And with that, Gwen farewelled her and left, confident Charlotte would do as she asked.
Charlotte sat down behind her desk and put her head in her hands. Life was too damned complicated. She was grateful for the emptiness of the gallery, but she felt so incredibly alone. The person she most wanted to speak to was mysteriously unavailable. She’d just verbally savaged her sister, and her best friend next door was so miserable he was barely able to make eye contact with her.
She lifted her head and looked around the empty gallery. The stark white room filled with Tyson Heller’s bright sculptures looked sleek and professional, but Charlotte found no comfort in it. This little refuge she’d built for herself and her sister suddenly seemed foreign. Where was Charlotte Evans in here? The desk beneath her elbows, salvaged, lovingly restored and shipped up from Melbourne on the back of a removalist’s truck, was the only piece of her in the room.
She needed to get out.
She pulled out her phone and tapped Emily’s number. The rest of her life started with an apology.
Chapter twenty-one
Across the street from the Evans Gallery, concealed by the low-hanging awning of the shopfront behind him, Craig watched the celebration. The tables at the café and restaurant on either side of the gallery were full, as was the gallery itself. People were spilling out onto the footpath. The air was charged with triumph; there was much back slapping, champagne popping, beer swigging and raucous laughing.
Inside Bean Drinkin’, Ben was aggressively working the espresso machine, his face shadowed by a scowl. His wilting posture and forced smiles suggested the sense of victory was not pervading the victorious.
The Vietnamese couple on the other side of the gallery were enjoying it. Food and drink were flowing, and their boisterous diners toasted them cheerfully as the beaming restaurateurs moved from table to table.
Craig hadn’t expected a street party. He’d come hoping to steal Charlotte away, and the celebration was a hindrance. Still, he’d spent the day setting everything up for this evening, and he wasn’t prepared to be foiled.
He focused his attention on the gallery and searched through the guests. He eventually located her inside, just by the door to the back room, talking to Gareth Moorehouse. In her pale yellow 1950s shirtdress, she looked beautiful, and she looked like home. Her hair was pulled up loosely. If things went according to plan, he would be releasing those locks later that night and watching them fall upon her shoulders. Or his pillow.
But he faltered, and his confidence took a hit as he studied her face. From where he stood he could see her shoulders were back and her smile was not forced like Ben’s, but there was no joy in it. He'd seen those eyes lit up with delight, but this evening, that particular spark was notably absent. Why?
On occasion, she cast furtive glances around the room, as though she was looking for someone. It was ever so discrete, as though she was afraid of being obvious and of being caught.
Could it be…?
Encouraged, Craig decided there was no time like the present.
He crossed the road and began weaving his way through the crowd towards her, a whisper soon following in his wake. There were many strange faces, but there were plenty of familiar ones, ones who’d shouted him down at the community meeting months ago, and members of the Boundary Street Preservation Group. The whispering crowd knew who he was and were wondering why he was here.
Tuning in to the murmur following him, Charlotte looked his way. She watched as he drew to a stop in front of her. Her expression was fixed, but he saw her eyes change. They softened.
As much as he’d rehearsed this moment in his head, he was suddenly lost for words.
‘Hi,’ was all he could manage.
‘Hello,’ Charlotte replied, drawing it out, suspicious. Beside her, Gareth adopted a shrewd smirk. She took a sip of her wine. A droplet clung to her top lip as she lowered her glass. It was distracting, he couldn’t think. When her tongue darted out to wipe it away, he thought he might break out in a sweat.
This was ridiculous. He was behaving like a teenager. Time to get his shit together.
‘Can I talk to you?’
She looked him up and down, assessing whether she should give him the time of day. Eventually, she excused herself from the grinning Gareth and led him into the privacy of the back room, which was cordoned off from the rest of the party.
She folded her arms across her chest and waited for him to start talking.
‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked, nodding at her folded arms.
‘Not exactly.' She didn’t look angry. More uncertain, but patient. She was waiting for his explanation.
‘That’s a good start,’ he conceded and smiled happily. ‘I gather you got the news about the development not going ahead.’
‘I did.’ She gestured towards the party with one hand. ‘Obviously.' The loose hand returned to the fold. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘I have time.'
She dropped her arms, dropped her defences, and gripped the sink behind her, instantly reminding him of another time she was pressed up against a kitchen bench.
‘It might take hours,’ he teased.
‘I’ve got hours.’
‘What about your party?’
‘It’s not just my party. It will go on regardless of what I am doing.’
‘Does that mean you’d be willing to leave it?’
She tilted her head, curious. ‘Where would I go?’
‘With me.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s a surprise,’ he replied, a mischievous smile dancing across his face.
The smile was contagious. She returned it, slowly and cautiously. It buoyed him. He was making ground. In fact, it was hard not to feel triumphant when she was willing to consider leaving her own victory party for him.
She pushed herself away from the sink. ‘Hours, huh? You better give me a minute then. I need to ask Gareth to close up for me.’
‘I’ll meet you outside,’ he beamed.
