regroup. No one would question why I was in Sydney – our staff were always popping up in random offices with wheelie bags.
No, I didn’t need to regroup. I just needed to know where Matt was. I needed to know that he was okay. What was he doing here? Or was he in Sydney at all? Had that been a lie too?
Matt. Are you okay? I just turned up at your office. In Sydney. But you’re on leave, doing wedding stuff? Where are you?
I didn’t really think about what I was writing, I just tapped furiously and pressed send. My phone lit up almost straightaway. It was him.
‘Matt, what’s going on?’ I asked before he’d even had a chance to say hello.
‘Are you really in Sydney?’ he asked. Did he sound a bit nervous? Or guilty? Or just himself?
‘Yes, on the street outside your office,’ I said. ‘Are you up here?’
‘I am. In Sydney. Not in the office,’ he said. ‘Can we meet?’
‘Yes! Of course we can meet. That’s why I’m here – to see you,’ I said.
‘I’ll meet you on the Woolloomooloo Wharf in twenty minutes,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But Matt—’
‘Let’s speak in person,’ he said, and ended the call.
I walked the familiar route to the wharf, the place where Matt and I often had dinner when we were both in Sydney for work, knowing that it would help to clear my head.
By the time I arrived, exactly twenty minutes later, I felt calmer.
There were lots of reasons why Matt might not have been in the office.
Maybe he’d arrived in Sydney for the meeting, realised he was exhausted after a huge weekend and decided to take a day.
Or maybe he was working on a secret squirrel project that his colleagues weren’t meant to know about.
Or maybe he had been doing surprise wedding preparations.
By the time I arrived and saw Matt, waiting for me at a restaurant where he’d already nabbed a table, I was convinced that I had overreacted and there was almost certainly a logical explanation.
Matt stood up when he saw me, and before he said anything my heart sank. Matt never looked worried – he existed on the emotional spectrum between joy and contentment. It took a lot to ruffle him, and right then he looked flustered.
‘Hi Becs,’ he said, but he didn’t lean forwards to kiss me, on the lips or at least on the cheek, like he normally would have. He sank down into his seat and took a sip from one of the glasses of wine that he’d already ordered for us.
I took the seat opposite him and stared at him expectantly with the same feeling of anticipatory dread I got before performance reviews, where I needed to brace myself in case I received bad news.
‘I didn’t have a meeting in Sydney. I’ve taken a few days of leave and I’m staying with one of my old uni mates who lives up here,’ he said, his face as serious as I’d ever seen it.
‘Why?’
‘I thought it might be a good idea to give you some space,’ he said.
‘Space?’
‘To work out whatever you need to work out,’ he said. ‘With Alex.’
‘There’s nothing to work out with Alex,’ I said quickly.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I saw you guys talking at Arlo’s party. And when he was looking after you at our place. There’s s omething between you two,’ he said.
‘We had some stuff to talk about, sure,’ I admitted. ‘But I’ve done nothing behind your back. Yes, I should have told you about him the day he turned up at work instead of ambushing you at breakfast the next day. But I’ve already apologised for that. We talked that through.’
There was a pause as Matt stared intently at his drink. ‘You’re right, it’s not about Alex,’ Matt said. He finally looked up at me. ‘I think he’s just another thing that you’ve been using to keep distance between us.’
I stared at him.
‘I wasn’t giving you space. I think I needed some space to think,’ Matt admitted.
‘I never understood why you were so obsessed with the curse. I didn’t get it.
You’re so rational, and this fixation was so irrational .
But on the way back from my buck’s, when you told me that you’d made a mistake on our wedding form.
.. well, I did just enough psychology at uni to wonder if maybe sometimes a mistake isn’t a mistake.
That it’s a manifestation of what we unconsciously, secretly want. ’
I felt like I was on one of those theme-park rides where the bottom fell out from under your feet. Except my solid ground was Matt. Or it had been. My cream silk shirt began to cling to me as I broke into a nervous sweat.
‘And the one question,’ Matt continued, ‘I’d kept pushing down for the last few months finally came to the surface and just kept circling around my mind: Does she believe in the curse because she doesn’t want to marry me?’
He reached for the stem of his glass with a slightly shaky hand but didn’t take a sip.
‘I’d been flying to Sydney for work so much that I think I convinced myself that going to the airport and buying a plane ticket wasn’t really a big deal.
I knew that if I went to stay with my parents or one of my sisters, I’d have to tell them what was going on.
And I knew that if it was easy to come home and be with you, then I would.
And I wouldn’t be able to think clearly.
I’d just keep organising our wedding, stay busy checking everything off our list. But I did need some time to think. ’
I stared at him in shock. Matt had fled to another state. Because he’d needed space. From me. Because, deep down, he didn’t think I wanted to marry him.
As I took a sip of my own wine, I felt that door deep inside me, wide open for the first time in decades as I’d poured my soul into my vows, slam shut.
I’d thought that Matt was the one person who would never, ever blindside me.
I’d been wrong. I couldn’t taste the chablis, which was almost certainly excellent.
‘The curse is broken.’ I could see his face fall when he realised that I hadn’t protested, that I hadn’t screamed, Yes, of course I want to marry you, Matt!
‘What?’ he finally asked, looking confused.
‘It turns out that Alex proposed to me on our last night together in Oxford,’ I said quickly. ‘I didn’t remember it because I’d taken a Xanax after drinking, and I lost a few hours.’
‘You got engaged. But you were so high on prescription drugs you don’t remember it. Actually, that’s a good thing because you broke your family’s curse, which you don’t believe in except you really, totally do.’ Matt neatly summarised exactly what I’d said with a dangerously steady voice.
I nodded. I could tell that he was annoyed, that by mentioning the curse I’d flung petrol onto the flames of his doubt.
‘But that’s not good news, Becs. If we follow the logic of the curse, I’m the second fiancé, so we’ll make it down the aisle. But we’ll be the ones in a terrible marriage. I’ll be your alcoholic, emotionally repressed grandpa. Or your workaholic, self-centred dad.’
I felt every muscle in my body stiffen.
‘I think we’re getting distracted here,’ I said.
‘You lied to me. You ran away to another city instead of talking to me about our relationship. I had to chase you across the country to try to fix a mistake.’ I pulled the form, a bit crumpled after a day of travel, out of my bag.
I pushed it across the table towards him. Matt’s face fell.
‘Yeah, I’m sorry, that was really shit of me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I’m not... very good at facing up to things. My instinct is just to smooth things over. I thought if I gave us some space then, I don’t know... everything would be okay.’
Matt hated conflict. He would always give someone the benefit of the doubt, to decide that something wasn’t worth kicking up a fuss about, to try to see the bigger picture.
I knew that tendency made him so excellent at his job – he instinctively knew how to forge a path through tricky situations.
It was one of the qualities I admired in him.
He picked up the piece of paper sitting in front of him. To an outsider, it might have looked as though he was reading it carefully. But I knew him well enough to see that his mind was elsewhere, that he couldn’t even see the words on the page in front of him.
‘Can I have a think about this?’ he asked. I felt my stomach churn. Matt looked surprised by his own words.
Not again. Not you, Matt. Please don’t leave me. Everyone always leaves.
A wave of nausea rolled through me. I felt like someone had turned off the light switch in my brain, as if everything was darkness. I bit my lip and didn’t reply. Because I knew that whatever I said would be a version of please stay – in this case please marry me . And I couldn’t, not again.
‘Why don’t we have breakfast together tomorrow morning?’ he suggested. There was no invitation to stay with him. I didn’t even know the friend he was staying with.