With him.
However you’re supposed to say it, and it’s tearing me apart knowing he probably wanted that too.
You don’t know that.
It’s true.
I don’t.
Not for sure.
ButChrist, I feel like I do.
I’m not on Figgy Mount anymore. While I’ve led Nash into conversational no-man’s land, I’ve taken myself halfway home. Except, it’s Cosmic Avenue ahead of me instead of Cinnamon Row, and for the fecking life of me I can’t make myself alter my course. “Why am I suddenly so shite at communicating?”
I haven’t spoken for a while. Neither has Nash, and I get the feeling it’s deliberate. As if he’s waiting for me to have some kind of epiphany.
Not happening.
Not tonight. But silence from Nash isn’t all that quiet. He’s not speaking, but I still hear his life unfolding as the bike engines simmer down, then cut off completely, and I hear him go inside to his people. Hear the woman he loves so much murmur something obscene and his fella laugh that deep Halliwell laugh.
I hear love.
The real stuff.
And though it hurts as much as missing Sab, that stubborn weight inside me…it starts to move.
“You’re shite at verbalising how you’re feeling,” Nash says eventually. “Because whatever you’ve found means the world to you and you’re scared witless of losing it. So you’re hiding from it. And you know the problem with that, my brother?” I do, buthe’s going to tell me anyway, and maybe I need to hear it. “You lose it anyway,” he concludes. “And then you have to live with the fact you never even tried.”
That smarts. I sit with it and I feel like weeping. Force myself to keep walking, getting closer and closer to Sab’s house on Cosmic Avenue. “You’re a mean agony aunt, McGovern. Makes me think you’ve been spending too much time with Logan.” A horrid thought occurs to me far too late. “He’s not there, is he?”
“Not tonight. You want to talk to Locke?”
“Nah, you can fill him in on my feckery. I’m going home to chew on some rocks.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I won’t, I’m joking. I’m gonna go, though. Thanks for that chat.”
“You’re welcome. And hey, Gale?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s fucking Christmas. Take a chance, boyo.”
Nash hangs up before I can even think of a response. Leaves me with silence for real, and it happens upon me as I draw level with Sab’s house, and that shift inside me…it widens, like maybe Nash’s gentle advice has broken something inside me wide open.
Take a chance, boyo.
Advice that could’ve come from my own fat Irish mouth. And it’sgoodadvice, I know it is. I feel it as hope warms my belly and I drag my gaze from the frosty pavement to face Sab’s work van, and the cute as hell wreath tethered to his front door. But as my scratchy eyes find focus, the senseless pit in my stomach reopens.
The wreath isn’t there.
Neither is the van. And while I’m not expecting the lights to be on at crack o’clock in the morning, the dark shadowing Sab’s house is so yawningly empty I trip over my feet, drifting to a halting stop, breath fogging in the brittle night air.
He’s not here.
They’renot here, him and Esme. I know it even as logic tells me they could be inside and sound asleep. My life has taught me what an empty house looks like, what it means, and the hush that descends on me carries the same bite as that long-ago winter.
