Dray considers me, entirely unflinching.
Beside him, Oliver is still murmuring on.
But Dray’s stare stubbornly invades mine.
Invasion.
That’s the word.
That’s the piercing intrusion of his eyes through my sunglasses, into my mind and soul.
The victory that filled him this morning when he picked out his clothes, when he showered and washed his face, then stood in front of a mirror combing his hair, it’s still in him.
He just doesn’t know I can read it for what it is.
He doesn’t know I am aware of his victory.
So when his mouth curls, a slight tilt of pink lips, he might think it looks like a simple smile, a curt, short one, but just a smile.
I see it for the smirk it is.
I look away.
I fold.
I always do.
I look anywhere but him.
The terminal ceiling is peppered with skylights that glare against the moody grey fogged over the tarmac. But even England’s winter can’t compare to the drab sag of my posture, the dullness of my face.
I hate that we linger.
Mother and Amelia are too deep in a rattle of last-minute whispers, and so it’s either gossip or Mother unloading her pain about having a daughter like me.
Harold and Father have wandered down between two Royces, far away enough that I can’t hear the cross words exchanged between them.
And those are undeniably cross words.
Harold’s face is beetroot. An ugly purple to replace the warmth of his complexion that Dray inherited.
Father is stone-faced.
Their hands snap and cut through the air with their hissed words.
Grandmother’s cane hits the hard ground.
Tension is already too deeply wound in me, threaded into my muscles and bones, so I startle with a jerk of the shoulders.
I loosen a curt breath just before Grandmother turns her chin to her shoulder, angling her slitted stare at me.
“I should take her with me,” she says. “When will your lessons be done, girl?”
My shades shift with the wrinkling of my brow. I must have missed a chunk of the conversation.
Bylessons, I think she meanspunishments.
Grandmother apparently wants to steal me back to Craven Cottage for more torture, the consequences of my behaviour this weekend.
