Me Without You (22 page)

‘Don’t you just love the way this city goes all out for New Year?’ I murmured.

‘Honestly? The waste… nearly does my head in,’ Lilah grimaced. Her expression softened though. ‘But… remember when you told me this city energises you?’

I nodded. Of course I remembered, but I was amazed that she did too.

‘I just knew you’d like this,’ she swept her arm before her. ‘Being a small figure on a small boat, dwarfed by the enormity of the city and the crowd. It seemed like the perfect way to ring in a new year full of possibility. My office usually has a rooftop party for clients—I nearly took you there,’ she grinned when I grimaced. ‘But then of course I remembered that I actually
like
you. Does Tison’s do the New Year party thing too?’

‘Yeah, they do. It’s kind of an institution. I’m glad I’m on leave; it’s one of those endless networking events where you really want to medicate yourself with alcohol to numb the pain of small talk with dozens of clients but you have to be on your best behaviour.’ I’d been at the Tison’s party every year since I graduated. It wasn’t the kind of event I could ever have opted out of, except for this happily timed block of leave.

‘My firm’s is low-key, but it’s still arduous. Only clients above a certain level are invited, and the food is all lobster and caviar and baby cow. It’s a nightmare. When we decided to go to the farm this year, I told Alan I wouldn’t make it so he insisted that Bridget, Anita and…’ She trailed off, frowning suddenly.

‘What’s up?’ I prompted. I followed her gaze but she was staring at the containers of food on the picnic table, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary there. I looked back to her face, which was twisted, contorted with the effort of whatever thought had caused her to stall.

‘Anita and…’ She repeated, then again. ‘Bridget, Anita and…’

‘Liam,’ I said, referring to one of the two paralegals she was forever complaining about. ‘Don’t you think it’s funny that I know his name but I’ve never met him? I think you either need more wine, or less, Ly.’

‘More. Definitely more. Refill me?’

I did as she asked, but a shadow passed over the light-hearted bubble I had been floating in. I’d been explaining so many tiny, little things over these past few months as Lilah being exhausted and burned out. Together, they formed a bigger picture that I couldn’t quite decipher—I just knew that something wasn’t right with her. We’d been at Gosford for two entire weeks and she’d done little more than laze around, in that strange way she had of just switching off when we were at the farm. I had genuinely expected to see her sharpen again. I thought the rest would refocus her and she’d be firing on all cylinders, but there was no denying that she still she was stumbling, if not with her feet, with her words.

We both fell silent for a long moment, and I glanced at her.

‘Are you okay, Ly? You’ve not been yourself lately.’

She didn’t seem at all bothered by my question. Lilah shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Neither have you, you know. You’ve been renovating and gardening and taking photos and actually texting your brothers. It’s been a big few months for both of us.’

‘So do you think you’re just worn out?’

‘You’ve been trying to get me to relax more, I know you have.’ She gave me a pointed glance. I chuckled and nodded. ‘And if there wasn’t something in that, I’d never have let you get away with it. I’m taking it really easy over this break. You don’t need to worry about me, okay?

‘I like worrying about you.’

‘Don’t you dare ruin this elaborate birthday surprise with serious chats about slowing down and taking it easy,’ she said suddenly. ‘Pour the champagne and let’s get back to partying.’

She was right, and I was sure that there’d be another time. I reached for the champagne.

D
arkness fell just
before the nine p.m. family fireworks. The cheers of the hundreds of thousands of people on the water and the shorelines were the soundtrack to a spectacular light show that kicked off above us. The Harbour Bridge was awash with colour, a rainbow of light. Maybe the New Year’s fireworks were Sydney’s way of dressing up for her lovers—people like me who saw her beauty every day but stopped to appreciate it just one night a year.

‘This has been incredible,’ I said softly. I glanced down to Lilah, the reflection of the rainbows above us dancing in her eyes.

‘You’re looking the wrong way!’ she protested. She was giggly from several hours of wines and the hype of the atmosphere just from the crowd, and there was a childlike wonder on her face. Maybe the environmentally sensitive part of her mind could be sedated by Moet, because she was truly enjoying the fireworks, and I was literally loving watching them through her. I cupped her face in my hands.

