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They both turned towards the road and Oliver shoved his hands in the pockets of his shorts and they stared at the—thankfully bare—tarmac.
She cast a sneaky glance at him from under her lashes. There was no sign of suave, cool Oliver. His face was ashen, drawn. “I thought you were going to jump out to save that roo.”
“I stumbled, that’s all.”
Oliver’s eyes remained fixed on the road.
“Please don’t put yourself at risk.” Quiet. Thin, expressionless. Was he angry with her? That didn’t seem fair, so she responded a little sharply. “It’s not like I did it on purpose. I was just in a state of shock, that’s all.”
“Felicity, there will be dead animals littered everywhere on the road from now on. You can’t let it affect you. You never swerve if one runs out in front of you. You keep driving just like the guy in the truck.”
“You mean, just hit it.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
“That’s heartless. Horrible.”
“No. The alternative is horrible,” he clipped harshly. And then, without looking at her, he turned and strode off, back the way they’d come, his broad shoulders bunched and his hands dug deep into his pockets. All she could do was amble after him, feeling unfairly judged, and strangely discombobulated. Scarlet twinged at her attempt to keep up with him.
He stopped. “See this?” Turning, he scuffed his toe into the gravel edging the tarmac. “You swerve and you end up in this stuff, and you know what people do when they’re not experienced on dirt? They overcorrect, and when they overcorrect—” He pushed his fist into his palm. “That’s when they hit a tree, or another car… it’s so fast. It happens so fast.”
She tried to open her mouth, to say something, and then it dawned why this was such a big deal.
He’d lost his mother in a car accident, for heaven’s sake. He was only sixteen. She knew what trauma at sixteen was like. It stopped you dead. Spun you round and round like some cruel cosmic game of blind man’s bluff, pointing you away from all your hopes and dreams. It forced you to invent another version of yourself.
And no matter how you tried to ward it off, the shadow of it never quite left you.
They trudged back in silence, the heaviness between them as palpable as the hot evening air. And to top it all off, a fly kept crawling into the corner of her eye, as if determined to set up camp for the night.
Back in their room, Felicity sat down heavily on the bed and sandwiched her hands between her knees. Her nose and eyes smarted from the dry air and Scarlet vied for her attention with a deep dull ache.
Try as she might, she couldn’t summon anything funny to say.
Oliver went over to the bottle of red wine on the little Formica table, uncorked it almost aggressively and poured it into two plastic cups. His hand shook very slightly as he passed her one.
She kept peeping at him as he paced to the window, pushed aside the net curtain and stared out at the dusty yard.
Should she say something? Let him know that she understood how a danger in the present could blast you back to the past with such force you lost your cool, your sense of reason? She heard him sigh as he scrubbed a hand across his brow. His dark hair was all messed up and there was no sign of the perfectly groomed, self-assured man who’d greeted her a mere week ago.
“I apologise if I sounded brusque,” he said, so suddenly she jumped. “I’m ultra-sensitive about road safety.”
“I get that—you know, after what happened to… your mum.”
He gave a brief nod of acknowledgement. “Plus, all those instructions I barked at you. I have a tendency to overcompensate, I guess because I want people to be safe.” He gulped down a mouthful of wine. “Leonie used to say I was a control freak. That I had a tendency to wrap her in cotton wool. It didn’t feel like that’s what I was doing… but, you know, she and I were coming from different perspectives. If she’d told me… I could have done something different maybe—before…”
“Sometimes no matter how much you talk, it can’t resolve a problem,” she said quietly.
He turned and gave her a measured look. “That sounds like the voice of experience.”
“My ex, Mitchell, and I talked a lot, had counselling, talked some more. We prided ourselves on always being able to discuss our problems, but eventually we had to agree we were on different journeys.”
“In what way?”
“We met when I was just out of teacher’s college and he was deputy of the primary school where I was teaching the pre-schoolers. He was ten years older than me. You know how it is… When you first meet someone, maybe there’s a little gap and you can just hop over it, but then it grows wider, and you need a rope to cross it and then it gets wider still and you have to start building bridges.” He was silently observing her, and she couldn’t look at him, so she tightened her fingers around her cup and studied them instead. “When I was twenty-seven and Mitchell was thirty-seven our priorities weren’t the same anymore. And that’s when you realise the gap between you is just too big—too wide. That you want different things out of life.”
“What did he want, that you didn’t?”
Felicity hesitated. Should she tell him? Best not to open that door. There were doors you went through, and they led places. And then there were doors that led only to the things you couldn’t fix. “Oh, you know, the usual stuff, like I wanted the loo seat down and he wanted to leave it up.”
