The price of her forgiveness

What she deleted

Chapter 6: What She Deleted

Lachlan's 

"We have three options for the cake," said Dominique, "and one of them is a fountain."

"No fountain," I said.

"No fountain," Briony agreed, a half-second later, and then smiled at the wedding planner as if we'd made a joint decision.

Wednesday, a quarter past two. The function room at Watsons Bay had a wall of glass facing the heads, and the light off the water was so bright it hurt to look at. Dominique had set the table with swatches and menus and a tray of miniature sandwiches nobody was eating. She was young and fast and wore a headset like a pilot, and she looked at us the way people look at a couple they've been told is very important.

"Then it's the lemon and elderflower, or the three-tier vanilla, or..." She fanned the cards. "The twenty-first of March is a beautiful date. Late summer. The light at five o'clock is just spectacular."

"Is it?" I said.

"It's gold. Everyone cries."

"Good."

Briony looked at me. "You could try to sound interested."

"I'm interested."

"You sound like you're agreeing to a mortgage."

"That's not far off."

She laughed, the bright one, and Dominique laughed with her, relieved. I picked up a sandwich so I'd have something to do with my hands.

I'd barely slept. Not since the bench in Rose Bay, not since I'd held a slip of paper with my own forged signature on it and tried to work out how a person survives learning that. I had a plan, if you could call it that. It was thin and ugly and entirely unfair. I would sit across from Briony Carmichael for one afternoon, and I would watch her, and I would see what a woman looks like when she's lying to me.

I'd never done that before. I'd always looked at what she showed me.

Forty minutes earlier, in the back of the car on the way over, Dev had rung with the first real update in a week. His voice was flat with exhaustion.

"The last shell in the chain is a company called Sterling Harbour Holdings. Registered in Jersey, run by a nominee director who's been dead since 2019."

"Dead."

"Paperwork doesn't mind. Whoever built this didn't want to be found by anyone with a subpoena." A keyboard clattered in the background. "I don't know a Sterling. Do you?"

"No."

"Neither does anyone I've asked." He hesitated. "Lachlan, you sound strange."

"I haven't been sleeping."

"That's not what I mean. You sound like you've decided something."

I looked out the window at the Rushcutters Bay marina sliding by, white masts, white hulls, everything tied up neatly for the afternoon. "Keep digging. And Dev, if anyone asks what you're working on, it's the Vancouver contract."

"Anyone like who?"

"Anyone."

He didn't say anything for a few seconds. Then, very quietly: "All right, mate."

I'd hung up knowing that I'd asked the wrong man to lie for me. And I'd got off the call and sat there with my own reflection in the glass and thought, "this is what it feels like. This is what she must have felt, every time I told her to trust me and then wouldn't trust her back."

Now I watched Briony stir sugar into a coffee she didn't drink, and I thought: "whatever she is, she is also afraid."

Briony reached across the table and pushed a tiny plate toward me. A square of lemon cake, a sprig of something green on top. "Try it. You'll like it. It's the one with less sugar."

"You remembered."

"I remember what you hate." She almost smiled. "It's a long list."

I took the fork. Her hand lingered near mine a second longer than the gesture needed, and I saw that it was trembling, a fine fast shiver she was trying to hide by pressing her thumb into the cloth. I ate the cake. It was good. I told her so. She nodded and looked down, and I felt something I hadn't expected and didn't want: a small, dangerous tenderness. For a woman who might have helped ruin me, and who looked like she was drowning in front of my eyes.

The first thing I noticed was the phone.

It sat face-down by her left hand, the way it had sat at Cormac's table on Sunday. She never held it. She never scrolled while we talked. But every few minutes it buzzed against the wood, a small, dry sound, and every time it did, her fingers did something tiny. A flinch, a tightening. Then she would pick up her water, or smooth her napkin, or ask Dominique a question about linen.

"Four times," I thought. *In twenty minutes."

"Napkin colours," said Dominique. "Ivory, champagne, or dove grey?"

"Champagne," Briony said at once. "Daddy likes champagne."

"Daddy won't care what colour the napkins are," I said.

"He'll care if he's not asked."

"He'll care about the morality clause."

That landed. Her face stayed pleasant, but something behind her eyes closed, like a shutter coming down on a shopfront. Dominique, sensing weather, announced she'd fetch the sample menus from the kitchen and slid away on soft shoes.

We were alone in a room full of light.

"What was that about?" Briony asked quietly.

"Your father brought up the clause on Saturday night. I'm only repeating what he told me."

"You didn't have to say it in front of her."

"She's the wedding planner. She knows what a clause is."

"It was unkind."

"It was true."

She turned her glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth. The ring on her left hand caught the sun and threw a small hard star onto the wall. It was a good ring. Cormac had helped me choose it, which was a sentence I had not thought about until that moment.