‘Thank you, Lilah.’

I bent to kiss her. All of the things I knew she wasn’t ready to hear—how much I loved her, how grateful I was for the joy she’d brought me, how happy I was at that moment—it was all in my kiss. And better still, I could feel in the way she kissed me back that she felt exactly the same.

W
e returned
to the farm the following afternoon. In the car, Lilah was quiet and I told myself it was just the late night, but as we ate dinner I finally acknowledged that she was back to barely speaking again.

‘Fuck it.’ She suddenly dropped her fork and rubbed her face with her hands. ‘I’m sorry Cal, I’m just distracted… just… I really need to do some work on the new case tonight. Do you mind if I skip the rest of dinner and go try to make some headway before bed? It’s prep work. Pre-reading. Needs to be done and leaving it undone is driving me insane.’

There it was again, the tiniest blip on my instinctual radar. In spite of the stereotype of her profession, Lilah was not a great liar.

‘It really can’t wait?’

She shook her head slowly, the ridge between her eyes deeper still. I hesitated, an internal debate happening in double-time as I tried to figure out if I should call her out and push her more about whatever was really going on, or just leave it be.

‘Then go for it, Lilah. Whatever you need to do.’

She pushed back her chair and left. I watched a silly comedy on television only for a while before the long day caught up with me and I realised I needed to go to bed. I stopped at her study door and saw her sitting at the desk, one foot tucked up underneath her, staring at the ceiling.

I asked what I thought was a logical question.

‘Problems with the Internet or problems with the case?’

She startled and turned back to me with a semi-scowl. She’d wound her hair up with a pencil into a messy knot on top of her head and, make-up-free, suddenly looked exhausted. The scowl disappeared quickly and was replaced by sadness that I didn’t like one bit.

‘The Internet is actually playing nice today. I just wish it wasn’t.’

The screen behind her did contain hundreds of lines of tiny text, so I decided that I must have misread the signals earlier and maybe she’d been telling me the truth after all. I knew the case she’d return to after the break was a big one.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ I offered gently.

The hand fell from her face, but her eyes were closed, and she gave another silent shake of her head, knocking a lock of hair from its precarious bun and onto her shoulder.

‘Are you okay?’ Now I was really worried. Lilah looked almost as if she would cry. I hadn’t seen her cry other than that night she lost the Minchin case, and I wasn’t sure I’d handled it well then. The blue eyes flung wide and she offered me a shimmering smile.

‘Sorry, Cal. Everything is okay. I just—
God.
I just wanted something
different
for these weeks. I think I’ll have to go into the city tomorrow.’

‘Just for the day?’

She nodded.

‘Okay, love. I’ll let you focus. Goodnight.’

‘Thank you, Cal. Goodnight.’

L
ilah left early
. While she was gone, I pruned, I walked, I read, I slept. She returned after the sun had set, and seemed her usual self.

‘Did you sort out your problem?’ I’d asked when she returned. She barked a harsh laugh.

‘If only.’

But that was the end of our discussion. We went to bed together, and we made love. It was always amazing with Lilah—but there was something poignant about that night, and even at the time I knew it. She’d rested on my chest afterwards, soft tears falling from her eyes onto my skin. At first I didn’t feel I should draw attention to it, but within minutes, tiny little tremors were shaking her body that couldn’t be ignored.

‘Are you sure everything is okay?’ I’d asked her. I was stroking her back, kissing her hair, hugging her extra tight. I just wanted her to know I was there, although of course there seemed to be no way I could help her with her work, and I still assumed that was the problem.

‘Sometimes things aren’t okay, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Her voice was miserable and weak.

It was louder now, and growing louder by the second, that instinct that told me that something was not as it should be. I’d tried to find the perfect balance between pushing her to talk to me and letting her work it out in her own time, but something about the distress in her voice almost panicked me.

‘Talk to me, Lilah, please.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘If you could just tell me why you’re crying, I think that’d be a great start.’

