Page 21 of More Than I Can Bear

I didn’t, couldn’t, wait till I got in my car. Instead I grabbed at my phone as he watched, taking shot after shot, something else I would get reamed out for. So he caught the moment I found Freya’s Instagram.

There were no images of her, I knew that almost instantly. I skimmed over post after post of shoes and jackets, t-shirts and stickers, each in the same kind of whimsical pastel style as her shoes. Little creatures poked out of holes she’d painted on the sides of shoes, or capered across the shoulders of t-shirts, but no pictures of her.

“That’s the girl you’re looking for, right?” the guy said, his eyes gleaming and that alone should’ve been enough to stop me, but it wasn’t. “She was wearing some of them shoes.”

“You want a story?” I said, not replying to him, but setting the agenda and as soon as I did so, I felt a bit better. “Either record this on your camera or get your phone out.”

The photographer instantly switched mode on his camera, a small flashing red light letting me know it was recording.

“Freya, if you are seeing this, I…” I didn’t have a lump in my throat, it was a great big stone, hard and harsh, sharp edges cutting into my throat each time I tried to swallow. “I’m sorry. I…” I wanted to say more, but that was a fucking cop out. I couldn’t do this as a one-sided conversation between me and the camera. She might never let me talk to her. I’m not sure I would’ve if our positions were reversed but… If I never got that chance, I needed her to know this. “I did the wrong thing.”

Jack would eviscerate me. I could almost imagine her response. That just made the pain cut deeper, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

“I screwed up and I’m so, so sorry.”

Freya

The lunch rush had just finished and we were in that lull between lunch and dinner where we cleaned the cafe up, ready for the evening crowd. And thank god for that.

“And lastly onto sport. We’ve got some very big news.” The smooth tones of the newsreader had all of us looking up at the screen. “One of Channel 7’s roving reporters captured this video today of a very contrite Adam Farrelly outside a community hall in…”

My hand gripped the broom handle tight, so tight it felt like my fingers would leave imprints in the wood, all sound dropping away until the video was shown.

“Freya, if you’re seeing this…”

“Freya?” Katie said, spinning around.

“Freya? You, Freya?” Gloria’s voice was an echo of my workmates, her incredulity growing louder by the second. “You’re the one Adam Farrelly took off with?”

I took a step backwards, shaking my head, as if that’s what it would take to get me out of this situation. Before now, people used to largely ignore me, and that was OK. I was comfortable there in the background, but this…? Amber came rushing out of the kitchen to see what the fuss was, as did the kitchen hands.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Freya looks as white as a ghost.”

“Freya was the girl that snuck off with Adam Farrelly the night of the Magarey Medal count,” Katie announced with a salacious grin. “Damn, girl, spill the tea!”

Chapter12

Kaine

I was sitting in my site office trying to work out how the fuck we were already behind schedule when one of my leading hands, Jim, barged in.

“Boss, you’re gonna wanna hear this,” he said, then shoved his phone in my face, and there was my baby brother.

“Freya, if you’re seeing this…” he said, looking absolutely crushed right then, but it wasn’t him that had my sympathy.

“Fuck…”

“The fellas were watching the video at lunch,” Jim said, “and now there’s a bunch of the local media clustered around the building site.”

Hoping to catch sight of my brother. I shook my head sharply. It wasn’t as if this shit hadn’t happened before. When Adam got into a fight. When Adam’s team won the premiership medal. But now? I wasn’t my brother’s keeper. All of that shit before was on him, but this was on us. Freya belonged to all of us and my brother couldn’t seem to get that through his thick head. I focussed back on the video.

“I did the wrong thing,” he said, a perfect picture of contrition.

Yep, I thought viciously,and you’re doing the wrong thing now. You’re making this all about you and—

“I screwed up and I’m so, so sorry.”

But you’re screwing it up more, I thought, the bear inside me roaring because he knew. Freya wasn’t used to the public scrutiny of having someone semi-famous in her life, not like I was.

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