over.’ I smile at him, my tummy flipping.
‘Starting with?’ he prompts, reaching across to my wine and sipping it before standing up and lifting the glass to my lips. I am hopelessly lost, my eyes locked onto his as I take a drink.
A dribble of liquid runs down my chin. He catches it with his fingertip before sitting down, and I return my focus to the pasta.
‘Mmm...’ I pause in my cannelloni stuffing to give him my full attention. ‘The south of France. Spain. Italy—all along the western coastline. Greece. Croatia. Then we sailed to Morocco—which was amazing. We took a flight to South Africa for a few months and then Bali beckoned.’ I wink. ‘We spent another six months island-hopping through Asia. Hospitalised twice...’ I lift two fingers and roll my eyes ‘...for stomach bugs.’
He grins. ‘Bali belly?’
‘And then some.’ I return to the pasta. ‘Then a year and a half in Australia. It was incredible.’
‘Who’d you travel with?’
‘A friend of mine. Clara. We worked together at a café when we were teenagers.’
He’s quiet and I don’t want to stop talking—sharing. I can’t say where the urge comes from, only that I find myself opening up to him in a way I never thought I would.
‘I think it’s why I was so interested in the Donovan case.’ My eyes meet his for a fraction of a second and then flick away. ‘We were practically the same age. I mean, I was eighteen when I left for my trip, right out of school. I can imagine how she felt. The excitement, the nerves. Her life was taken from her, and that’s awful. But the pleasure and excitement she was on the brink of enjoying...what a crime to rob someone of that.’
I stare at him, waiting to see his reaction, but it’s expertly concealed from me. There is barely a flicker of response in his face and, though that might seem cold, on some instinctive level I know it’s not. I believe it’s that he feels so deeply he can’t show it. That he doesn’t want to show it.
‘Don’t you think?’ I push, needing to hear him admit what I know he’s thinking.
He’s quiet still.
‘I mean, she was so young,’ I say.
When he eventually looks up there is something in his gaze, as though he’s weighing his words carefully. I wait, breath held for some reason. ‘Where was your favourite part?’
I narrow my eyes. His ability to clam up on me is utterly infuriating. ‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Try.’
‘I loved Sydney,’ I say finally.
He nods and sips his wine.
‘You didn’t come to my office yesterday.’
I am jerked from our conversation into another river, the current moving in a wholly new direction and at an altered speed. ‘Was I meant to?’
‘Yes.’ His nod is slow, thoughtful. ‘To discuss the group assignment.’
It dawns on me then that he mentioned something about this on Thursday afternoon. ‘I presumed that was just a pretext to get up close and personal so you could slip me the hotel key?’
He shakes his head. ‘I really did want to talk to you.’
‘Oh. What about?’
His eyes meet mine and there is renewed speculation in them. ‘How many students were in your group?’
‘Five. You have the list, right?’
‘Yet you, and you alone, wrote the assignment.’
I blink at him, confused by his insight. He’s right, but he has no way of knowing that. ‘It’s a group assignment,’ I demur. ‘We all played our part.’
He expels a sigh. ‘You can’t let people take advantage of you like this. You’re starting your career. You’re very smart. If you’re not careful, you’ll crumble under the pressure of what becomes the norm for people to expect of you.’
‘No one took advantage of me.’
‘But you wrote the whole thing. Fifteen thousand words.’
I don’t answer at first. I reach for another cannelloni then realise I’ve stuffed them all. I lay the piping bag down without meeting his eyes. ‘It was a team effort.’
‘You have a certain style to your phrasing. A logic that is uniquely your own. This paper might as well have been a fifteen-thousand-word autograph, Miss Amorelli.’
I am flattered.
I should be more defensive, more outraged, more protective of my groupmates. But his intuitive familiarity with my writing sparks something in my chest. Pride, relief, gladness. They all tumble through me, making me smile.
‘It’s not funny. I’m annoyed at you.’
I laugh. ‘Why?’
‘Because you can’t let people walk all over you.’
‘I assure you, I didn’t.’ I bat my eyelids at him. ‘What did you grade the assignment?’
‘I’m giving you a high mark,’ he says. ‘But I’m severing you from your group. They’ll fail unless they can show me detailed research notes proving their involvement.’
All amusement drops from my face. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘No, Olivia. This is your final year. They can’t skate by on your hard work. I can’t let them.’
‘No one’s... Oh, God, Connor, please don’t do that.’ I move around to his side of the bench with urgency. ‘It was my idea for me to do the damned thing. Our schedules were so chaotic and we could barely get together. It was a topic I was comfortable with—so similar to a research piece I did last year. You can’t fail them. Please.’
I hover in front of him, my arms lifting around his neck of their own volition.
‘Are you actually standing between my legs, asking me to change grades for you?’
‘Not my grade,’ I mutter, knowing that I’ve moved into ethically questionable territory. ‘Theirs.’ My cheeks drain of colour. ‘Or fail me, too. Don’t sever me. Say you suspect it wasn’t a proper group effort and fail us all—let us resubmit in a month. Please.’
‘Jesus, Olivia, it doesn’t work like that. How many group assignments have you done at the LLS?’
‘I don’t know. Ten, maybe eleven.’
‘Enough to know that the approach is in the name. Nothing’s easy about group assignments. Everyone knows that. It’s preparation for the real world. Do you think I liked having to rely on other people? People who didn’t have my understanding of the law or motivation to work my arse off? It’s the worst. You suck it up. That’s as important as the
