He gave me a short nod. “Okay, well, keep me posted,” he said. “You know I’m always happy to help.”
That offer made me think: aside from the fact both Mum and Bree weren’t talking to me—and it would be really bad form to ask him what I should do about Bree—I really only had one major problem. “What I could really use your help with is figuring out what the fuck I’m going to do about my money situation,” I said. “Because, honestly, I’m out of ideas.”
He sat back, his eyebrows travelling up his forehead a little. “Alright,” he said easily. “Well, how much do you owe?” I gave him a breakdown of my debts, and when he did some quick mental addition, it sent his eyebrows into his hairline. “Jesus, $70,000?”
I cringed. “Yeah.”
He gave me a bit of a wide-eyed look. “Good god. Alright,” he said, thinking, “How much was the factory paying you again?”
I shook my head. “I can’t go back there. Not without telling Bree’s entire extended family and all their work colleagues that I’m transgender.”
He exhaled. “Okay, so you have no income, no assets, and a debt of $70,000.” I nodded, grimacing; when he said it like that, the situation seemed pretty grim. To be honest, I’d already felt like it was anyway. It was clear there weren’t many options. “Well,” he said carefully. “I suppose I could cut a few cheques and give you some breathing space. You can start to pay me back when you’re working again. I can promise not to send scary debt collectors around if you miss a payment.” He smiled.
I made a strangled noise. Was he offering to—? “No,” I said firmly. “Henry, no, that wasn’t what I meant when I asked for your help.” The more I thought about it, the more abhorrent the idea was. “Are you seriously offering to lend seventy grand to the cheating ex that you could hardly speak to for months because it was too painful?”
He actually looked a little hurt. “No, I’m offering to help someone I care about,” he said shortly.
Whoops. I put my hand on his, jamming my eyes shut for a second. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t deserve that kind of help from you, that’s all.”
He disagreed. “You paid more than twenty grand for Bree and you’ve been with her for three months,” he pointed out. “And you didn’t even have the money. I have the money, it’s just sitting in a term deposit, waiting for me to actually have someone to spend it on. It might as well be put to good use, because it’s not as if I’m going to need it in the near future...”
I squeezed his hand and shook my head. “That’s—god—really generous of you. But no. No more debts.”
He nodded, his eyes glazed for a moment. “Sorry,” he said eventually. “Sorry, that was—” He swallowed. “I’ll have a think to see if I can come up with another solution for you.”
If he’d been in a reasonably good mood a few minutes ago, it was ruined now. “Thank you,” I said, and then put my hand back in my lap. “I’m sorry.”
We sat there in silence, staring at the reflection of the street lights on the road as the rain fell at our feet. I stole a couple of glances at him; did he mean what I thought by that ‘no one to spend it on’ comment? “You’ll need your money one day,” I told him. “You should save it for then.”
He laughed once. “That’s the plan,” he said bleakly. “When I started working at Frost, the first thing I did was work on paying my house off so that when I started a family, I wouldn’t have to worry about the price of housing. Then I saved for wedding—a proper traditional one, you know my parents would want to invite half of Australia. Now, I’ve saved three sets of private school fees and I’m working on university tuition.” He looked across at me. “But there’s just one problem with all of that.”
You don’t have a wife or any children, I thought. I didn’t say it, of course I didn’t. The guilt gnawed at me, though. It chewed on my insides: he’d been expecting that to be us for the last three years. It was better that it wasn’t, because he deserved a proper wife, not one that was just pretending to be happy. “One day you’re going to meet some lucky woman and make her the happiest person in the world,” I promised him.
He exhaled, visibly deflating. “No, I’m not,” he said with conviction. “All I do is work, and there’s no fucking way I’m ever going to be able to date someone from work again, not now.”
God. “Because of me?”
He shook his head. “Jason made an offhand comment that you’d been working under him for years with no issues, but that you quit right after we broke up. Management knows our breakup had nothing to do with it, but Sean Frost is taking great delight in getting his lapdog—”
“—his lapdog?”
“My assistant manager,” Henry clarified, “to interview all of my employees and all of your ex-co-workers as part of your complaint to make sure the ‘investigation is appropriately thorough’, which is code for ‘the entire office thinks Henry Lee is a predatory womaniser with no professional boundaries’.” He sounded very bitter.
Suddenly it made sense why my complaint was taking so long to be resolved. It was a pity; I could really have used that $8,000 yesterday. It was too late now, though. “Why are they doing it? Is Sean just being a sadistic fuck, or—?”
Henry pressed his lips together. “He wants me to take leave, because if I do, James gets sign off on everything and Sean can push whatever he wants through HR without being grilled about petty little inconveniences like needing to follow industrial law.”
He seemed a bit tight-lipped on that point, I opted not to press any further. Instead, I extended a tentative arm around his shoulders. He didn’t stop me. “Just quit,” I told him, rubbing his back. “It’s not worth it.”
He made a hesitant noise and shook his head. “Then where would people like Sarah be when they need help?” He sighed at length. “Besides, I don’t want to give Sean fucking Frost the satisfaction of driving me out.”
