‘Like you and the whole town don’t know, man.’
Graeme nodded. ‘Good point,’ he said, and swirled the red wine in his glass, before tipping his nose in and inhaling as if he was a beagle after a sausage. ‘You know the difference between a young cabernet and an aged cabernet?’
‘Are you using a wine analogy to explain my love life to me?’
‘Roll with it, mate. Do you know the difference?’
‘Time in the barrel? Rainfall while the grape was on the vine? Southern versus northern growing slope?’
‘All good suggestions, but no. The difference is the volatility.’
Josh took a deep sip of his beer. ‘Clear as mud.’
‘When a person is young, he’s content to drink a young cabernet. The colour is bright, the flavours are bold, the taste is typically intense and high in tannins. The young person can afford this wine, it’s sunny and warm and uncomplicated, and he’ll enjoy quaffing it.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘A bit like the legendary Josh Cody might have enjoyed himself dating the netball team back in high school.’
Josh rolled his eyes.
‘But when the guy gets a little older, his palate changes. It’s time for something a little more complicated, where the flavours and colours have had time to settle into something unique, softer, with a rich and nuanced quality. Something that requires a little patience to find.’
‘I can be patient. I’vebeenpatient.’
Graeme lifted his glass and clinked it against his. ‘Hang in there, champ. Vera’s got the hots for you so bad, she’s not going to care that in my wine analogy you come in just slightly above vinegar.’
Josh shook his head. He didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved.
‘How do you know she’s got the hots for me?’
Graeme shook his head. ‘Maaaate.’
CHAPTER
33
The Friday in November on which she was to farewell her aunt brought with it a bleak, grey-skied afternoon, and rain had darkened the granite of the old headstones scattered about the cemetery. Overhead, leaves shivered in the breeze, and Vera gathered her coat about her. This was all so wrong.
Jill had loved colour, and sunshine, and fun. Not drooping flowers, and grass running with rivulets of mud. The coffin she could barely recall choosing spilled dull sheets of water as it was lowered into the hole in the ground.
Marigold had organised everything, from holding Vera’s hand while she sat by Jill to say goodbye, to bossing around everyone at the funeral home and announcing herself celebrant of the service.
Vera had just … stopped. Everything, every goal she’d pursued since leaving the city, had hinged on Jill being alive.
Finding a new and peaceful aged care home for Jill:thathad brought her to the Snowy River district. The need to find a way to earn income if she lost her case and was incarcerated? That goal had resulted in her opening a café in Hanrahan, hiring a manager who could run it in her absence, making enough profit to employ a replacement cook, and working dawn to dusk to make it all happen.
And the other goal … the secret that had been at the heart of every decision she’d made except for that mad, foolish, night with Josh … was to never get hurt again.
She’d screwed up, and now Jill was gone, and what did all her plans matter now?
She was like a knife with no blade, an oven with no heat. The only thing tethering her to the world was a criminal charge that she felt too exhausted to fight.
‘May your passage be swift,’ said Marigold, addressing the mourners who lingered in the rain.
Graeme had come, his partner Alex by his side in full fireman’s uniform. The café was shut. Baking, usually her go-to solace for every malady, had been more than she could face.
Kev stood by his wife, dapper in a corduroy cloth cap and suede coat, holding a misshapen orange golf umbrella over his wife’s head.