Prologue Satoshi #4
‘Oh my god, Fiona, I can’t even tell you how much he’s annoying the shit out of me.’
This, at least, was safer territory. We’d both scraped our dishes clean and were nearing the bottom of our wineglasses by the time I’d finished telling her the latest instalment in the ongoing saga of Isamu channelling all his repressed emotion, about the fact he and Noriko had gone no-contact after their recent divorce and she’d elected to do all her business with us solely through me, into trying to micromanage my half of the Bibliophile/Tsundoku dual enterprise even more intensely than usual.
‘He’s been talking about moving out to the vineyard full time,’ I said.
‘Which would make my life easier, to be honest. It’s bad enough that he won’t shut up about me taking the MS. If he’d stuck his head in here tonight and caught me letting a customer help run service, he’d insist on being a god-like overseer of everything I do until the end of time. ’
‘I’ll never tell him, I swear.’ She drew a cross over her heart. ‘Although surely I’m not just another customer, Satoshi.’
‘Of course you’re not,’ I replied hoarsely, the simple sound of my name on her lips sending blood rushing to my head. ‘Do you think I complain about him to anyone who walks through the door? He’s my business partner as well as my brother. We have an image to maintain.’
Fiona chuckled. ‘In that spirit, then – can I complain about Matt for a minute?’
It was the worst thing she could have said.
There was nothing crueller than hope. That was one of the first lessons you learnt when you grew up the way I had, constantly uprooted the second you managed to settle somewhere.
If you allowed yourself to hope things might be different this time, you were only setting yourself up for pain.
Better to accept the things you could not control and focus on the ones you could.
Maybe if she hadn’t said it, there would have been a way out of this for me.
I could have drunk a lot of black coffee, taken a lot of cold showers, given myself a lot of sobering reminders about how extremely married she was.
Then, once I had exposed this impossible infatuation to enough time and air, it would oxidise, and I could tip it down the sink and get rid of it.
But she had said it, and now here it was: that awful flicker of hope.
‘Complain away,’ I said.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I love him, but sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in him.
’ Fiona leaned one elbow on the bar, resting her chin in her hand.
‘He made a big production of wanting to come here tonight so we could have a serious conversation, and I’m pretty sure it’s because he wants to have another baby—’
My soul left my body.
‘—but just the thought of it,’ she finished, thankfully unaware that my spirit was somewhere in the Milky Way, ‘makes me feel so, so fucking exhausted.’
‘Three kids are enough?’ I managed to force out.
‘More than. We’d originally agreed on two, but then – twins.’ She flashed me an almost apologetic smile. ‘It’s not even that, though. Do you remember when you told me about deciding to take the MS? How badly you wanted to do it?’
I nodded.
‘It made me think – what do I want?’
Fiona traced her fingers up and down the stem of her glass.
‘It’s not like I’m secretly yearning for some big career like Matt or my brothers have,’ she said.
‘I like my life. I’m incredibly privileged to have it – to be able to focus on the kids and write a bit on the side.
But there’s been this… thing that’s been niggling at me.
Matt will take me to one of his work functions, and the place card will say Matt Sinclair plus one, and no one will call me by name the whole night.
Or – I love my kids more than anything, but it’s so easy just to be their mum and not a person in my own right.
The thought of doing it all over again… I’m not…
hungry for it, the way you should be for a child.
I’m hungry for something else now – to be something else now, not just a wife, not just a mum – but I have no idea what. ’
She sighed. ‘I’m so jealous of you sometimes, Satoshi. You’re barely twenty-seven, and you know exactly who you are and what you’re doing with your life. I’m thirty-five and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.’
‘If you ever go into wine, there’s a job for you here.’ Icy adrenaline was pulsing through my veins, a primal desire to keep her here, safe, with me. ‘You just excelled in your trial shift. Get your Certified Somm qual, and I’ll hire you as my second-in-command tomorrow.’
Fiona looked at me, our eyes meeting for just a little too long. ‘Don’t tempt me,’ she said softly.
Something in me started to ache, and then it started to burn.
I wanted to say so many things. I wanted to do so many things. I wanted to reach out and caress a lock of her hair between my fingers and tell her that if she was ever in the market for something else – someone else – I would be right here waiting.
‘So, alas, I’ll have to politely decline,’ Fiona said. ‘It’s Birdie’s job anyway. I was just filling in.’
I was starting to feel light-headed, in the way that had, in the past, often preceded a panic attack. How was I supposed to let Fiona walk out the door tonight? How was I supposed to simply wave her goodbye and send her home to get potentially impregnated without offering her an alternative?
‘Speaking of Birdie – you’re not going to fire her, are you?’ she asked. ‘When I took her out the back to calm her down, she was worried that you were.’
And there it was. The reason I had fallen in love with her – and the reason I would never, ever have her.
Fiona Fisher-Sinclair was a fundamentally good person. All the way down to her bones, she was kind and considerate and loving, the kind of person who, when everyone else was frozen, was already on her feet to help.