“The police were there at St. Luke’s,” Nally said. “They can’t do anything unless Quentin makes an explicit threat or physically assaults me.”
“Outrageous!” Jude’s dad said.
“The police suggested we leave town for a while to give the whole thing a chance to blow over,” Jude said.
He felt before he saw Nally glare at him. When he turned his head, Nally was still munching on his custard cream, but he looked mutinous for some reason. That, even more than Quentin, struck fear into Jude’s heart. He had no idea what he’d done to earn that sort of a glare from the man he cared about more than anything in the world.
“Well, it seems obvious enough to me,” Jude’s dad said, pulling him out of his worries. Both Jude and Nally looked at him, so he shrugged and went on with, “You need to get out of London for a while.”
“I have meetings to attend and a composition class to plan and teach,” Nally said. “I can’t just leave London indefinitely.”
“You can’t stick around and wait for this stalker to do something to convince the police he’s a threat,” Jude’s dad said, standing and moving to a small cabinet on the wall near the door. He opened it and took out a set of keys with a Scottish flag keychain. “Go up to the beach house for a while. It’s out ofthe way. It could probably do with a good clean right about now anyhow, after your brother spent half the summer there.”
“The beach house?” Nally blinked, glancing from Jude’s dad to Jude with a curious frown.
“It’s what dad calls our house on Eilean an Teaghlaich, our own private little island in the Hebrides,” Jude explained.
“What, that tiny island your great-grandfather or someone bought a hundred years ago when he fancied himself a man of the land instead of an aristocrat? That place we went that one time when I joined your family for a holiday?” Nally asked, his frustrated expression lightening into puzzlement.
“The very one,” Jude’s dad said, bringing the keys over to Jude. “If you have to get out of London and go somewhere that a stalker won’t find you, what better place to go than a remote island off the coast of Scotland that barely has electricity, where my family members have gone to pretend they’re someone they aren’t for generations.”
“I remember it having electricity.” Nally glanced between Jude and his dad.
“It has electricity,” Jude sighed, unsure whether his dad was being a pain or whether he was right. “There’s a generator.”
“Best not to use the electricity,” Jude’s dad said, touching the side of his nose. “The point is to pretend to be rustic, you know.”
“No electricity,” Nally said, back to frowning, though now he looked determined instead of all the other emotions he’d been running through fast enough to leave Jude breathless. “That means no internet.”
Immediately, Jude knew that Nally wanted to go to the island. And that it was just a little bit intended as a punishment for the way Jude’s mismanagement of his socials had caused the problem to begin with.
Resigned, Jude shrugged, letting his shoulders drop at the end. “I’ll go pack a bag with warm clothes and supplies.”
Neither Nally nor his dad said anything to stop him. He headed out of the room, leaving the two of them alone to say God only knew what about him as he went upstairs to pack.
Half an hour, one medium-sized suitcase, and a quick social media post to say he’d be off-grid for a few days later and he was back downstairs.
“Take the big car,” Jude’s dad said, handing over the keys to the SUV as Jude and Nally left the house. “It tends to do better in the Highlands than the Porsche.”
Jude didn’t even have it in him to make a joke. He took the keys, then he and Nally proceeded out to the SUV.
The drive to Hawthorne House was one of the most painful of Jude’s life. Nally said hardly anything. He asked a few questions about what else had been going on with his socials. Jude recounted everything Quentin had said in detail. Whether that was enough or not, Nally spent the second half of their drive looking through all the messages and his accounts by himself in silence.
Once they reached Hawthorne House, Jude had to recount everything a second time to Robert and Janice Hawthorne, though he left out the truly scary details and made it sound like Quentin was just an online nuisance and the trip to Scotland was more of a lark than a necessity. He didn’t want to worry Nally’s parents, or the rest of his family when he told the story a third time to a few of the other Hawthorne family members who had wandered by too late in the tale to get the full details. As he did, Nally went up to his flat to pack a suitcase of his own.
“Are you certain the two of you should be driving to Scotland in the middle of the night?” Janice asked when he came back down again, looking wan and exhausted.
“I’d rather leave now so we can get there as soon as possible,” Nally explained. “I just don’t want to deal with the real world for a while.”
It made absolute perfect sense, and it also made Jude feel like shit.
“This is all my fault,” he said for the umpteenth time once they were on the M40, heading northwest with only a few other cars around them in the blackness.
“Yes, it’s all your fault,” Nally nearly shouted, stopping him from saying more. “We’ve established that already. Give it a rest, will you?”
It was awful. Jude hadn’t felt anything even close to the misery of having Nally shout like that since Timothy days. He kept quiet, tightened his hands on the wheel, and held his breath to stop himself from bursting into tears. The fact that he was so close to sobbing was embarrassing and awful. He was either so tired that his emotions were leaking through, in which case he shouldn’t have been driving, or he’d kept all of his feelings, all of them, bottled up for so long that they were about to explode and destroy him.
“Look,” he said quietly after the several agonizing minutes it took him to get his feelings under control. “I think we can both agree that everything is shit right now. I’m sorry I let things get that far. But I also think that you and I both know we have some serious things that we need to talk about. Badly. Things we should have dealt with when we first started feeling them.”
