“Go upstairs and have a nap,” Micky said. “I’ll kick this one out—” She patted Robin on the knee. “—and get back to work. Josephine and I can handle things.”
“Hey.” Robin pretended to be offended. “I have to go, anyway. Diversity waits for no one.”
“Not a bad idea,” Kristin said, despite not being much of a day napper.
After saying her good-byes, she headed upstairs and walked around the apartment, where she went straight to Sheryl’s office, as though following a hunch. The door was closed but not locked. They never locked the doors in the house. They didn’t have reason to. An idea bloomed in the back of her mind—had probably been doing so for a while.
If Sheryl was going to be too stubborn, too depressed, or unraveling too much to do it, Kristin would do it for her. Sheryl wasn’t going to give her answers anyway. She was bottling it all up, drinking her pain away.
Kristin had been in Sheryl’s office when she’d seen her stash the piece of paper away in a drawer. She knew where to find Sheryl’s father’s phone number.
Kristin rang the bell. A thrill ran up her spine. Sheryl’s father, Trevor, lived in Strathfield’s Koreatown, an area she knew well. A second later, as if he’d been waiting on the other side, the door swung open.
“Kristin?” the man said.
“Yes.” Kristin extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Trevor.”
“Come in.” He opened the door and Kristin followed him into the apartment. The hallway was painted in an off-putting kind of brown and the small lounge, made up of what looked like secondhand furniture, didn’t instill a cozy warmth in her either.
“Can I offer you some water? I’m afraid I don’t have any coffee, turns out it’s pretty bad for the liver as well.” Trevor gave a rueful smile.
They sat down in a pair of knackered armchairs. Kristin tried to hide her nerves by sitting as still as possible. She only reached for the water glass after staring at her hands for a few seconds in silence and making sure they weren’t trembling. The sense that she shouldn’t be here made her jumpy. It felt like she was cheating on Sheryl by sitting across from this man, who looked nothing like Kristin had ever imagined him. Though, she suspected, time and substance abuse must have done a number on him.
Trevor Johnson’s skin was almost translucent, with purplish half moons underneath his eyes. Whatever he had left of his hair was combed backward but didn’t hide the liver spots dotting his skull. What Kristin noticed most were his hands, bony and thin-fingered, which kept fidgeting with nothing.
“How’s Sheryl?” he asked right off the bat.
“Not well.” Kristin examined his face, looking for similarities between it and her partner’s. Perhaps the eyes a little bit, though Trevor’s were watery and heavy-lidded and Kristin could barely see the blue shine through. “Not since you showed up.” She tried to keep any blame out of her voice. That wasn’t why she had come.
The only reason she had ventured all this way, risking Sheryl’s wrath, was because she was desperate to understand. To meet someone in Sheryl’s family, the woman she had spent the better part of her life with. The woman she had asked to elope with her to New Zealand to marry a few years ago, but who had refused on principle as long as the Australian government kept its head up its ass on the matter. A no that hadn’t hurt Kristin in the slightest because she understood the reason behind it.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to look Sheryl up.” Trevor’s head shook a little. “In the end, I felt I had no choice. If only to tell her that none of what happened was her fault. She was only a child when Maureen died, and I was so off my head all the time, I might as well have died along with her.” He stroked the stubble on his chin. “Do you think it was too selfish of me to contact her like that?”
Kristin was taken aback by that question. Not only because she hadn’t expected it, but also because Trevor seemed to possess the same inquisitive nature Sheryl had.
“Not really,” she replied. “But it shocked Sheryl and ripped open all those old wounds. Made her think of the childhood she could have had, perhaps. All the missed opportunities.” Kristin cleared her throat. She glanced at Trevor who looked at her intently, lips slightly pursed. “I’ve known Sheryl for a very long time, and she’s never done self-pity. Until you turned up. It has shaken her to the core, and for someone who is impossible to shut up at times, she’s being awfully quiet about it all.”
His lips drew into a smile. “That sounds like Sheryl all right. The not being able to shut up part. She was always like that. Always debating at the dinner table, ever since she was a little girl.” He shook his head. “All I wanted was some reassurance that she did okay in life. That I hadn’t messed her up too badly. I had one of the guys I share this apartment with, a younger fella, look her up on the internet, and I was very impressed when he told me she’s a professor. I could immediately see it, you know? Despite having been absent from her life for so long, if I had any working brain cells left”—a guileless chuckle—“that’s what I would have guessed. Smart as a whip, that girl.” His voice broke a little.