Chapter 9 — What did you come for?

(Laura)

“How?” I ask.

Something careful comes into his face. “It was sudden. I’ll tell you what I know, but not on your verandah, and not tonight.”

I let it go. Part of me doesn’t want to know, and the rest of me doesn’t trust anything he’d tell me anyway.

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re standing on my verandah.”

“A few months ago I was told what you said after the wedding,” he says. “What you said my brother did to you.”

“Told by who?”

“By a member of my family.”

“Giulia.” It isn’t a question. In eight years I’ve told exactly one person in that family, sitting on her couch in her uni hoodie with my arms held out.

He doesn’t confirm it. He doesn’t deny it either, and that tells me plenty.

“I didn’t know,” he says. “Before that conversation, I didn’t know.”

“And I’m supposed to take your word for it.”

“No.” He says it simply, without any heat. “You’ve no reason to.”

It throws me a bit. I was ready for him to argue, to swear on his mother’s grave, to tell me what a good man he is. Instead he stands there and agrees with me, and I don’t know what to do with that, so I keep going.

“How did you find me? I don’t use social media. I’m not in the phone book. I moved here so nobody would find me.”

“I hired people to locate you.”

“You had me followed?”

“I had you found.” A pause. “I accept you may not see much difference.”

“There isn’t any difference.” I’m gripping the post now. “Did they watch my house? Did they watch me pick him up from school?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.

And that’s when it clicks into place, like a joint when you get the angle right at last. Investigators who found my address would have found Chris. They’d have found his school and his after-school care and probably his merit award for the echidna poster. Matteo Vianello didn’t walk up my steps tonight wondering if I’d had a baby. He knew before he knocked. What I watched in the hallway wasn’t a man discovering my son. It was a man checking a report against the real thing.

“I’m not going to tell you I came here only to offer help,” he says, as if he can see me working it out. “That wouldn’t be true, and I think you’d hear it.”

“Then what did you come for?”

He doesn’t answer straight away. His gaze leaves my face and goes over my shoulder, and I turn my head to follow it.

He’s looking at my house. At Chris’s bike lying on its side on the patchy front lawn, where I’ve told him a hundred times not to leave it. At the paintings taped to the inside of the front window, a whale and a lopsided rainbow and a stick-figure me with enormous hands. At the window further along, where the light from the hallway is spilling into a bedroom painted ocean blue. He looks at all of it slowly and thoroughly, the way he looked at the room at that wedding eight years ago, keeping count of what’s where.

The moth is still beating against the light. My thumb is on my phone screen. Behind that blue window, my son is reading about a shark who’s scared of water, and the biggest man I’ve ever seen is standing on my verandah, memorising the shape of our life.

I step sideways, into his line of sight, so the only thing he can look at is me.

“Did you come here for my son?”