Exiles (Aaron Falk #3)(97)

We see what we expect to see.

Falk gazed at the ferris wheel, up to the top carriages rising high in the air. He lifted his arm and waved. He waited.

We see what we expect to see.

A dozen hands waved back.

Gone before she was gone.





34

KIM




Charlie was calling her again.

Kim saw his name on her screen. She was sitting in the passenger seat of her husband’s car, her six-week-old daughter asleep in the back. It had been a while, but she still recognized the bushland surrounding them. They were about half an hour from Marralee.

Kim glanced sideways at Rohan. His eyes were fixed on the road, carefully navigating the turns, traveling just below the speed limit. Had he seen Charlie’s name on the screen? She couldn’t be sure.

“Are you going to get that?”

Her husband didn’t look at her when he spoke.



* * *



Kim’s problems with Charlie hadn’t begun with Dean Tozer’s death, but it was then that they’d started to get worse.

Charlie had taken to disappearing for long stretches on his own, coming back with grief clinging to him like vapor. Whenever Kim tried to talk to him, her attempts were brushed away, gently at first and then later with a dash of impatience. Silence and sadness crept through their house, seeping into the fabric of their days. Kim found herself alone a lot of the time. Standing in the kitchen, staring out at long rows of vines as she made a cup of tea or washed out Zara’s lunch box, listening for the sound of Charlie’s key in the door. She knew those lost hours were being spent down at the reservoir, but the very first time she’d asked him about it, he’d lied—automatically and badly. That was unusual enough to be unsettling for them both, and Kim hadn’t asked again. She hadn’t really needed to, she knew Charlie well enough to guess why he was going. He needed space to grieve for his friend in a way he felt he couldn’t around anyone else. Including Kim herself. And she understood that. But still, this didn’t feel right.

It was the hint of shame around the whole thing that bothered her most, especially after she started to suspect Shane was doing the same. Kim just hung around her empty kitchen, slamming drawers in frustration. They all missed Dean, and his death felt like a body blow. Of course it did. None of them needed to hide that from each other. She was desperate to throw some sunlight and air on their mutual pain, sit down together and open a bottle of something good and fill their glasses. Say out loud the words she was sure they were thinking so they could all agree it was a horrible, shit thing to have happened and, yes, it still really hurt.

Charlie wouldn’t give her the chance. He seemed able to sense the conversation coming, even while Kim was still drawing breath, and immediately was so busy or dead tired or just grabbing his keys on his way out. He still went absent for hours at a time—Kim banged the cutlery drawer closed so hard the knives rattled—apparently safe and secure in the knowledge that she wouldn’t come to the reservoir to find him.

She was considering it, though. Kim would go to the reservoir if she had to. She simply preferred not to. But she would. And then, almost as if Charlie had been able to tell what she was thinking, he’d stopped going overnight.

It didn’t help. The little arguments that had been brewing even before Dean died began flaring again like spot fires. Kim could sense both herself and Charlie keeping constant watch, racing to put them out before they ran too far. It was exhausting for him, too, she could tell. They both wanted to stop. They tried. They just didn’t seem to be able to.

They only fought about small things, Kim would think as she lay awake at night, exhausted and fractious, listening to Charlie’s slow breathing. But for how long did small stuff stay small? How many years until it all added up into something too big to ignore? Kim stared at the ceiling, counting how many years she’d been with Charlie, and thought she knew the answer to that. She had known for a while, she suspected.

Sometimes Kim would catch an unexpected glimpse of Charlie, trudging through the vineyard or avoiding her gaze at the dinner table, and he’d seem older and bigger and worn in a way that she could barely reconcile with the clear-eyed boy from that first autumn day. She could still remember the sound of his voice, though. Calling out to her all those years ago as he chased her bike through the leaves, his face flushed when he’d caught up.

“Hey,” he’d said, breathless.

“Hi.”

And it was, as fifteen-year-old Kim had written in her diary, love.

Sometimes now, when Charlie occasionally laughed or they talked about their daughter, she could still take herself back to that moment. But a lot of the time, it felt like a story she’d heard about two other people.

Dean’s funeral had been a lurid nightmare. It hadn’t even been a funeral, technically. It had been worse, a memorial service, because they still hadn’t recovered his body. Everyone had been there. Rohan had driven back to Marralee to attend.

Kim had been at the sink in the church kitchen fetching Gemma a glass of water and had watched Rohan draw up and park his clean black car considerately in a difficult spot. He was on time and dressed in an understated charcoal suit, and she was struck by how he’d grown into the features that as a teenager had made him seem so awkward and self-conscious. Rohan had spotted her through the window. He’d smiled and raised a hand, his delight at seeing her transforming his face in a way that had caught Kim off guard. And she found herself, entirely inappropriately in that moment at the church sink, remembering how Charlie hadn’t been the only boy who’d used to look at her like that.