CHAPTER FOUR #2
"Can I ask you something invasive," Josie said, "and you can tell me to get stuffed."
"Go on."
"Does he know? Kowalski."
Pip watched the fire down the beach a moment, the shapes of everyone moving around it, Dom with the baby on his hip, swaying gently the way new fathers learn to sway without noticing they've started doing it, Cal's arm slung loose over the back of Renz's chair even though Renz himself was up refilling something nobody had asked him to refill, moving between the fire and the tables with the same unhurried purposefulness he brought to everything.
"He knows there's something," she said. "I don't think he knows the shape of it.
I'm not sure I've ever said it out loud where he could hear the whole thing at once. "
"Why not?"
"Because —" and here Pip stopped, and started again, the way you do when you're finding a sentence for the first time in the act of saying it, feeling for the shape of a truth she'd only ever half-articulated to herself.
"Because he's the most stayed-put person I have ever met in my life, and I am not staying-put shaped, and it feels — unfair, almost, to hand him someone like me.
Like giving a bloke who's spent his whole life building a house a woman who keeps the moving truck's number on speed dial.
He deserves someone who'll actually be there in ten years, not someone who's spent nine years proving, over and over, that she can leave a place clean and quick and never look back. "
Josie was quiet a second, turning her own drink slowly, the ice long since melted into something flat and warm that neither of them was actually drinking anymore.
Then: "Cal flew helicopters into fires for six years because some part of him thought that was the only way he'd ever be allowed to be useful enough to keep.
Took a flood and a woman half-drowned to work out that being loved and being useful were two different things.
" She looked at Pip directly now, not unkindly.
"I'd bet good money Kowalski's running the same arithmetic in reverse.
He doesn't need a woman who stays effortlessly — that'd just prove staying's a gift he wasn't born with.
He needs someone whose staying costs her something, same as his usefulness costs him.
Same broken arithmetic. Nobody owing anybody a debt they can't pay off. "
Pip didn't answer that. She didn't have an answer for it, not yet — the sentence had landed somewhere too deep and unexamined for a reply to reach it, and she found, sitting there with the fire going down the beach and the gathering's noise rolling soft over the water, that she needed a minute simply to sit inside what had just been said to her rather than immediately trying to argue her way out from underneath it, which had always, historically, been her first instinct with anything that got too close to true.
Mia came back eventually with the esky and three drinks she hadn't been asked to fetch, reading the shifted temperature of the conversation and choosing, with the same practical instinct that had kept her alive flying into places most pilots wouldn't touch, to bring something with her rather than arrive empty-handed into a silence she didn't fully understand.
The conversation, by unspoken agreement, moved somewhere lighter after that — Mia's stories were good for that, endless and slightly implausible and entirely without an agenda — but Pip carried Josie's sentence with her the rest of the evening, turning it over the way you turn over a stone you're not sure yet whether you want to keep or throw back.
? ? ?
Later, well past dark, Pip found Renz alone at the fire pit, feeding driftwood in one careful piece at a time, the way he did everything, unhurried and precise, watching the flame catch each new piece before reaching for the next, and she sat down beside him without asking, close enough now that their shoulders did touch, finally, for the length of one held breath.
"Jax was looking at that chair again," she said, meaning the empty one, front row, facing the flames.
"Jax looks at a lot of things."
"You left the gap this morning. Before anyone else arrived."
Renz fed another piece of driftwood into the fire and watched it catch, the small orange flare of it lighting his face for a moment before settling back into the general glow. "Always leave a spare," he said. "You never know."
"You never leave a spare in the front row, Renz.
You leave it at the back, near the esky, where it's easy to grab if someone needs it.
That's what you did every other year I've been coming to this.
You put this one by the fire. Facing the water.
And it's exactly my size." She said it gently, the way you'd point out a thing to someone you didn't want to spook, the same careful economy Josie had used with her twenty minutes earlier, and she understood, saying it, that she'd absorbed something from that conversation at the boat shed without quite meaning to, a small transferred permission to say a true thing plainly instead of circling it forever.
He didn't answer for a long moment, and the fire popped and threw a little shower of light across both their faces, and when he finally spoke his voice had none of its usual flat closing certainty in it — just something smaller, and a good deal more honest, the sound of a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying carefully for a long time without ever quite admitting the weight was there.
"I don't know what I'm doing half the time when it comes to you," he said.
"I know how to run a gathering for forty people.
I know everyone's coffee order and every kid's exam schedule and I can read a fireground faster than any bloke on this coast. But I sat down this morning and left a gap in a row of chairs without deciding to, and I've been avoiding looking directly at it all day, because I think if I look at it too long I'll have to admit what it's for. "
"What's it for?" Pip asked, very quietly, though she already knew, and he already knew she knew, and the asking was its own kind of courage, the first one either of them had shown all weekend, small and plain and entirely without the elaborate armour either of them usually brought to a conversation like this.