Their departure didn’t go unnoticed. Half of the party watched him hold open the passenger door of his BMW as she slid in. Closing the door behind her, he didn’t care who saw his jubilation.
As he pulled out in to the traffic, she said, ‘Your nana told me to give you time and wait for you to contact me. Is this what I've been waiting for?’
‘This and more,’ said Craig. His eyes were on the road, but he could feel her watching him.
She huffed. ‘I know where you get that from now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your dreadful habit of being cryptic.’
‘My nana,’ he stated.
‘Did you send her to talk to me?’
‘No, that was her idea. She insisted.'
‘It would have been nice to speak to you, Craig. Especially after you hung up on me and then ignored my calls.’
‘I didn’t hang up on you,’ Craig sighed. ‘Cassie dropped my phone in the toilet and killed it.’
Charlotte did a double take but quickly regained focus. ‘You never answered my question.’
‘Which one?’
‘About the development proposal. I asked you if it was all above board.’
Craig drew the car to a stop at a red light. He looked across at Charlotte, looked into her grey eyes.
‘It wasn’t. But that doesn’t matter any more because it’s not going ahead.'
‘Why not? What happened?’
Craig grinned at her like a school boy. ‘Like I said, it’s a long story.’
Charlotte groaned and rolled her eyes at him, making his smile broaden.
‘You seem to be enjoying yourself immensely. I hope you appreciate how tortured my last two days have been,’ she said.
Graciously, he dropped the grin. ‘I do, and I’m sorry to put you through that. I’m hoping to make up for it tonight.’
She eyed him suspiciously, then shifted her gaze out of the windscreen
.
‘The light’s green,’ she said. Craig turned his attention back to the road. She didn’t say anything more until he pulled up outside his apartment building.
‘Why am I here, Craig?’ she asked, looking out of the window at his building.
‘I have a story to tell you,’ he said, and climbed out of the car while she dropped her head back against the headrest heavily. He opened her door and reached for her hand. ‘Come with me, I want to show you something.’
She looked at his hand for only a second before she gave him hers. He pulled her out of the car and did not let her go.
As predicted, she moved towards his building. With a step just shy of a skip, he redirected her across the road and up the dark steps of the Art Deco building opposite. He felt a slight hesitation, followed by a tightening of her grip on his hand.
Once inside, his phone lit their way to the bottom of the stairs. She hesitated again, the pull stronger this time. He expected it. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘The broken step is fixed, and I’ve been up and down these a hundred times today. The rest are sturdy. Trust me.’
She sighed loudly. ‘Okay, lead on.’
At the top he asked her to wait on the threshold of the first apartment to the right. Everything was in its place ready to go. When he opened the French doors leading onto the small balcony, the white cotton curtains danced in the breeze like ghosts. He found the candles lined up on the kitchen bench and lit them, checking to make sure they wouldn’t be extinguished by the wind. Pulling one of the old jazz records from its sleeve, he desperately prayed his newfound friend and neighbour, from whom he was borrowing electricity, had remembered to leave the extension lead running into his laundry plugged in, and turned on. Thankfully, the scratchy sounds of the old vinyl soon filled the room.
Craig looked up to find Charlotte peering in, drawn by the candlelight, the music and her curiosity. Her eyes widened as she took in the whole room. Gratified, Craig watched her take stock of everything. The apartment was dusted and gleaming, as much as it could without a new coat of paint. The crumbling furniture had been removed and replaced by restored pieces from the appropriate era. The curtains were new, and the windows they adorned were clean. She walked towards him, reaching unconsciously for him as she took in the carefully laid table with its white tablecloth and setting for two.
Her hand came to rest on his bicep and it flexed instinctively. Staring out the French doors towards the city skyline in the distance, she said, ‘Craig, this is amazing. Did you do all this?’
‘I had some help,’ he admitted. For all her faults, there was a reason Cassie was still his friend. She could still be relied upon when he needed her, and after the severe berating he’d given her after Emily’s exhibition, she readily acknowledged she owed her penance.
Together, they'd spent the day hauling old, irreparable furniture down the patched up stairs, into a hired ute, and throwing it into a refuse pit where it shattered into a hundred satisfying pieces. Then, Cassie accompanied him as he raced from antique store to vintage warehouse, collecting replacements and loading them onto the back of the ute. Back at the old building she hauled them up the stairs with him, grunting a bit from the exertion, but not grumbling about the task.
On the second floor, Nana Gwen, beaming like a 1950s housewife, had polished the apartment within an inch of its life.
When Craig had left to find Charlotte earlier that evening, Nana Gwen was cooking Chicken Tikka Masala in his apartment across the street, and the end result was now sitting in a crockpot next to his rice cooker on the freshly scrubbed kitchen bench top.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Charlotte breathed, tightening her grip on his arm.
Reluctantly, Craig peeled her fingers away. She flushed as she looked down and wrapped her hand in the folds of her dress. Craig retrieved a bottle of Gewurztraminer from the countertop and filled the glasses on the table.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked as she untangled her hand and reached for her glass.
‘Only hors d’oeuvres,’ she said, taking more of a gulp than a sip.
