“Do you see him often?”
“Not as often as I should, especially since I moved back here. When I do visit, he wants to play endless games of Connect-4—though he just likes dropping the counters in and hearing the click—and we watch cooking shows. He’s obsessed with them, for some reason. That’s about the extent of our relationship. He’s always happy to see me, and he gets upset when I leave. But hey, I still have a brother. And I like Connect-4.”
“Which doesn’t mean you don’t get to have feelings about it,” she said archly. “You know that this is something that happened to you, too? You lost your brother. You got a new brother, a different one, but you lost the first one. You get to grieve that.”
“Quite right. I think it took all of us a very long time to wrap our heads around it. The worst part for me was going back to boarding school without him. It was supposed to be his final year. Instead, I watched his mates become prefects, date, apply for university, make the cut for the first-fifteen or the first-eleven—that’s rugby and cricket, if you’re wondering. But because of one mistake, he wouldn’t have any of that.”
“How awful for you.”
“I suddenly felt so much older than the other lads in my year. And then of course I would come home in the term breaks, taking the train without Eddie, hanging around here without Eddie. Connor kept his distance that year, and then he went to uni. All my life it had been me and Connor and Eddie, and then suddenly it was just me.” Tom took a deep breath, his chest rising under Amelia’s cheek. “Connor took it worse than anyone, seeing as he’d been driving the car.”
“You would though, right? That’s a lot to live with, especially at that age.”
“My parents held out hope for ages that some groundbreaking surgery or miracle cure would restore Eddie. I think that kept them from completely falling apart in those first few years. By the time it became obvious there was no hope, it came as no shock. Just a sad, gradual letdown. My grandfather, though… He refused to talk about it, ever. Wanted us all to play down the seriousness, as if it were a temporary glitch. He was a proud man, and I think he didn’t want people to know that his heir wasn’t of sound mind.”
“It’s not like it suggests a hereditary condition.”
“Thing is, he could be grumpy as all hell, but he was immensely proud of Eddie and me. Every single thing we did, no matter how lowly, he would brag about to anybody and everybody, usually exaggerated. He took us to all our rugby games, and he had a standing offer of ten quid to anyone in ourteams who scored a try. He would never whistle or cheer or call out like the other spectators. But his clap! He had this booming thunderclap. It would drown them all out, while having the appearance of restraint.”
“I love that.” She could hear Tom’s heartbeat, under his sweater, slow and strong.
“There was nothing better than coming back from games in his Land Rover, our muddy boots all over the seats, dissecting every move, him raging about what unappreciated tactical geniuses we were, even if we’d hardly touched the ball. Of course, I just blew up that Land Rover—which is probably the only thing I legitimately own. Still, it might not have lasted much longer.”
Suddenly, he rolled them both over and kissed her.
“Wow,” she said. “What was that for?”
“Because you’re very kissable,” he said, burrowing his lips under her scarf to nuzzle the skin of her neck. “Also, because you were about to point out that I’m allowed to have feelings about blowing up the Land Rover. Though you’d be completely right.”
She laughed quietly. “I’m glad you recognize the folly of your ways, all by yourse?—”
There was a shuffling noise outside the room. Tom stiffened. They lay quietly for a while. “Probably a raven,” he whispered, eventually. “They nest in the ruins.”
“Could the dogs track us through the house?”
“Doubtful. My scent is everywhere, and they’re not trained to track humans. And there are hundreds of years of scents. I once found a mummified cat inside a wall when I was fixing the plasterwork. Food!” he said suddenly, rolling off her and reaching for a bag. “We need to eat. I grabbed hand sanitizer, too. Health and safety first, and all that.”
“Nothing like the thought of a mummified cat to fire up the appetite.”
“I gave it a decent burial, but it did seem rather petrified about the whole affair.”
She groaned at his terrible joke. “Poor thing. I guess it crawled in there somehow and got stuck.”
“Worse, I suspect,” he said, digging through the bag. “It may have been trapped there deliberately.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“They used to think cats in walls and chimneys and other places warded off witches. Here, a chocolate bar.”
“And I thought Prince Charming was psychotic. Holy shitballs, give me that.” She jokingly snatched the chocolate from his hand and tore the wrapper.
“At least back then they had an excuse for ignorant beliefs. We live in the information age and people still choose ignorance.”
He plumped the pillows against the wall, leaned on them and drew her back against him, like he had in the tree house. She snapped off the first row of chocolate and handed it to him, then took one for herself.
“This is how we get through this,” he said, nuzzling her ear. She could hear him chewing. Was that the thing she’d grow to hate about him?
No. She was not going to do that, not to him. She would accept him for the full package that he was for the time she had him, not try to mix and match. “I like this plan,” she said, her own chewing drowning out his. It was the smoothest, creamiest, most heavenly chocolate she’d ever tasted. “It feels safe. I feel safe—relatively. Cold, but safe.”
