“Aye, and exonerated, along with you and me and your parents. And Charlotte’s on her way up to Edinburgh to see you. By outing Hyland you’ve saved everybody’s skins, so the journey’s all but over for us.” He smoothed her hair back from her forehead. Her scalp tingled. “We just need to get you well.”
We.Weas in the world, the health system, their little group of rebels—orweas in Jamie and Samira?
“When can I go...?” She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Samira?” he said, taking her hand. “You need painkillers?”
She opened her eyes. He leaned over her, his eyes crinkling. She remembered touching his wrinkles at the hotel, saying something stupid about them. “No. It’s just... I was going to say ‘When can I go home?’ But...”
“You don’t have a home.”
“Awo.”
“Youcanhave one, now. You can start rebuilding your life.” He hooked his foot around a plastic chair, pulled it up beside her and sat, holding her hand in both of his. “And anyway, you’ll not be going anywhere for a few weeks, not while you’re recuperating—and there are some immigration matters to be sorted.”
“Oh God.”
He chuckled. “Nothing to worry about. You’ve gone from wanted woman to folk hero overnight. The UK authorities have just kindly asked if you can fill out the proper paperwork and present your genuine passport.”
She relaxed onto the bed. As she inhaled, her side pinched. “What about you?” she said. “Will you go back to Corsica?”
“I have some recuperating of my own to do. In more ways than one.” He tightened his grip on her fingers, shifting his chair closer. “I was thinking, Samira. It’s Christmas soon. I know Scotland’s not the most pleasant of places in winter but it can also be quite...” A grin pulled at his mouth but once again didn’t quite erupt. “Romantic.”
Her stomach clenched, shooting a bolt of pain deep into her side.
“I’d like to spend some time with Nicole and the kids and see my mother,” he continued, dropping focus to their hands. “And I’d love to spend some more time with you.”
“Me, too,” she squeaked.
“So I’m thinking maybe we could find a wee cottage by a loch—one that hasn’t been bombed recently—and hide away for a bit, while we recover, get our heads around everything that’s happened. I’m theoretically injured, so getting the leave shouldn’t be a problem.”
A cottage. With an open fire. And Jamie. And no one shooting or bombing them. Could anything be more appealing? Did it snow in Scotland in December?
“I’d like that,” she said.
She wanted to say so much more but the words wouldn’t come. Somehow she’d found the courage to confront the man who’d killed her fiancé, and to dive in front of a bullet, but she couldn’t find the courage to tell Jamie that there was this big bubble sitting in her chest and it was filled with the magic that was him and she didn’t want it to burst.
Or could she?
He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand. “Before we, you know...return to our lives.”
Our lives.Separate lives. Spoken so deliberately, like he’d sensed what she was about to ask—not that even she knew what that was.
“Samira?”
This was exactly what he’d warned her of.We could never work, you and I. I can’t have a relationship. I can’t live in the real world.At the time the real world had seemed so distant. And now here it was, with all its mundane everyday self-doubt. She’d leveled up, all right. Leveled up and bombed out.
“I think... I need to sleep,” she said, retrieving her hand. Unable to flip to her side, she turned her head to a beige wall. God, hadn’t she told him she wasn’t ready for a relationship either? And she’d meant it. But now that her life was no longer in danger, now the people she cared for were safe, she was struggling to remember why.
Regret, like a tail, comes at the end.
He was silent awhile. “Sure,” he said. She sensed him leaning in. He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I’ll leave you alone.” His footsteps padded to the door, then stopped. “I found this for you,” he said, quietly, as if not wanting to disturb her from sleep. “Thought you might want it back.”
After a few seconds, he padded back over to the bed. She resisted looking. Her eyes would give away too much. A few seconds later, the door whispered open, and hissed closed, leaving the room in thick silence.
She turned. Her scarf was draped over the foot of the bed.La couleur de minuit.
She didn’t want to be alone anymore.
