Chapter Twenty Three

That was the thing about music – about sound as either art or nightmare. It only existed in the moment of its creation. One fleeting, agonising song poised in time. And then it was gone.

Polly wondered if that was a metaphor for love too.

She listened to the hum of the plane and sighed. She wasn’t sure why she’d needed to do it, but there’d been a piano on the stage of the Korovinjan Dom Harmonja and Polly needed to hear it again, if only to prove it was over.

She knew it was destructive, but she couldn’t stop herself. She knew what she was risking – sixteen years of a tentative grip on sanity, not to mention the hard won peace and contentment she’d found in the home she’d built at Jerinja.

And the heavenly second chance she had with Ksenia Tokarycz.

The concert had been impressive. Polly couldn’t stop a smile as she thought about it. Toks was as hot as hell in a tux, swagger in her step as she strode to the centre of the stage. The unbelievably cocky smirk and the toss of one perfect eyebrow she directed to the box where Polly was watching. She’d done it every concert on this whole tour – sought Polly out and flirted with her in front of two-thousand people, then turned her back and been fucking brilliant.

And Polly had loved every second of it, including teasing her about it afterwards when it was just the two of them. Including kissing that confidence from her lips, from her throat, from her body until Toks was a shaking, quivering mess in her arms. Until she’d quieted all that boastful pride and found the woman inside. The woman who still seemed to love her.

It astonished Polly that she had the power to do this. That Toks was prepared to give it to her after everything that had happened – or hadn’t happened – between them. It was a precious gift, dusted with time and tears, as ephemeral as music and the elusive sounds that Polly chased, and she knew Toks didn’t surrender it easily. She wanted to cherish this new potential between them.

She wanted to nurture that slow, wondering smile that spread across Toks’ lips when she clocked what Polly had reduced her to. The smugness that came next was what Polly lived for. Toks would roll them over, reclaiming her position as the maestro of Polly’s heart, her body and her love, and then she’d drag Polly’s surrender from her too.

They were a symphony together. Appassionato.

But as desperately as Polly clung to hope and the wonderful idea of being with Toks again, the bittersweet lure of madness and memory had tugged her toward the piano on the stage of the Dom. Scars that had only healed on the surface jammed the stool on the pedals of the piano and the deep hurt within her waited to hear her nightmare one last time.

It hadn’t been the same.

Of course it hadn’t. A perfectly tuned piano with open strings rang with every note – a bit like the plane that hummed its white noise across the heavens. It could never resound with all the haunting specifics that swirled in Polly’s head. Like the magic that Toks recreated each evening with her orchestra, the exquisite pain of the music only happened for one moment in time. The sound that Polly was chasing was gone.

Polly looked out the small window to the clouds that hunched beneath them. They were an hour out of Bangkok. The tropics. Halfway home. Daz dozed by her side. Justin watched them both from the aisle seat. Their fingers were linked. Polly envied them.

“Any chance they might turn the plane around if I asked them really nicely?” Polly said.

Justin cocked his head with the question.

“I shouldn’t have left her. Not again.”

He nodded. “Maggs will sort her out. I needed to take care of you. It’s time she understood.”

“I know.”

Polly looked at the clouds again. They were storm cells, building on each other as they punched up to the stratosphere. The howl of the music Polly remembered from the ruined piano in Korovinja was the same. A chord that may have been started by screams and pain and fear but which caught with harmonics. Sounds that soared and grew and crashed together, dark and bruised at the bottom, churning and violent. But as they reached higher? Glorious and majestic, ascending through the shattered dome of the concert hall and stretching to the heavens.

They’d taken Polly with them, feeling the vibrations through her wrists, her back, her whole body as it was lashed to the piano. She’d been neck-deep in hell, but soaring with the angels.

Nothing in life was simple – one spur of the moment decision on a plane sixteen years ago had taught her that – but it was a wry, stupid, torrid contradiction that Polly still yearned for the beauty she had found amid terror.

Justin reached over and squeezed her knee to get her attention. “Why did you do it, Polls? Was it a test?”

The man had been her saviour three damn times now, and he had a gentle soul that Polly wished the world could share, but he’d never understand that.

“For myself?” she asked. “Maybe.”

“I meant for Toks.”

Shit.Polly hadn’t considered it like that.

Was it? Justin and Daz hadn’t dragged her onto the plane. She’d let them lead her away. Part of it was following a timeworn pattern, but what was the rest? Was she subconsciously challenging Toks’ devotion to her now?

That was a cruel, cruel thing to do.

She panicked. “No! Oh, god no. Really, turn the plane around! I need to go back. I need to go back to her! I can’t leave her twice. Not after only just finding her again. I love her! Justin, I love her.”

His smile was too fucking wise. Daz opened his eyes. The bastard hadn’t been asleep at all.

“Maybe a test would do that woman good,” he said.

Polly was horrified. “You don’t think sixteen years was enough? This is awful. I have to go back.”

“Maybe we don’t forgive her for not coming to find you sixteen years ago.”

“Maybe it’s not your forgiveness she needs!” She clapped her hand over her mouth. She didn’t want to be angry at these two. Not ever. She owed them everything.

The siege had lasted six weeks – six weeks listening to that ringing piano, its pitch only changing when they’d torn out the F sharp below middle C and strangled Luka with it. Polly had spent the days, the hours, the seconds counting each one and imagining Toks’ pain too – her heart swelling as she pictured Toks frantic at the railway station in Berlin. She thought of the text messages piling up on her phone, though the soldiers had ground it beneath their boots in front of her just to murder her hope too. What would Toks think when she never replied? She kept track of the days by counting the freezing nights, snow falling through the dome and piling between the rows of seats. After what had to be weeks, she hoped Toks would never see the hostage videos she was forced to make, though she tried to reach through the camcorder they held in front of her face with her eyes.

If that was going to be the last Toks ever saw of her, Polly wanted to be brave.

When rescue arrived, it airlifted her to a military hospital in Frankfurt, and she worried that Toks wouldn’t be able to find her again. They wouldn’t give her a phone. The nurses’ faces pinched tighter every time she called Toks’ name and in the end she almost welcomed the near-constant sedation.

Toks didn’t make it to Frankfurt before they flew her home to Sydney and she spent another four weeks in hospital there. Only by then, it became clear Toks hadn’t been looking for her at all.

Polly was confused at first, but amongst all the healing and the nightmares, amid the press attention and the endless media about the failure of government to protect her, in the middle of her mother selling her story to the gossip mags and prime time and milking Polly’s story like she was a cow back at Jerinja, Polly had to accept that Toks had rejected her.

It had been harsh – a total and absolute silence, shocking beside the piano that still rang in her mind – but she had gotten used to it.

She had no doubt Toks could do it again.

“Do you forgive her, Poll?” Justin asked, gently.

Did she?

Sixteen years was a long, long time.

“I do,” she said.

The men smiled, and Polly sat with that warming her chest until they landed in Bangkok.

She turned on her phone to an avalanche of messages. Time turned a different circle and Polly hummed a tiny part of a complex, messy chord in her head.

It was going to be okay, she realised.