“He loved you so much.” Edward refused to look away as he departed his choice of admission. “I need you to hear me say that.”
It had taken three words to break a world and five to make it again.
He loved you so much.
William found the final dregs of energy left to look into Edward’s haunted eyes, focusing on nothing but the things he had left to share. “How do you even know?”
“Because Archie spoke about you for almost the entire meal. He told me about his plans for you both, the future you’d have together here. He was… he was going to surprise you with the manor after he completed work on it. He had so many ideas for it.”
“Archie told me how much you loved to write and how he was so proud of you for trying to further your career in publishing. He was going to turn that drawing room into your own library, with space for all the books he knew you’d one day publish. He told me you loved red and that roses were your favourite flower. All he wanted to do was re-plant hundreds of roses outside the window so you could look out at them when you worked. When he spoke about you, his eyes lit up from inside. After spending these days with you, I can understand why. I was going to tell you, but that same light he spoke about was already so fragile, barely there. I feared that if I told you this, it would extinguish entirely. I – I have already caused you so much pain, I didn’t want to add to more. I told myself that keeping it a secret was the only way of protecting you from more. But he… Archie had other plans too. So many that there wasn’t enough time for us to discuss them all. But you need to know, and please listen to this, he loved you enough to see a never-ending future, because that is what you deserved. A future. Here, at Hanbury, or elsewhere. He wanted you to keep going.”
Edward looked back up towards the doorway. His eyes widened, his thick brows lifting into his hairline as his lips parted into an exasperated o-shape. “He’s gone.” Edward smiled, the corners of his lips lifting. “It’s over.”
William turned around, focusing on the space where the figure in the red coat had stood.
Archie was no longer there. His presence faded from sight, but more than that, the pressure of his eyes had lifted and flown away.
“The truth will set us free,” Edward said. “Someone I admire once told me that.”
Funny that, how the truth could be both the shackles and the key. How it could bind a person entirely and yet lighten them. It was neither good nor bad. It was a cacophony of feelings that hurt him to hear but were soothing in the same breath.
“Then consider yourself free. Of me, whatever this is… free of Hanbury,” William replied, stones cutting into his wet palms as he pushed off the ground and back to standing. Edward followed suit but kept a sensible distance. “You have been relieved of your secrets, and the burden of your lies. I hope it brings you peace.”
“Will, can we keep talk–”
“No,” William said softly, barely audible beneath the downpour of rain. He didn’t want to hear anything else. He allowed himself a moment to lay a hand on Edward’s chest. Both men sighed at the contact. Then William dropped it and said his final piece. “Goodbye, Edward.”
This time, Edward didn’t try and stop him. He stood and watched as William walked back to the manor. He didn’t stop watching as William entered the corridor and closed the door behind him.
With shaking fingers, William locked the front door behind him and moved, in a trance of heavy limbs, upstairs to the bedroom. He almost looked out the window to see if Edward was still standing there, but something else caught his attention.
Laid out on the bed, much like the last time he’d seen it, was Archie’s red coat. It was still wet, soaking into the sheets with rain, proving that the apparition had been as real as the truth William had just learned.
But, deep down, William knew that Archie was gone. Archie had never haunted William, his presence only here because of another person’s secrets. The coat went missing the first night Edward stayed here; Archie was Edward’s haunting.
That realisation was the final nail in William’s coffin.
Blinded by tears, unable to catch a solid breath, William lay on the bed beside the coat, curled up into a ball and clutched it to his chest.
He was an open wound, bleeding out all of his emotions, admiring the subtle warmth that still clung to the coat. Eventually, he heard the groan of a car, heavy tires baring down on gravel.
Edward was gone, at last, but his departure did little to ease William’s growing grief.
William stayed like that for so long that the storm finally passed. The sky brightened from black to blush dawn. Only when the sun beat its rays through the window, casting beams over where William lay, hugging the coat of his first love, did he finally sit back up.
With no more tears to shed, William lovingly folded the coat, packed it in his bag and closed the door on the story of ghosts and hauntings.
Or so he thought.
If he had tears left to shed, William wouldn’t have stopped crying. But alas, he was dry to the bone, empty of anything else to release.
When Archie died, William had felt guilty for kicking him out of their house, forcing him onto his bike in the rain, and putting him on the road. It had nearly ruined him – if his neighbour hadn’t found William on the precipice of meeting Archie in death, then he would’ve given up on this world all together. But the one thing he’d held onto, the string that tethered him to his life and kept him going, was the belief that Archie had cheated. That his actions had broken William’s heart first before William’s decisions caused Archie’s body to break against the bonnet of a car.
William no longer had hold of that thin string. Edward had severed it with his revelation, turning everything William had thought he’d known on its head. And now, he didn’t think he’d survive it.
According to his phone, it was almost eleven in the morning when William carried his packed bags, closed Robert’s room and moved to put his belongings by the front door. He had two options. Wait until the pre-booked taxi-man arrived in another twenty-four hours to collect him or locate some service and see if he could get another sooner. His plans faded like ash on the wind. Hanbury Manor had never been quieter since Edward left.
No, not left.There was no stopping the thoughts as they barrelled through him.You kicked him out and sent him scurrying into the night just like you did with Archie.
