A pause. Then, quietly: “I love you, Rose.”
My eyes were burning. The city below me was a smear of light.
“I love you,” I said. “I loved you in the barn and I loved you when I pushed you away and I loved you every night I didn’t watch your video because I knew hearing your voice would break me open. And I’m done pretending that’s not true.”
“Then stop pretending.” His voice was wrecked and warm and it sounded like coming home. “And leave the door unlocked. I’ll be there by morning.”
I hung up. Sat on the fire escape with the phone in my lap and the blanket around my shoulders and the city spread out below me like a promise I was finally ready to believe.
Maggie climbed back out the window. She didn’t say anything. She just sat beside me and put her arm around my shoulders and held on.
“He’s coming, leaving tonight,” I said.
“I know. I heard.”
“The twins are going to destroy him.”
“They’ll love him. Everybody loves a man who lets babies chew on his shoes.” She paused. “Are you okay?”
I thought about the question. Really thought about it, the way I hadn’t let myself think about anything in weeks.
“No,” I said. “But I’m going to be.”
For once, I believed it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GRAHAM
I packedlike a man whose house was on fire.
My mum stood in the doorway of the guest room watching me throw clothes into a bag. Jeans. Shirts. Jacket. Passport. Phone charger. I forgot my socks. I definitely forgot a belt. Checked my passport again even though I’d checked it thirty seconds ago.
“You’ll need a warmer jacket,” she said.
“It’s New York, Mum, not the Arctic.”
“You’ll need a warmer jacket,” she said again, in the tone that meant this wasn’t a suggestion. She disappeared down the hall and came back with my father’s wool coat. Dark grey, heavy, smelling faintly of peat and the cedar chest she’d kept it in for twenty years.
I looked at it. At her.
“He’d want you to have it,” she said simply. “For the journey.”
I took it. Folded it into the bag on top of everything else.
She watched me zip it shut, then crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe with the expression of a woman who’d been waiting for this moment longer than I realized.
“Go get your lass,” she said. “And Graham?”
“Aye?”
“Don’t come back without her.”
I kissed her forehead. She patted my cheek once, firm, the way she’d done since I was six years old, and then she turned and walked back to the kitchen without looking back.
I stopped in the hallway and looked at the house. Stone walls, low ceilings, the loch dark through the window. The house that had held me together when everything else was falling apart.
Then I walked out.