“Well, I don’t want to watch Frost destroy you.”
“You won’t,” he said, “because I’m not going to let it. I’m just—” He shook his head. “Things are just hard right now. I’ll be alright in the long run.”
I decided to trust him on that point. “Okay, I hope you’re right.” I hugged him firmly for a couple of seconds, and then we both sat back up again. I watched him surreptitiously dab his eyes on his sleeves but didn’t draw attention to it by offering him a handkerchief. Instead, I said, “PS, if you get the chance to fuck Sean over, as someone who’s had the pleasure, I highly recommend it.”
He laughed a little at that. “I’ve heard about four different versions of that story and I like all of them,” he told me and then took a long, slow breath and exhaled, looking up at the sky. The clouds had parted and the rain was clearing. We could safely walk back to his apartment.
He looked across at me for a moment before he stood up. “It’s so strange,” he reflected, his eyes running over the length of me. “You look nothing like the Min Lee I knew, and when you told me you were transgender, I had this image of you gallivanting off into the sunset with Bree, a completely different person. I’d just be left behind as this figment of your past life, someone who you’d rather forget.” His voice was a bit unsteady. “But now you’re here, now we’re talking, it’s still you. It’s still you in there. Your laugh, the way you speak, the way you think, just how very well you know me… You haven’t gone anywhere. And inside this man I hardly recognise, I can still see my best friend.”
I swallowed. “I’m so sorry I can’t be more to you, Henry.”
He had such a gentleness in his eyes. “That’s alright,” he told me quietly. “I think this might be enough after all.”
I let him help me up, and, figuring we should head back before it started raining again, we dodged puddles and cars on the way to the place he’d rented nearby. Then, just like we had for four years, we poured ourselves a glass of wine and sat opposite each other on the couch, controllers in hand.
My probl
ems weren’t going to be solved tonight—if they could even be solved—but I had Henry back. I had him even though I’d given up hope that I ever would and accepted our story was over. But it wasn’t over. And that made me feel like everything else might turn out okay, after all.
THIRTY-FOUR
The fluorescent lights in the hospital waiting room were really bright compared to the dim and overcast sky outside, and first thing in the morning, they made my dull headache worse. It didn’t make me regret finishing the wine and spending the night in one of Henry’s spare beds, though, not at all. With everything crumbling around me, it had been a relief to not have to go home to Sarah’s all by myself. It also meant that when I finally got a call from Rob this morning about her, I was close by and it hardly took me five minutes to run through the drizzle back to the hospital.
“You’re in early!” the receptionist at Women and Babies told me when I asked about Sarah, and then she leant back to have a look at the board with all the patient names on it behind reception. “She’s in 519. Her partner’s in there, too. Make sure you knock.”
I followed her directions up the corridor to 519, but I never got the opportunity to knock, because as I lifted my knuckles to the door, it wrenched open. Rob was standing in the doorway, red-faced and upset. I’d obviously interrupted him in the middle of storming out. “Sorry,” he told me, distracted. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead he just stepped carefully around me so he could stomp down the corridor in a fluster.
I watched him disappear behind reception where the lifts were, stunned. What was that about?
Inside the room, Sarah was lying flat on her back, surrounded by several machines—some of them were connected to her by various leads and tubes—looking just as upset as Rob had. She turned her head towards me as I came in, and her face softened. “Look who it is…”
“Hey,” I greeted her, glancing apprehensively at all the machines as I wandered over to her bedside.
She saw my expression. “I’m not as sick as I look, I promise. No matter what Rob told you.”
I felt uncomfortable. “He didn’t say much to me.” I pulled a chair up to her bedside and sat in it. “Are you okay?” I didn’t know how to ask it. What if she’d miscarried? “What happened?”
She sighed. “It’s nothing,” she said, but it obviously wasn’t nothing, because she immediately wanted to explain what it was. “Well, nothing serious, anyway. I had a shower in my hotel room last night, and before I knew it I was blacking out. I thought it was one of those things that would go away—you know, like if you stand up too quickly—but it didn’t. After ten minutes of not being able to see properly, I figured it was something I should get checked out ASAP. I got a taxi down here because I didn’t want anyone to see an ambulance and freak out, and I would have just been in and out, except that when I got out of the taxi I blacked out again. Because I was a bit out of it afterwards, the ER staff called Rob and he freaked out.”
I didn’t blame him. “If someone called me out of the blue and told me Bree was in the ER, I’d freak out, too.”
She looked a bit annoyed. “I told them not to,” she said. “I specifically told them not to worry him because I knew what would happen. But because I kept answering their questions wrong about what day it was and all that, they called him anyway.”
Oh. Suddenly, Rob being upset made sense. “And he’s worried about you.”
