The Dry (Aaron Falk #1)(43)
“I never thanked you, Aaron,” Barb said as they waited for the kettle to boil. “For helping us. Opening an investigation into what happened.”
“Barb, I haven’t done anything like that,” Falk said. “You understand that what I’m doing with Sergeant Raco is off the record, don’t you? We’re just asking a couple of questions. Nothing official.”
“Oh yes. Of course, I completely understand that,” she said in such a way that he could tell she didn’t. “But you’ve got people wondering. That makes all the difference. It’s stirred things up.”
An image of Ellie flashed through Falk’s mind, and he hoped Barb wouldn’t come to regret that.
“Luke was always so grateful to have you as a friend,” she said as she poured boiling water into three mugs.
“Thank you,” he said simply, but Barb looked up at something in his tone.
“He was,” she insisted. “I know he wasn’t good at saying it, but he needed someone like you in his life. Someone calm, with a sensible head on their shoulders. I always thought that’s partly what attracted Luke to Karen. He saw the same sort of qualities in her.” She automatically opened the right drawer and found a spoon. “Did you ever meet Karen in the end?”
Falk shook his head.
“It’s a shame. I think you really would have liked her. She reminds—reminded—me of you in a lot of ways. I think sometimes she worried that she was a tiny bit … I don’t know, dull, maybe. That she was the only thing standing between Luke and his big ideas. But she wasn’t. She was steady and really bright, that girl. And she was exactly what he needed. She kept my son grounded. You both did.” Barb looked at Falk for a long moment, her head cocked to the side a little sadly. “You should have come back for their wedding. Or anytime. We missed you.”
“I—” He started to say he’d had to work, but something in her expression stopped the words on his lips. “Honestly, I didn’t feel like I’d be welcome.”
Barb Hadler took two large steps across the kitchen that had once been hers, reached out her hands, and pulled Falk into her arms. She held him firmly until he felt a tension buried deep inside him start to waver.
“You, Aaron, are always welcome in my family,” Barb said. “Don’t ever let yourself think otherwise.” She pulled away, and for a moment she was the Barb Hadler of old. She placed two steaming mugs of coffee in his hands, tucked the library books under his arm, and nodded to the back door with a matriarchal glint in her eye.
“Let’s take these out to my husband so I can tell him that if he wants this house cleared he can stop hiding in the barn and do it himself.”
Falk followed Barb out of the back door and into the blinding sunlight. He narrowly avoided sloshing coffee on his wrist as he sidestepped an abandoned toy cricket bat.
Is this what his own life could have been like? Falk wondered suddenly. Kids’ cricket bats and coffee in farmhouse kitchens? He tried to imagine it. Working side by side with his dad in the open air, waiting for the moment when his old man would shake his hand and pass him the reins. Spending Saturday nights in the Fleece with Luke, eyeing up the mostly unchanged pool of talent until one day his eye stopped wandering. A brisk but beautiful country wedding, the first baby arriving nine months later. The second a year after that. The fatherhood role wouldn’t come entirely naturally to him, he knew, but he would make the effort. They say it’s different with your own.
His children would be friends with Luke’s son, inevitably. They’d all have to take their chances at that shabby country school, yes, but they would also have acres and acres of land where they could stretch their legs.
Days working on the land would be long, of course, but the nights at home would be warm and full of noise and chaos and laughter. Love. There would always be someone waiting for him with the light on. Who could that have been? he thought. Ellie?
Straight away, the image started to blur and fade. If she’d lived. If he’d stayed. If everything were different. The idea was a complete fantasy. There were too many lost chances for that vision to have played out.
Falk had chosen his life in Melbourne. And he was happy with it, he thought. He liked being able to walk down the street, surrounded by people but without a single soul recognizing him. He enjoyed work that taxed his brain rather than his back.
Life was give-and-take. His flat may be quiet and empty when he returned at the end of each day, but he wasn’t watched by curious eyes that knew every last thing about him. His neighbors didn’t judge him, or harass him and spread rumors about his family. They didn’t leave animal carcasses on his doorstep. They left him alone.
He knew he had a habit of keeping people at arm’s length, collecting acquaintances rather than friends. But all the better should one of them ever again float bloated and broken to the surface of a river, a stone’s throw from his family home. And yes, he battled the daily commute to work and spent a lot of his days under fluorescent office lights, but at least his livelihood didn’t hang by a thread on the whim of a weather pattern. At least he wasn’t driven to such fear and despair by the blank skies that there was even a chance the wrong end of a gun might look like the right answer.
Luke Hadler may have had a light on waiting for him when he came home, but something else from this wretched, desperate community had seeped through that front door and into his home. And it had been rotten and thick and black enough to extinguish that light forever.