"Is everything all right, Lachlan?"

"Why?"

"You've been somewhere else for three days. You didn't answer my messages. You didn't come on Monday." She said it without heat. "I'm allowed to ask."

"You are."

"So?"

"Work," I said. "The debt thing. It's eating me."

She nodded, slowly, and didn't say anything. And in the silence, her phone buzzed again.

This time she moved. Her hand went out and turned the phone over, and she looked at the screen. Her face did nothing at all. That was what I noticed, because Briony's face was never still. It was a face trained to perform. Right now it had simply gone out, like a power cut.

"Excuse me," she said.

"Of course."

She stood, taking the phone with her, and walked to the far window. She stood with her back half-turned, her shoulders high, thumbs moving. I could see her reflection in the glass. She was typing something short. Then she stopped, and began swiping, and I understood what she was doing a second before I let myself believe it.

She was deleting.

Swipe, tap, confirm. Swipe, tap, confirm. A long thread, scrolling upward past her thumb, vanishing line by line.

I stood.

I don't know what I intended. I didn't walk fast. I crossed the room the way you cross a room to look at a view, my hands in my pockets, and I came up beside her at the window and looked out at the water.

She jumped. She actually jumped, a small violent flinch that made the phone slip in her hand, and she caught it against her chest.

"You startled me."

"Sorry."

"I was just..." She made a vague gesture with the phone. "The florist."

"Is the florist upsetting you?"

"No. Don't be silly."

But in the instant before she had pulled the phone against her, I'd seen the top of the screen. A contact name, in grey letters over a white bar. Not a long one.

Florist.

And beneath it, a message preview, cut off at the edge of the screen. I read it the way you'd read a sign from a moving car.

delete after reading. Don't make me remind you who.

Then her thumb covered it.

I should have walked away. I knew that even as I stood there. Kaelia's file said I'd been a man who acted on certainty, and here I was again, building a case in my head out of a phone screen and a flinch. If I was wrong, I'd be doing to Briony exactly what I'd done to Kaelia.

But I wasn't wrong about the contact name. And I wasn't wrong about the fear.

"Briony."

"Mm."

"I want to ask you something. And I want you to hear it as a question, and not as an accusation."

She went very still. Beside us, the sea moved against the rocks, slow and steady, and a yacht cut across the light on the water. Her profile gave me nothing. I noticed she'd stopped breathing, and made herself start again, and it showed.

"All right," she said.

"The night of the IPO. Three years ago." I kept my voice level. I'd practised this in the shower, the way Kaelia said I used to practise speeches. "You came to the apartment with a document. A medical report about Kaelia."

Nothing moved in her face. A small muscle at the corner of her jaw tightened.

"I've never asked you where you got it."

"I told you at the time."

"You said you found it."

"I did."

"Where?"

"I don't remember." Too fast. The words came out smooth and flat, like something bought off a shelf. "It was a long time ago. I was frightened for you. I saw it and I thought you should know."

"It was sealed. It was in a private clinic file. It wasn't something you could just find."

"Lachlan..."

"Someone gave it to you, Briony."

"I said I don't remember."

"Someone told you what to do with it."

Her head turned. Slowly, as though the motion cost her something. She looked at me, and for the first time all afternoon I saw her without the polish. A pale, tired girl of twenty-six with mascara that had begun to sag at the corners, and eyes that were not the hard hazel I'd always seen but something much younger and much more frightened.

"What are you doing?" she whispered.

"I'm trying to understand."

"You're trying to catch me."

"I'm trying to stop being the last person in Sydney to know what happened to my own life."

Her mouth trembled. She pressed her lips together to stop it. I saw her swallow, and I saw her decide something, and I saw her decide against it, all in the space of a breath, as plainly as if she'd said it aloud.

"Please," she said. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't ask me that. Not here." Her fingers had tightened on the phone until the knuckles whitened. "There are cameras in this room, Lachlan. And people who..." She stopped. Shook her head. "I can't. I can't do it here."

"Then where?"

"I don't know."

"When?"

She looked past me. At the doorway where Dominique was returning with an armful of menus, headset blinking, face arranged into a smile. Briony turned her own face back to me, and the polish came down over it, layer by layer, until she was once again the woman in the cream coat.

But her voice, when she spoke, was so low I felt it more than heard it.

"Don't ask me, Lachlan. Not yet."

Then she stepped away from the window and said brightly, "Dominique, those look divine. Do you have any with the elderflower?"

I stayed where I was. The sun burned on the water, and the yacht had slipped out of sight, and my hands in my pockets were fists.

It was the first honest thing she'd said to me in six weeks.That was what frightened me.