Chapter Thirty-four #2
‘Just listen. Okay?’ She grabbed my arm.
‘I feel like I’ve been protected. And that you not telling me about Felix was you protecting me again.
Sometimes that is really disempowering. Maybe we can work through some of that, find ways to let you share things with me properly.
But I think it was unfair that I didn’t acknowledge the other side of you protecting me.
That you can’t help it, because it’s how we’ve survived.
And that you allowed me to have a childhood that you probably never had because you protected me from the bad stuff.
I know you did, Mary. I wish you could just have been my sister, and I grieve that.
But I also know that I had you as a parent, when you only had half of one.
I’m so grateful for that. So grateful. I should never have made you feel like I wasn’t. ’
She was crying and I pulled her into my arms. ‘Oh, darling girl.’
‘I just want to be able to be there for you too, Mary.’
I nodded and gripped her, tears coursing down my face too.
‘And I want you to live a life for yourself. Not just for Mum and me. Because the guilt of that would be too much. I want to know that you are fulfilling your needs as well.’
Abel’s words drifted to the front of my mind. These were the two people in the world who I valued most, and at some point, I needed to think about what they were telling me.
But right now, it was a mess. Wasn’t it my stupid needs and my lack of focus that had landed us in this situation?
‘We’ll work it all out.’ I squeezed her, my tears settling. ‘I think for now I just need to be closer to you guys, so this doesn’t happen again.’
She pulled away and clutched my arms like she needed to shake me with the words she was trying to say.
‘No. No. This is exactly what I mean. You need to stop thinking that you can control if this happens again or not. You need to stop thinking that all of this – all Mum’s shit, and me and the kids – is your responsibility. ’
‘But I want to help you.’
‘You can and you do. You’ve modelled parenting for me, Mary. You’ve allowed me to look after my children as a strong adult. You’ve done everything you could have, but you can’t stop yourself living the life you want to live so you can be here watching us forever.’
‘But if something like this happens—’
‘Then I call you, like I did today, and you’ll help us.’ Her voice changed suddenly, a suspicious quality emerging. ‘Except you didn’t answer the phone for, like, almost an hour. Where the fuck were you?’
I felt myself flush. She was one of those girls, Ebony. A romance reader, a sleuth for sexual misadventure.
And sure enough, her eyes widened.
‘You were with Abel, weren’t you?’
‘We were out of range. I called as soon as I could.’
‘Out of range? Staying in some sexy mountain lodge?’
‘At his parents’.’
‘At his parents’!’
‘In the shed loft. They couldn’t hear us. Which was just as well, I have to say.’
She was wolf-whistling now. This was the sort of story Ebony lived for. ‘Oh my God. So, you’re having sex. Is it amazing?’
‘It was the first time … and yes.’
She fist pumped. ‘I knew it! The sexual tension between you guys was enough to strum a Taylor Swift song on. And how do you feel now?’
I forced myself not to give a censored version, to be honest with her. ‘I feel awful. The last few hours before I got on the plane were sickening and I barely said a word to him. And now I’ll probably never see him again.’
‘What?’ she spat. ‘For fuck’s sake, Mary! Of course you’ll see him again. What are you going to do – move back in with Mum?’
‘There’s so much up in the air, I can’t even think about it right now. Plus, I’ve probably lost my job in Hobart anyway.’
I went on to explain the phone call with the director. It had been plaguing me, and my confidence in what I had or hadn’t done was extremely thin, heading towards non-existent. Maybe he was right. Maybe I’d made a big, fat, irreversible cock-up.
Ebony listened and frowned, her face full of fury and passion. How could I not want this girl on my team? How could I not share with her the shit I was going through? It had felt scary and vulnerable but I realised it was fine. It was good.
‘I bet Felix is involved. That lying, shitting fuckwit.’
I shook my head. ‘No, this is my fault. I got distracted and I probably did do something stupid—’
I stopped. Felix had been there on that shift. He’d not been involved with the patient but I distinctly remember him being around. Snarling at me, making me feel uneasy.
My pulse quickened. Had he been watching me these last few months? Waiting to call me out on a mistake I made? Mistakes happened all the time, mostly not critical, but they were inevitable – humans are imperfect. Except, if I hadn’t made a mistake …
‘If Felix were to have made anything up,’ I said slowly, as I thought it through, ‘he’d be putting himself at extremely high risk …’
‘And he’s an extremely small-brained dick of a man, so I would not put anything past him.’
‘Do you know he cheated on me?’
‘Yeah. I guessed as much. Would have been nice if you’d just told me at the time, but he’s always had his colours clearly visible. Cheating, lying fucker.’
It was a pleasure just to hear her say the words.
My mind was spinning. It was too late to do anything further today, but tomorrow it would probably at least be worth the question: Who’d raised the concern?
Because in that moment of altered perspective, with my little sister’s arm linked through mine, filling me with love and appreciation and confidence, my hyperfocused, über-disciplined, Type-A brain was one hundred per cent fucking sure I had not charted goddamn potassium for any patient that day.