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Luckily, we were safe for now.
We had no enemies to fight and no murderous fathers to run from. Our biggest stresses were grocery shopping when neither of us wanted to do it, and whose turn it was to do the laundry.
Griffen kept our rent ridiculously low and continued paying me a substantial amount for my time. He no longer guided me in how he wanted things to be run but trusted that if I implemented a new system, it was because it was better than the old one. I learned how to order police checks on new tenants, arrange bonds, and even organised taking a tenant to tribunal for wilful damages to a newly renovated apartment.
I did everything under his name.
Nothing under mine.
He gave me his logins to business bank accounts so I could track payments and set up direct debits for his tax. Considering I wasn’t legal, I knew more about Australian rental laws and tax obligations than most of its citizens.
Jack and Anna popped down to visit when they could.
Billy and I grew friendly enough to share a few messages in the odd times that we didn’t have all-night calls with our two girls monopolising most of the conversation. Those nights, alcohol would be consumed, a movie shared on Netflix, and the sense that our little life of two had expanded to include friends.
Fuck, I had a friend.
My own age.
I honestly didn’t think I’d get close to anyone apart from Neri. It wasn’t easy confiding in someone who might say the wrong thing to the wrong person and be the reason everything crashed and burned.
I’d grown used to guarding myself, and regardless of how close Honey and Neri became and how much I valued Billy’s friendship, and even Teddy and Eddie as they became regular visitors in our apartment—thanks to the ease of internet and smart-phones—I never told them the truth.
No one asked.
Why would they?
Like most people I dealt with—the tenants, the tradies, and the outside world—no one ever looked at me as if I didn’t belong. The endless fear I’d always had that somehow a stranger would be able to look at me and just know that I wasn’t permitted faded as I grew older.
I did my best to say goodbye to depression and hello to optimism. Most days, I succeeded. When I felt pride for a job well done and bliss as I came brutally hard in Neri’s arms, I didn’t have to choose to be happy.
I was happy.
That kid inside me who’d always been worried, always grieving, always guilty for living his life when his family was dead had healed enough to enjoy every moment.
Neri had a magic that never failed to get me out of my head and into my heart. With her, I was wholly present and wonderfully grateful.
She was the one.
Not because of coincidence or convenience.
But because she was born for me and me for her.
She was mine.
I was so proud of how hard she worked on her bachelor’s degree. How many nights she sacrificed to homework and how often she put up her hand for extra learning. In her second year, she spent more time on the sea with her fellow students, travelling on the university’s research vessel to Magnetic Island to study the reef, and farther out where the coral dropped away and bigger creatures lived.
By night, she studied heavy books full of chemistry and biology, learning the makeup of plants and ecosystems, gradually transforming from the eager-eyed child who wanted to be like her parents into a fully-fledged scientist in her own right.
Her hair changed colours with the tides, depending on if she spent time in the salt and sun, and she grew ever more beautiful every year.
For her nineteenth birthday last year, we’d gone out for a nice dinner and rented a hotel for the night that had an indoor pool.
We’d snuck inside once it was closed to guests and swam until one a.m., reliving those wonderful evenings in her back garden where I’d craved her, wanted her, but never touched her.
Now I touched her so often it was borderline obsessive.
Our need for each other hadn’t tamed. If anything, it grew more poignant between us as we left behind the last remnants of youth and stepped into the adults we were destined to become.
