Perhaps reading his mind, Lena put her hand on his arm. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you in the lurch. We’ll find someone to replace me, I promise.”
“It’s not that, love. I’ll miss you. Who’s going to bully me into cooking weird stuff on a Sunday afternoon?”
“Kim will still be here.”
“Aye, but he’s around less and less these days. The woodshop’s taking off, eh?”
Lena nodded. “He’s loving it. Keeps his mind off the other shit too.”
She didn’t need to spell it out. Like the rest of them, Kim had a past that occasionally caught up with him. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything, then. Just tell me how to sign my half of the studio back over to you.”
“What?”
Lena folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t keep it, Brix, when I’m not here earning it. I owe you everything in the world for giving it to me in the first place.”
“No, you don’t. I gave it to you because I needed you.”
“And soon you’ll need someone else. Please, Brix, don’t make this harder than it already is.” Lena put her arms around him, hugging him tight enough to contain the lump building in his throat. “You can always ask Calum to help you if it takes a while to find someone else. He’s good with computers, and he ran his own studio in London.”
Brix had forgotten that Lena probably knew as much—if not more—about Calum’s recent London life than he did. “Even if he sticks around, he won’t want to be parked behind that desk all bloody day.”
Lena snorted. “I think it’s a given that he’s going to stick around, providing you don’t scare him off, but as for being stuck on the desk: he won’t have to be if you all pitch in. Just ask him to help with the admin for a while; I’m sure he won’t mind.”
Brix wasn’t so sure about that, about any of it, and contemplating the idea of Calum sticking around indefinitely felt like tempting fate. He gave Lena a last squeeze, then followed her back to where Calum and Kim were waiting.
But when they got to the front desk, they found Kim alone and entertaining himself by carving patterns into the legs of Lena’s desk chair. “Where’s Calum?”
“Dunno,” Kim said. “Some dude rang for him, and he shot out of here like his arse was on fire.”
“Some dude? Rang where? The studio? Who was it?”
If Kim was startled by the barrage of questions, it didn’t show. He merely stared at Brix with his shrewd green gaze. “Studio phone rang. A posh cunt—Rob something or other—looking for Calum. I passed him the phone, he took it, then the next thing I knew, he’d scarpered. Figured he was late for his dinner.”
Brix ran to the door and outside, jogging to the end of the narrow street and looking both ways for any sign of Calum’s broad shoulders, but he saw nothing save a few lingering tourist shoppers and a gang of seagulls. Heart in his mouth, he looked both ways again, but to no avail. The view remained the same. Calum was gone.
Brix left the studio behind and ran home, hoping that, like most evenings after a long day at the studio, he’d find Calum camped out on the living room floor, staring into a newly built fire. But the cottage was dark and empty, the only sound Zelda’s disgruntled yowl as she sashayed around his ankles demanding her dinner.
Dennis was nowhere to be seen. Brix wondered if he might be upstairs with Calum and dashed up to check, but the bedroom was empty, and Dennis was sleeping alone in the bathtub. Fuck. Brix didn’t know much about Rob the ex, but the long-healed bruise on Calum’s face told him he was bad news—that and the profound distress that clouded Calum’s gaze each time his name came up.
Unease prickled Brix’s skin. Calum didn’t know Porthkennack that well, so there were few places Brix could think of that he might have gone. One of them was the cliff path only Lusmoores knew enough to tackle unguided in the fast-fading light. Common sense told him there was no logical reason Calum would’ve headed up there, but his gut said otherwise. After all, where would Brix go if his past had caught up with him? Where had Brix gone, each and every time?
He left the cottage behind and set off for the cliff path, hoping he’d make it up there before the storm clouds over the sea came ashore. Surely Calum already knew how dangerous the cliffs were in the rain? Or perhaps Brix had never told him. Panic gripped his heart as he realised he couldn’t remember. The cliff paths in and around Porthkennack had claimed a dozen lives in the time Brix had been alive, and countless more before he’d been born. Calm your tits. He’s probably in the fucking pub, but the quasi-Lee in Brix’s brain did nothing to quell the fear squeezing his lungs. Overreaction be damned. He had to find Calum.
Brix ran along the seafront, pulling his hood up against the spray that blew in from the crashing waves of the high tide. The clouds darkened as the cliffs loomed up ahead, and the daylight had all but gone by the time he spotted a lone figure on the bench at the bottom of the hidden path. Briefly, Brix talked himself out of the idea that it was Calum—their moment for stumbling across each other in such circumstances had already happened—but as he got closer, the hunch of the figure’s shoulders became too familiar to deny.
If Calum was surprised by Brix’s sudden appearance, it didn’t show. He merely raised an eyebrow, apparently oblivious to the driving rain that had begun to fall. “All right?”
“Are you?”
“Fucking blinding, Brix. Why do you ask?”
“Don’t be a dick.”
Calum’s belligerence faltered, and the characteristic self-doubt Brix had come to hate coloured his features. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, mate. Just tell me what’s wrong. You’re not sitting up here for nothing.”