As he served the meal, she blurted, ‘I don’t think I can wait any longer. What’s happened? Why aren’t you going ahead? What did you do? Will you tell me now?’
Craig smiled. She'd been incredibly patient. Not many women would have been willing to remain in the dark while he tinkered around the brittle edges of their life. But Charlotte Evans wasn’t a doormat, so there had to be a reason she was willing to blindly cooperate.
He owed her an explanation. Now. Still, when she was confused she was delectable, and he couldn’t help but tease her a little more.
‘Too many questions at once,’ he claimed.
‘Then pick one, any one, and give me an answer.’
‘Perhaps I should just start at the beginning then.’
He took a sip of wine.
‘Dad gave me my first job at Morgan Carmichael when I was sixteen, over the school holidays,’ he began. ‘Mostly, I photocopied plans and fetched coffee, but Dad always made a point of taking me on site visits, to see how things were progressing and give me some insight into the way the worksites operated. It was invaluable experience, this line of work is as much about managing relationships as it is about project management.’
Charlotte eyed him. He wasn’t giving her the answers she craved, but as he watched her, he could see her mind ticking over, deciphering his meaning. Eventually she said, ‘So it was your dad who taught you how to get what you want from people.’
‘Some,’ Craig replied. ‘But remember, my mum was in marketing. She was good at it.’
Charlotte nodded.
‘Over the years, I gradually got involved in more and more of the business. When I started to suggest different ways of doing things, Dad and Keith shut me down immediately. They had no reason to change anything. The money was still rolling in.’
‘I decided to bide my time and prove myself first,’ Craig continued. ‘Once I’d had a few wins and established myself, I could have another crack at shaking things up.'
‘They didn’t give me my first project until after I graduated. It was a housing estate they wanted to build on reclaimed swampland on the western fringe of the city. I knew it was a terrible idea from the start, but I kept my head down and played the game. Then, when the environmental impact statement showed there was a rare species of frog in the area, the project looked set to be scrapped.’
Craig paused and took a deep breath.
Charlotte sipped her wine, eyes fixed on him, waiting for him to continue.
‘I was working on wrapping it up when Dad walked in to my office late one afternoon, and told me it had been approved. It defied all logic. I pushed him to explain how it had come about, but he refused to give. That night, while I was at Mum and Dad’s picking up some plans, I answered their phone. It was the local councillor looking for Dad. They were out, so I offered to take a message. I guess the councillor assumed I knew what was going on. He knew I was the project manager and that I was Dad’s son. He asked me to let Dad know the cost of the approval had gone up one hundred thousand.’
Craig looked to see if Charlotte was following. Eyes wide, she shifted in her seat.
‘Your dad was bribing him,’ she said.
Craig nodded. ‘I was furious. This was my first project, and he and Keith had promised me I could run it how I saw fit. I’d made the call it was to be pulled.’
He sighed. ‘Dad always used to say, ‘you can’t stop progress’, and suddenly I knew he really meant nothing stops progress. If something gets in the way, then you pay your way around it. He and Keith went around the EIS, and they went around me. And they’d dragged me into the muck with my very first project. If it was ever uncovered, I was a party to it whether I liked it or not. Who would believe the company director’s son had nothing to do with it?’
‘It does seem implausible,’ agreed Charlotte.
Craig continued. ‘I phoned Dad at his function and let rip. We’d arg
ued before, but nothing like this. He told me I was nothing but a disappointment. He told me I owed him everything he’d spent on my ‘useless’ degree. And he told me if I couldn’t handle things the way they were, then it was time for me to go. I promised to be out of the office the next day, and he told me not to come crawling back when I stuffed up.’
He paused a moment.
‘Then, five hours later, the police were on my doorstep telling me he and Mum were dead.’
‘Holy shit,’ said Charlotte. Her hand was shaking as she picked up her wine glass.
‘I hadn’t told anyone about the fight. Nana was hospitalised almost immediately, unable to cope with the grief. As she got stronger, she told me how much it meant to her that I was there to take Dad’s place at Morgan Carmichael. She was so fragile, I was terrified I was about to lose her as well. So, I decided to keep quiet, stay on and step into my father’s shoes.’
‘Keith was a mess too,’ said Craig. ‘He’d lost his oldest friend and closest confidant. I don’t think he quite knew what to do with me, so he let me do what I wanted to. When I set up the Infill Development Division, I thought it would help me let go and move on. Forget what happened with Dad and focus on doing what I really wanted to do.’
‘Keith immediately regretted giving me free reign, but he let me go for a while, and I did succeed. But it has always been the infill development itself that bothers him, and he’s constantly been on the lookout for a reason to shut it down. I brought in a decent profit for quite a few years, but we’ve been on a gradual decline over the last twelve months.'
‘When we came upon the Boundary Street site, I couldn’t have been any more chuffed. West End is still booming, and your building isn’t in the best of shape.’
Charlotte’s eyes sparked. She opened her mouth, drawing in a sharp breath.
‘Hear me out,’ Craig said, holding up his hand. ‘I’m not having a go at you, just trying to give you the full picture.'
Set Me Free Page 23
