Read Online The Secrets We Keep by Stephanie Butland - Free Book Online

didn’t much like heights. She’d taken him to Luna Park where he’d laughed like a child on the rides, and she’d cooked for him and introduced him, casually, to her sister. She’d looked at photos of where he lived and tried to imitate his accent. She’d been charmed when he’d offered to come running with her—she was training for a marathon at the time—and liked how, although he was a head taller than her, they’d found a matching stride. She’d had sex with him, noisily all over his hotel room and quietly, gigglingly, in her little shared house. She was having, she told herself, a short-term romance.
    Michael wasn’t. He was smitten and he didn’t care that she knew it. He felt ambushed by love and told her so. She laughed at him, telling him that he had sunstroke, infatuation, a bug. He curled her hair around his finger and shook his head. She told him she’d be forgotten as soon as he was back in the England he kept telling her about, rain clouds and gravy and all.
    â€œNo,” he said. “No, Elizabeth, you’ve got me all wrong. You’ll see.”
    She asked him how, if he’d never been out of his country before, he knew it was her and not Australia he was loving. He explained how he’d felt, this last year, that there was something missing from his life, but that at the same time he loved his job, and his home, and when he saw the TV ad for Australia he’d felt something speak to him, something telling him to come here.
    â€œThere you are then,” Elizabeth had said, rolling herself closer to him. “The universe wants you to get a tan. That’s all it is.”
    â€œNo,” he’d said. “It was you.” But she’d refused to accept it. Refused the idea that she could tie her existence, her happy, easy days, to someone who would, by dint of his birthplace, make her life awkward, complicated, in need of compromise and planning and all of the things she had deliberately removed from it when she came to the city and started anew.
    While he was away he texted her every day: good nights, good mornings. He called and left cheerful, thinking of you messages on her answering machine.
    â€œHe’s behaving like my boyfriend,” Elizabeth had said to Mel.
    â€œHe’s behaving like your soul mate, Sis,” Mel had said, scrolling through the messages, “and you need to decide whether you want that or not. He’s not the casual sort.”
    â€œNo,” Elizabeth had said. “I suppose he’s not.”
    â€œAnd neither are you,” Mel had added.
    â€œNo. I know.” She had been mostly happily mostly single since she came to Sydney, and could hardly believe that five years had gone by since her school sweetheart gave her an ultimatum about settling down and getting married, and she gave him the answer he didn’t want. She’d known then that he wasn’t really the man for her, although it had felt as though everyone except Mel had known better and had been lining up to tell her she had made a mistake. She had been sure that she hadn’t. But now she came to think about it, she wasn’t sure that the life she had made since was really the life for her either. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Sydney, and her friends, and running and swimming and working too many hours and saving for a deposit on her own place. She did. But perhaps it wasn’t really right; perhaps that was why she was thinking about Michael the way she was.
    But it was best to be sure. Elizabeth had spent the next week making a list to herself of all the reasons it wouldn’t work. Not really knowing each other. Distance. Culture. Expense. Time apart. Away-from-home self, different from at-home self. The countless times she’d mopped the tears of brokenhearted colleagues when their One True Love had gotten on a plane home and never been heard from again.
    Compared to the reasons