Free Frantic by Katherine Howell

arm. ‘If you clam up now, what can I think except that he is involved?’
    He shrugged, his glass to his mouth.
    ‘Jeezus.’
    Around them the bar was getting fuller. The words ‘Roth’ and ‘gang’ and ‘Dudley-Pearson’ could be picked out in the buzz of conversation. Someone elbowed Ella in the back and said ‘Sorry’ but she didn’t take her eyes from Dennis’s face. ‘Were he and Marisa Waters actually an item?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘You do so,’ she said. ‘How was it kept so quiet?’
    He pulled bits of tobacco out of the end of the cigarette. She grabbed it and threw it over the bar.
    ‘That’s not very nice,’ he said.
    ‘You’re supposed to be quitting.’
    ‘I can still play with them.’
    ‘Who’s investigating the crash?’
    Dennis tugged at a loose thread on the edge of the bar towel.
    ‘I’ll find out soon enough, you know.’
    ‘So find out,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘I have to go. Tim’s doing a roast.’
    Ella watched him push his way towards the door. His wife, Donna, was a professor of nursing with the wickedest sense of humour Ella had ever known, and their teenage son Tim was a) friendly, b) cheerful and c) an apprentice chef who couldn’t get enough of cooking. Ella had a microwave meal in the freezer, half a bottle of flat Coke in the fridge, and a bird cage that she hadn’t cleaned since her unnamed canary escaped two months ago. There was also a stack of photos from the fire in the takeaway shop. Case of the year. Hip hip hooray.
    Perhaps she’d get another drink and a bag of chips, and just sit here with her ears open.
    7 pm
     
    Sophie and Mick worked overtime, and by the time Sophie finally got home she was wound up tight. Chris had not rung back to ask why she’d had to cut their phone conversation short, whether everything was okay, and the concern and rising guilt that she might be somehow to blame for the deaths of Julie and her baby weighed on her like a forty kilo sandbag, on top of the one she was already carrying over Angus.
    She slammed the door as she entered the house.
    ‘How about a bit of quiet?’ Chris came hurrying down the stairs. ‘Lachlan’s asleep.’
    Sophie stalked into the kitchen. ‘You eaten?’
    ‘Leftovers.’
    Sophie yanked the remains of the lasagne from the fridge and threw it in the microwave. ‘Interesting thing happened at work today.’
    Chris was washing baby bottles and didn’t look up.
    ‘Yeah,’ Sophie said. ‘Got my life threatened. Just after I talked to you.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘What I said.’
    ‘That’s not good.’
    She almost laughed out loud. ‘Never mind my day, how was yours?’
    He put the bottles in the steriliser, slowly and deliberately. ‘I know you’re angry that I didn’t answer your calls and didn’t ring you back.’
    She stared into the microwave. The dish went round and round.
    ‘I went into the city to talk to Dean, not just about missing the party but also about the robbery. The guard. The whole thing.’
    Now she looked at him.
    ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘I needed to talk to someone.’
    Light burst over her head. This could be the turning point. She thought again of the promise, the possibility she’d felt when Lachlan was born.
    Things could be good again.
    ‘I’m sorry I was nasty before,’ she said, ‘about how long you’d spent with Dean. I understand it now.’
    Chris finished screwing on the steriliser lid before answering. ‘I wasn’t there all the time. I went for a walk along Mrs Macquarie’s Point. Had a bit of a think.’
    Or could they?
    The microwave pinged. Sophie busied herself opening the door and lifting out the dish.
    ‘Isn’t that hot?’
    The burning in her fingers was nothing. Mrs Macquarie’s Point in Sydney Harbour was where they’d gone on their first date, and where Chris had proposed to her two years later, on New Year’s Eve, as fireworks blasted into the sky. If he was going there to walk and think, how could it not be to