‘I’m crying because I want life to be a fairy tale and it’s not.’

‘Do you remember what you said to me a few months ago, about everything in life having both a good and a bad side?’

‘I didn’t know what I was talking about.’ The self-derision was not a natural fit for her, and her words sounded hollow.

‘Of course you did. You always do. Take tomorrow off. Forget about your reading; you can do it later. You might just need a bit more of a break from work, and you are technically on a holiday, you know.’

‘No. There’s no more avoiding it,’ she said softly. ‘I need to get this done.’

‘Well, maybe the day after then.’

‘Do you remember that night when we went to Shelly Beach and I goaded you into joining me in the waves?’

‘Of course I do. I’ll never forget it.’

‘That night was
all good.
For me, I mean.’

‘And me too.’

She kissed me one last time, then said goodnight. I knew Lilah often had insomnia and I’d frequently heard her up and about in the middle of the night. That night, she either feigned sleep immediately or genuinely drifted off, and it was I who lay awake staring at the ceiling.

I
t was
at breakfast that I finally realised that Lilah was not upset about an argument with her mother. She was not distracted by her case. There was something wrong, and it was wrong between us.

We sat at the kitchen bench, as we usually did for breakfast at the beach house. She was quiet again, and once we’d finished our coffees and I mentioned heading out to prune, she put her hand on my arm.

‘Callum,’ she said. This tone was new—it was as cold as she had been warm all of these months. Business-like Lilah was back, and I was suddenly aware that she had returned to break my heart.

‘What’s wrong?’ My voice was strained. I cleared my throat.

‘We’ve been kidding ourselves. I told you this wasn’t going to be a forever thing, and we need to end this now before anyone gets hurt.’

‘Before anyone gets hurt?’ I couldn’t believe my ears—not her words, or the achingly embarrassing sound of my own high-pitched whine. ‘You really think we could end this now and neither one of us gets
hurt
?’

‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you.’

God, she was so cold. I stared at her, trying to figure out who this icy stranger was and where the passionate, emotive woman who’d laid on my chest the night before and wept had gone.

‘So how does this play out, Lilah? You’re calling the shots here.’ I felt the anger burgeon in my chest. ‘Do I leave now? Not contact you again? Let you cut me out of your life without even an explanation?’

‘I don’t
need
to give you an explanation because I warned you from day one,’ she hissed at me, but then she shifted on her stool and it fell backwards. She grasped for the breakfast bar to keep herself from falling with it and I automatically moved to catch her. Lilah shook my arm off furiously. ‘Don’t touch me, Callum. Just get your things and go.’

‘It’s been a big few weeks for us. Let’s just take it easy today and talk about this later—’

‘You’re not hearing me, Callum. There is no later. You need to leave.’

‘Why are you doing this? Do you really think I will let go of what we have without a fight? Because I just won’t.’

‘You can’t force something that isn’t here.
What we have
might seem perfect to you, but it’s obviously
not
to me.’ I wondered who this cold woman was, and where Lilah was hiding. She suddenly softened her voice and the change again caught me off guard, ‘I know this is hard to hear, but I just don’t want to be with you anymore, Callum. You aren’t going to change my mind. I want you to leave and I don’t want you to come back.’

‘I don’t understand.’ I tried to keep my voice level, to stop any escalation of the discussion into a screaming match. I thought of Lilah’s hair-trigger temper and I knew I had to tread lightly. ‘Can we please just talk about this, Ly? We’ve been so happy together; I can’t understand why you want that to change. Is something else going on here?’

‘I told you all along, Callum. I don’t want to play happy families. I don’t want to settle down. Not with you, not with anyone. I’m sorry if you’ve come to believe otherwise over these past few months. That really wasn’t my intention. I need to focus on my work again now.’

It was her closing argument. The language and her presentation were all business; her courtroom demeanour was on in force.

‘You’re afraid.’ I was clutching at straws. She was really going to throw me out—just like that. I knew the truth of what she’d said—she
had
warned me—but her actions had spoken so loudly that I’d ignored the words.