"Can I at least go and see him?"
"After breakfast," Erin said. "And we'll all go together."
Florence accepted this with a nod. Frank was already planning the route: through the kitchen garden, past the walled garden, down the path to the paddocks. He was drawing it with his finger on the table, narrating as he went, and Florence was watching his finger with the patient expression of someone who knew the way perfectly well but was allowing Frank his moment.
Alexandra caught Erin's eye across the table. The look that passed between them carried the weight of everything they hadn't said since the car ride home: the exhaustion, the relief, the knowledge that outside this kitchen there were phone calls to make and investigations to close and Cecilia to confront and a political crisis to manage. All of that was waiting. But here, in this kitchen, in this light, with these children, it was not yet time.
Erin reached across the table and took Alexandra's hand. Their fingers laced together over the salt and pepper and the butter dish and the jam with Frank's face on it, and she squeezed once and Alexandra squeezed back and the conversation was the same one they'd been having wordlessly since the gravel drive in Surrey:We're here. We made it. Whatever comes next, we do it together.
"I have something to say," Erin said.
The table went quiet. Even Frank stopped mid-sentence, which was a measure of the gravity he'd assigned to the moment.
"I know the last week has been hard. And I know some things are going to change: security, routines, all of it. But I want you to know that you are the most important thing in the world to me.All four of you. And nothing — nobody — is going to take any of you from this family again."
Frank's chin wobbled. He was trying not to cry, she could see it, the effort of it, the way he pressed his lips together and jutted his jaw the way Erin did when she was holding back emotion. He was eight years old and trying to be brave and his serious scowl looked so much like Erin’s own facial expression that her heart twisted.
"Mum," he said. His voice was thick. "Can I sit on your lap?"
He was eight. He was too big to sit on laps, or at least he thought he was most of the time, and the fact that he was asking meant the week had cost him something that he couldn't name. Erin pushed her chair back and opened her arms and Frank climbed into her lap with the graceless urgency of a boy who needed to be held, and she wrapped her arms around him and rested her chin on his head and let him press his face against her shoulder.
Matilda looked at Alexandra. A question in her eyes. Alexandra opened her arms and Matilda climbed in, folding herself against her mother's chest with the neatness of a child who had been waiting to be invited. Florence watched them from her chair, still eating her toast, her blue eyes moving between the two pairs of mother and child. She didn't move. She chewed. She swallowed. She wiped her mouth with her napkin the way she'd been taught.
Then she stood up and walked around the table and squeezed herself onto Erin's lap beside Frank, her small body fitting into the space between Frank's sprawl and the arm of the chair, her hand reaching across to hold Alexandra's free hand. Five of them, two chairs, too many limbs and not enough space, and Audrey's head emerging from beneath the table to rest on Florence's knee, and the kitchen full of morning light and thesmell of eggs and the sound of a family that had been broken apart and was being put back together.
The morning stretched on. They finished breakfast. They washed up, all five of them, which turned the washing up into a production that involved more water on the floor than in the sink and Frank dropping a plate and Matilda finding the incident deeply amusing while Florence dried each item with the focus of a child performing surgery. They walked to the stables. The children ran ahead, even Matilda, who didn't usually run, was jogging beside Florence, her hand in Florence's hand, and Frank was sprinting ahead and turning back to check they were following.
Percy was in his paddock. He was a Welsh Mountain pony, dun-coloured, patient-eyed, with a white blaze and a temperament so steady that the grooms called him The Professor. When Florence climbed the fence and called his name he walked over with the measured, deliberate pace of a pony who knew he was important, and Florence buried her face in his mane and stood there, breathing him in, and the sound she made was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob but something between the two that made Erin's eyes sting.
"He smells the same," Florence said, her voice muffled by pony hair. "He smells exactly the same."
They stood at the paddock fence and watched Florence with Percy and the sun was warm on their shoulders and the dogs were running across the lawn, Audrey lumbering behind the younger dogs, her long legs eating up the ground despite her age, and the castle rose behind them, grey and solid and unchanged, and Erin leaned against the fence and let the ordinary beauty of a summer morning at home settle into her bones.
Alexandra leaned against her. Smaller than her, the length of her body warm against Erin's side. "You need to sleep," she said quietly.
"So do you."
"I will. Later. But you've been running on nothing for six days. You need to stop."
"I will. When I'm ready."
"You're ready. You just don't know it yet."
They were still standing like that, leaning against each other, watching Florence lead Percy around the paddock by his headcollar while Frank trotted alongside pretending to be a horse and Matilda sat on the top rail of the fence offering commentary, when Vic appeared.
She came around the corner of the stable block at her usual pace, which was somewhere between a walk and a sprint, her long hair tangled from the wind, a t shirt that probably used to be yellow but was now a shade between yellow and grey and covered in horse hair and unknown stains and her face carrying the particular expression she wore when she was trying to be casual about something she felt deeply. Hyzenthlay was beside her, not the half-step behind of a child following a parent but the even, parallel stride of a girl who walked beside rather than behind. Ten years old with her mother's hazel eyes, fierce intellect, and a self-possession that belonged to someone three times her age.
"All right," Vic said. She stopped at the fence. Looked at Florence in the paddock. Her eyes went bright and her jaw worked and she pressed her lips together and breathed in through her nose and the effort of not crying was written across her face like weather on a hillside. "Right. Good. She's here. She's on the pony. Good."
"Good morning, Vic."
"Shut up. I'm fine. I'm completely fine." She was not fine. She was gripping the top rail of the fence with both hands and her knuckles were white and her chin was trembling and she was watching Florence with the intensity of a woman who hadcarried the guilt of losing this child for six days and was seeing, for the first time, that the damage might not be permanent.
Florence looked up from Percy. “Auntie Vic!" She waved, one arm high, the enthusiastic wave of a child greeting a favourite adult. "Come and see Percy! He missed me!"
Vic's composure broke. She pressed her hand over her mouth, the same gesture Julia had made in the safe house hallway, and her shoulders shook once, hard. Then she climbed the fence, not through the gate, over the fence, in one athletic vault that reminded everyone present that she had been an Olympic champion, and crossed the paddock and picked Florence up and hugged her with the ferocity of a woman who needed the child to know she was sorry.
"I missed you, kiddo. I missed you so bloody much."