Her expression hardened. “Yes, and I keep telling him he doesn’t need to be. It’s just low blood pressure, it happens to heaps of women mid-pregnancy, and vomiting all the time just made it worse. They’ve given me a script for the nausea, so I can eat and drink properly from now on and I’ll definitely be fine, but Rob doesn’t see it that way,” she said. “I told him I’m planning to go back to work this afternoon—because I am—and he just went off at me. ‘How can you be so stupid’, ‘Don’t you care about your health at all’, ‘You’re responsible for two lives now’, all that crap. I don’t need it. It was bad enough with the doctor in the ER patting me patronisingly when I asked if I’d get back to work last night. He was like, ‘You’ve got more important things to think about now’, like, ‘silly girl, your real job is to be a living, breathing gestation machine for your foetus’.” She was getting upset, and the machine beside her played a couple of low-grade warning tones and her heart rate flashed. She immediately reached over and reset it. “I watched the nurse do that,” she admitted, and then sighed. “I get that it must have been a really awful phone call for Rob to get. But just because he got a nasty phone call and it scared him, that doesn’t mean I should just drop everything and be a stay at home mum for the next 18 years.”
“Does he actually think that’s the answer, though? Maybe he was—”
“His exact words were, ‘Do you really think working at that bloody place 24/7 is good for either you or our little one, Sares?’” She imitated his big, booming voice.
Privately, I tended to agree with Rob. The terrible pressure and stress at Frost were bad at the best of times, I didn’t know what they’d be like to someone who was pregnant and suffering from morning sickness. I didn’t want to sound like I was siding with him, though. Even though I knew she’d hate to quit marketing projects, I half-heartedly attempted, “Well, maybe you could stay there and do admin, or—”
“No,” she said firmly. “No. The only reason I put up with the crap I do at Frost is because I love my job. If I quit that, what’s the point of being there at all?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. She exhaled at length. “Anyway, sorry,” she said. “Sorry to dump all this crap on you first thing in the morning. You’re probably half-awake.”
I shook my head. I’d been dumping my crap on her for months and she’d always been there for me. “I just had the world’s strongest instant coffee, I’ll be awake until Sunday. Be my guest.” I made a gesture inviting her to continue.
She smiled vaguely at that, but she didn’t take me up on the offer. “I’m kind of over talking about how sick I feel,” she admitted, and then something occurred to her. “Oh! Do you want to hear about the project? You’re like the only person who’ll understand me when I talk about it. Rob’s eyes just kind of glaze over.” When I nodded, she brightened. “We did decide to call it ‘Flagship’, after all; I really like that name. I’ve got 24 staff on it, and so I organised them into different teams with their own sub-Leads because otherwise it just gets too much for me.” She launched into this complete description of where the project was up to and how she was organising it—I had a feeling she’d been asked more than once to report on it—with animated descriptions of how, like, intense the media campaign was going to be and how much money she had the sign off on. “It’s mind-blowing,” she finished. “We can get the best contractors for everything, we don’t need to cut corners. I can’t wait to see how it’s going to turn out.”
It was so endearing listening to her gush about the project that I was hesitant to ask anything that might knock that smile. My curiosity got the better of me, though. “No one’s being weird about having a female lead on such a big project?”
Her eyebrows went up. “You know what? They’re actually not.” At my sceptical expression she nodded. “I know, I was surprised, too, because they’re a pack of sexist wankers. I think maybe it’s because they know I wouldn’t put up with crap.” She deflated a little. “Of course, they don’t know I’m pregnant yet, so maybe that will be the clincher… I’ve been thinking, the second I start to show I’ll just get everyone in a room and just tell them at the beginning of the meeting, and then move straight on to other business like it’s no big deal. But before I do that, I kind of think I should wait until I know what I’m going to do about leave.”
I thought she'd already made that decision. “Didn’t you say you were going to work right up until you give birth, take all your maternity leave, and then quit once it was all used up?
“Yeah…” she said vaguely, but she didn�
�t sound convinced. “That was the original plan.” I gave her a pointed look, and she sighed. “I don’t want to quit, Min. I’m loving this stuff. You know how good it feels watching a project you worked hard on coming together? Well, there’s this whole other level of pride when I’m the reason it’s working. Not only that, but look at where I am: I’m heading an enormous project under the personal mentorship of the acting manager. I’ve got my foot on the next rung of the ladder. I’m nearly there, and if I do a good job on this project, who knows what’ll happen next? I’ve been waiting seven years for this. It’s here, it’s finally happening. I don’t want to give that up.” There was an implicit ‘but’. “Except I’m pregnant.”
“So what are you going to do instead?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. I mean, look at me.” She gestured at the machines attached to her. “I’ve been hugging toilet bowls for weeks. I know Rob has a point, and maybe he’s right. I want to keep working—like, I really want to—but is it the right thing to do? Maybe I should quit and ‘take care of myself’. People keep saying kids are happier with stay-at-home mums anyway…”
“But would you be happy as a stay-at-home mum?” I already knew the answer.
So did she. “No, I’d be fucking miserable if I had to quit all of this right now, just as my career is taking flight. All I know is work. I’d be leaving everything I know and love to be a housewife, and I’d be hopeless at that because I’d hate it. But whatever, people always wax poetic about the great sacrifices mothers make for their kids, don’t they?”
Something about the way she’d phrased that struck me.
‘Leaving everything I know’, ‘the great sacrifices mothers make’… I’d heard those words before. A deep uneasiness began to settle in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. “I don’t know if making big sacrifices is the answer…”
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