Ellie cackles to hear me talk like this.
‘He’s cute. But I get it. He’s like a fresh scab, he needs to heal over.’
Not an image I want to associate with our coupling but it’s pretty true.
‘It’s just functional. We get what we need out of things. He’s kind. I know the history, he knows mine.’
She pulls a face. ‘It’s very clinical. Is he the only person you’ve banged since…?’
‘Yeah.’
She doesn’t quite know how to reply to that. She seems sad for me.
‘Thanks for covering back there,’ I tell her, trying to change the subject.
‘Oh no, that was super fun. She had bitch vibes anyway. I wasn’t digging her general aura.’
That’s the other thing that separates us out, the ideas we share about Tom’s passing. As I’d seen all of the ugly end, the way chemo and steroids ravaged him, the rampant physical demise of his body, I perceived everything so vividly but also organically. He was gone. Ellie speaks of auras and spirits and feeling him in the air, like a celestial being. As proven now as she gazes up into the stars.
‘Do you think he’s looking down on us?’ she mutters.
I glance up. ‘I hope he is. But he was atheist. So probably no.’
She punches me in the arm. ‘I miss his energy, that presence he had. God, I miss him, Gracie.’
‘You don’t say?’ I say, glancing over at Ryan chatting to Sam as they walk ahead. ‘I thought I was the sad widow but you’ve gone the full hog with the doppelganger husband, you even stole his name for your daughter.’
I’m lucky she finds this amusing. ‘It’s a good name, it’s solid. What do you think of Ry?’ she asks.
‘He seems like a good guy.’
‘He is. He’s a little too Aussie in that he’s never left Australia before this but he’s got a decent heart. What he wants out of life is pretty simple and I like that. After Tom, I just realised I didn’t want someone who’d…’
‘Leave?’
We smile at each other. Whether it was through travel or death, Tom liked to make a grand exit and break some hearts on the way out.
‘Remember, he came back to you, though. It was always you, Gracie Callaghan.’
‘And then what did he do? He pissed off again.’
‘He’s still here,’ she says, putting her hand to my heart.
If you want to know the one overused condolence that people use when someone you love dies, it’s that. They tell you he’s in you, that your heart will remember him. I wish it were that simple. The fact is I sometimes feel possessed by him. He inhabits my thoughts, my brain, my movement, my every breath.
‘And well, my Kennedy is a little ladybug. You’d like her. It’s a shame I couldn’t bring her down this time. I can’t wait to meet your girls too.’
‘We’ll make it happen,’ I reply.
‘Do you like me, Gracie?’ Ellie asks. ‘I can never quite tell.’
I scan her face. In death, Tom left me a legacy of relationships that have now become mine. We will forever be linked by that man. It means that, despite everything, I care about her, I will look out for her. I know she’ll do the same for me.
‘I do. I think I just have trouble recollecting our time together in Australia. We used to start drinking at midday. There was that time we got drunk at the beach and I tanned to the colour of a frigging flamingo.’
I’m not sure why this is funny to her. I couldn’t wear a bra for two weeks.
‘They were fun times, though. I was such a good host. I took you to the Opera House.’
