‘Please tell me you’re not doing Atwood,’ I said.
‘I am for sure going to do Atwood.’
‘You will make her cry.’ I clutched my heart in mock sorrow.
‘She doesn’t strike me as the crying type.’
I looked down at myself. ‘She for sure would if she had to wear this.’
‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’
‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’
Milly let out a squeak.
Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.
Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’
‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.
‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’
‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’
‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’
‘What?’
‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who …’
‘We were four. It was twenty years ago, Milly!’
I’d actually written the letter myself. It said, ‘I love you, Holly’, and the words were surrounded by a heart. It was hardly a work of art, though I suppose it was evidence of how much I loved to write and make things up, even at that age. I’d wanted Milly to think I had a secret admirer. I’d experienced a small sense of triumph that I pulled off that bit of fiction and made someone think it was true. Even then, though, I knew that the fact I could fool her didn’t mean I should. I’d felt a twinge of guilt, too, that it had been so easy.
‘Was it Fergus?’ she said. ‘Do you think he wrote the letter?’
‘God. No. I mean, I don’t know, but I’m sure it wasn’t him.’ I still didn’t want to confess to Milly that I’d faked the letter. At the age of four, I was already practising my tradecraft as well as my writing. But my strongest motive for tricking Milly was my wish to impress her. I’d wanted my brand-new friend and neighbour to think that other people saw me as special.
I tried to joke. ‘Gaston probably wasn’t able to write then, so it couldn’t have been him. But you and I were very advanced.’
She laughed. ‘Again true.’
‘I get that you had a crush on him when we were four. I don’t get what you see in him now.’
‘What I see in Fergus is that he’s always been in my life. That kind of loyalty matters.’
‘Not to him. You shouldn’t hold on to someone because they’re a habit.’
‘Why not? I’ve held on to you.’
As a joke a couple of years ago, Milly bought a book that instructed women on all the right things they should do to get a man to fall madly in love with them, and all the wrong things they shouldn’t. She read out bits to me and the two of us hooted in derision.
On my first date with Zac, I did two of the biggest wrong things. The first was that I didn’t make him take me out to dinner. I went to the house he was renting, nestled in farmland and set a few hundred metres from the coastal path.
After weeks of flirting and brushing past each other, his hands were all over me the instant he closed his front door. I said, ‘All those women. Is it true?’
‘Not any more.’ He was unzipping my dress, sliding it off my shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.
The book put the second wrong thing in a different font, for emphasis. Do not sleep with a man on the first date. Never ever. No matter what. Just don’t.
Zac was pulling me towards a rug in the centre of his sitting room, pushing me onto my back, and we were making love almost in the same movement.
When we got up to go to make dinner, he asked how I liked my steak, and I said, ‘Well done, with horseradish sauce.’ He kissed me and sat me at his marble-topped table and told me he would be right back. I heard him climb the stairs, and a minute later, his footsteps drawing near. But instead of returning to the kitchen, there was what I guessed to be the rattle of keys and the creak of the front door opening and closing, then the roar of his car engine.
Half an hour later, I was reading an article that Zac had left the newspaper folded to, which he’d neatly arranged on the corner of the table. The article was about a huge leak of records from a Panama-based law firm, and how the prime minister’s own father was on the list of rich people who put their money in offshore tax havens.
When Zac walked into the kitchen he nodded approvingly at the article. ‘Impressive thing to pull off.’
I took his hand. ‘Whoever leaked that data is a hero.’
‘Doubtful that he’ll appear on the Honours List.’
I stood and pulled Zac against me. ‘I hope they don’t catch him.’
‘I’m glad you feel that way.’ One of his hands was on the small of my back. The other was taking a jar of horseradish sauce from the pocket of his blazer and putting it on the table. ‘I want you to have your dinner exactly how you like it.’ But we ended up not eating anything.
Zac slept with his body pressed against mine that night, and it was the first time I could remember feeling as if I belonged somewhere. When he went into the bathroom the next morning to get ready for work, I listened carefully for the sound of the water running in the shower, then sat up to peek in the drawer of his bedside table.
There was a photograph of a woman who looked like me, with hair the colour of maple leaves in autumn and eyes the colour of moss. She was on a cushiony reclining chair by a beach with palm trees, sipping from a cocktail glass with carefully arranged edible flowers around the rim. She was wearing a tasselled white cover-up, so filmy I could see her orange bikini beneath it. On her left ankle was an oval mark like a black star sapphire, so distinct I wondered if it was a tattoo. Perhaps it was a birthmark.
‘You found my first wife.’ Zac’s voice came as the quilt slipped from my shoulders, or rather, as he pulled it from me, so it was only when those two things, the words and the movement, happened at once, that I inhaled and looked up to see him standing there, though I could hear that the shower was still on.
‘You startled me.’
He sat on the edge of the bed, a towel round his hips. There were drops of water on his shoulders, and he was dripping on me. He drew a wet finger