Page 128 of Your Loss
Did Patrick send him that day? Does he know what the man did to my dad?
I stagger back a few paces, slumping onto the bench in thecentre of the room. A thousand horrified thoughts chase each other through the tunnels in my brain, racing each other, playing tag, leaping atop one another in a scrum.
They come to a halt when I realise Patrick would never be that careless. He has a laissez-faire attitude to the workplace, sure, but he’s still mindful of his employees. Especially when, in some obscure way I still don’t one hundred percent understand, I make him money.
If he had sent the collector, the man wouldn’t have just strolled into the changing room. Patrick would ensure I never saw him, never connected him.
But there are other associates, other connections that might bump against one another occasionally.
I prefer not to speculate on why she needed a job to begin with.
The memory is so clear, it’s like Patrick’s standing right beside me. That was his response to Lachlan when my employment here was discovered. The words I dismissed because it seemed like there was fault on each side, so we didn’t need to dissect anything further to know we were both in the wrong.
But now Iwantto dissect it because it seems like the type of statement that might offer me some clues to what’s going on.
In fact…
In an instant, I can see how all the things that happened at the start of our relationship could be… not false exactly, but massaged, manufactured, directed according to one very unhappy, very determined, very powerful boy’s fancy.
After all, this is the same boy who thought nothing about planting drugs in another kid’s room to open a vacancy. Who bought my company for a night just to piss off his girlfriend when she wouldn’t toe the line.
A boy who humiliated me before my classmates, then defended me from the repercussions.
A boy who invited me and my one friend to join his popular group at lunch, then took that friend away by offering him a place on an impossible-to-join team.
That’s the kind of boy who might get a girl fired so she became dependent on him for her finances. That’s the kind of boy who might cut off her father’s creditors with one hand but introduce new lenders with another, lenders operating completely under his control.
Who might introduce her to impossible-to-afford pleasures, knowing she’s wired to feel indebted because she turned up at his door one day and demonstrated that’s precisely how she thinks.
So many tendrils that look separate but, when you give them a tug, turn out to be hopelessly intertwined.
I sit with that story resting in my head, letting it settle. Waiting to see if it falls apart within seconds or if it holds; all the disparate parts fitting snugly together in their new narrative.
It does. Every piece of it could be one hundred percent true.
But so is the story I already live with. The one where a boy saw a girl whose father had stolen from her, then spent time and effort to make her whole without ever revealing she’d been robbed.
I fidget with my mother’s rings, the ones I still wear, even though with my father in another city, he’s hardly likely to steal them again.
The rings that give me so much pleasure not just because they connect me to the mother I adored and lost but because they remind me every day that Lachlan cared for me, right from the firstmoment.
The ones that prove we were meant to be.
I shove the errant thoughts from my mind just as Lachlan reaches the door, knocking on it to alert me to his presence. He dangles the car keys in front of his face, a male temptress. “Thought you might like to go for a ride to clear your head.”
“Have I told you recently that I adore you?” I ask him, grabbing the keys from him in exchange for a kiss.
Because yes. Yes, I would like to drive until the raft of awkward new ideas stop populating in my brain. I have a multitude of thoughts that need clearing.
The voicemail was full. How did he know to come to your rescue?
Thoughts like that one.
What service does it perform? None. It’s useless. Good for nobody unless they’re a person who likes to stir up trouble for themselves and I don’t.
I tuck myself under Lachlan’s arm and press my head against his chest. Right at the part where my initials form a permanent scar, a reminder that this gorgeous boy belongs to one lucky girl, and that girl is me.
“That’s good,” he replies, the vibration from his words hitting against my ear like a rumble strip. “Because I just happen to adore you, too.”
We stand like that for a moment, neither of us wanting to move. Finally, Lachlan’s the one to break the pose.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
And we do.
