“Exactly nothing. I gave him a piece of my mind, which he just stood there and took. He mentioned you had called off the wedding.”
“Yeah.” A little knot of shame formed in Aida’s stomach. “I can’t believe this is happening. I really need to get my stuff outof there, and I’m not back for another two weeks. Fuck.” She didn’t have much furniture—she had moved in with Graham, who had been in the town house for a while. But she would probably need someone with a van to help with what she had. The thought of moving made her sick to her stomach. She had never imagined a life that didn’t have Graham in it, or their beautiful house.
Yumi gave her a sympathetic look. “Hey, don’t worry. You can stay with me till you are back on your feet. I’ll help you figure it out. But I’m not moving boxes, honey. I’m a supervisor.”
Aida had to smile a little at that. “The very best supervisor. Oh god, Yumi... I just don’t understand how he could do this. And with Erin, of all people. She was like a sister to me when we were kids.”
Yumi sighed, her expression a mix of sympathy and anger on Aida’s behalf. “I know. Everything about this sucks.”
Aida stared out the car window, watching the London streets flash by in a blur. “I keep thinking back, trying to see if there were signs I missed about them. Times they were together that seemed off. But I can’t think of anything.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Yumi said firmly. “This is not your fault. They are the ones who chose to betray you like this. You trusted them, and they abused that trust.”
Aida nodded, but the words felt hollow. How could she ever trust anyone again after this?
Needing to feel some semblance of control, she turned the conversation to moving out. Yumi offered to scout out the movers and they decided to split up how they would cancel the wedding plans.
“I’m going to lose all the deposits. My god, what a waste it all was,” she said. But it wasn’t the wedding she was talking about.
Yumi sighed. “I wish I could reach through this phone and hug you. I know this sucks. But you will get through it. You are strong, Aida. Stronger than you know.”
Aida managed a small grateful smile. “Thank you, Yumi. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“I’ve got your back, always,” Yumi promised. “Just take it one day at a time.”
When Aida hung up a few minutes later, the numbness clung to her like a shroud. The tears still didn’t come. Her heart was a dark numb spot that floated empty within the space between her ribs.One day at a time.On impulse, she asked the driver to make a diversion from going straight to the hotel. He obliged without question and drove to Baker Street station.
Aida stepped out of the car into the familiar yet altered landscape of Baker Street. The iconic Sherlock Holmes statue stood as proudly as she remembered, but her heart sank at the sight of the nearby museum—closed indefinitely. Its shuttered doors marked a poignant shift from her youth when she had first visited this place, wide-eyed and hand in hand with her parents. Her father had marveled at Holmes’s legendary deductive powers, sparking Aida’s early fascination with meticulous research that fueled her work and writing. She could still hear his voice, full of warmth and curiosity, explaining the finer points of Holmes’s methods to her.
Those moments with her parents had felt so steady, so rooted in love. Back then, the world had been a place where problems were solved together, and her parents’ guiding hands made everything possible. Their absence now though left an emptiness that nothing had quite filled.
As she stood on the same street, reeling from her call with Graham, the contrast hit her hard. The warmth and security she had once found in her parents were so distant, and the bitter sting of Graham’s betrayal made the void even sharper. She had come to Baker Street seeking comfort, a reminder of a time when love was simple and unconditional. But now, with the museum’s closure and the shadow of her crumbling relationship looming large, the memory seemed a distant echo—fading just when she needed it most.
She wandered a bit, heading farther down Marylebone Road, which, she was sure, had another attraction they had enjoyed as a family. The memory was fuzzy, like a word on the tip of her tongue, but she recalled it was a place where she’d been enveloped by a great warmth from her parents.
She paused at the next corner, near two iconic red phone booths. The area felt familiar. In front of her was a circular building with a big green copper dome, like the planetariums she had loved visiting as a kid. This, however, did not appear to be a planetarium. Instead, plate glass windows gave a glimpse inside, of elderly people sitting in recliners watching a big-screen television. A woman with a walker stood at the window staring out at her. Aida, unnerved, continued walking. Sure enough, a couple of windows down, she came to a sign that proclaimed the odd building as an assisted-living facility.
The massive white edifice just beyond the green dome also felt familiar. There were no windows, save above a simple, unassuming entry half a block down, with big old windows on the floor above the front door. A sign above the entrance proclaimed the building as Her Majesty’s Young Offender Institution. Aida stared at the front door, trying to understand what she was looking at. She was absolutely sure that neither the old folk’s home nor this juvenile detention center was there when she had last visited, perhaps four or five years before when she had been in London for a conference. But what had been there? She stared at the pavement, racking her brain to remember, but for some reason she could only conjure up hazy, half-formed images of Queen Elizabeth, David Bowie, and Darth Vader. Suddenly dizzy, she leaned against a signpost for support. What was wrong with her? Stress, it had to be.
A middle-aged woman in a pink sweatshirt and a teenage boy in a black hoodie emerged from the building. The woman came toward Aida. “Oh, dearie, are you all right?”
“I—I think so. Thank you. Just felt a little lightheaded, but I think it’s passed.”
“Come on, Mum,” the pimply-faced boy said, tugging on his mom’s arm. Aida guessed he was embarrassed to be seen near the facility. She wondered what he had done to end up there.
“You look after yourself.” The woman let her son lead her away.
“Wait,” Aida called after them. The woman turned back. “What used to be in this building? Do you know?”
She looked up at the building. “The YOI? It’s been here for as long as I can remember. No idea what it might have been back in the day.”
Aida sighed. “Thank you.” She watched them retreat, then made her way back to the waiting Bentley. She must have been mistaken about the location.
Still, as she took her seat in the car, she was left with an overwhelming sense of something about the building being wrong, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Something that was just beyond the reach of her memory.
The driver honked his horn at someone. Aida’s train of thought broke, and she couldn’t recall what she’d been ruminating about. But there was an ache in her heart, an ache for what she once had.
9
