“I told you,” Corentin replies patiently. “I’ve had people searching for you.”
“You’re a Druid,” Tom snarls. “Not a fucking detective.”
“Watch your language,” Corentin says, still calm. “Like I said, you broke Mom’s heart leaving like you did. She entrusted me with... Well, not finding you, not exactly. She always said you would only be found when you wanted to be. But she did ask me to keep an ear out for you, which I have done. For about a year there was nothing, and then, nearly six months ago, Tom Somerset suddenly appeared on the radar again. An old bank account of yours was reactivated, and a significant sum of money was transferred into it days later. I’ve been seeing digital receipts from your travels ever since. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, France... Like I said, quite the traveller these days, aren’t you?”
“I’m on my European tour,” Tom replies through gritted teeth. “Taking some time to myself.”
“I’m happy for you — and don’t get me wrong, Tom, I really am happy for you. Hearing your voice again is the best thing to happen in years. Awen — blessings be upon her — answered my calls to bring you home.”
“Don’t, please don’t,” Tom begs, “I don’t need another lesson in goddess paganism today.”
“It wasn’t a lesson, merely a commentary, and you sound so lost—”
“I’m not lost. I told you, I’m in Rouen,” Tom snaps.
“—and so alone that you could do with the goddess lighting your way,” Corentin carries on, as though Tom hasn’t even spoken. “Well, we all find our path in our own time, I suppose,” Corentin sounds almost cheerful, “but Tom, I have to ask you now to cut your European tour short and come home.”
“No.”
“Tom—”
“No,” Tom snaps again. “I’m not coming home. There’s no need for me to come home.”
“There’s nothing to keep you in Europe either,” Corentin says, and Tom swears he can hear his brother shrugging. “Unless there’s something you aren’t telling me?”
Tom says nothing and feels Corentin — damn his intuition — sense something in the void.
“The woman,” Corentin says gently, “is she really not with you anymore, or...”
“She’s gone,” Tom replies. “I’m alone. She was nobody. Just some woman.”
Nobody, but not to him, he thinks. Ari’s everything to him — the whole world, wrapped up in a wonderful package.
But Corentin and the others can’t find out about her. Not yet. He needs to clear the air with her himself first. Tom knows his mother. He understands all too well that if his mother ever got wind of a potential daughter-in-law, she’d be on the first plane to Rouen, ghosts of the past be damned. God knew she had the air miles to use.
“Okay,” Corentin says. “Time to come home then.”
“No, I’m busy, I’m travelling, I’m—”
“Tom.”
“I said no, okay? Just fucking listen to me for once, I’m not coming home. There is nothing on this earth that could get me to leave here and step foot near that miserable pile in New York my mother calls a home—”
“Tom, Dad’s dying.”
At these three simple words, issued so cleanly from Corentin’s plain-speaking mouth, all the air seems to be sucked from Tom’s lungs. He gasps, frantically clawing oxygen back into his body, his fingers gripping his phone with a bruising hold.
“What?” he whispers, and he can hear Corentin sighing.
“It’s Dad, Tom. He’s dying.”
“But he . . . he can’t be. He’s always been so . . . so . . . full of life,” Tom argues.
It isn’t a lie. Doug Somerset, rogue and pilot, daredevil and gambler, is a man so fervently full of zest and life it seems to drip from every pore of his body. He’s spirited and joyous, charming and kind, with a streak of honour within him that puts most others to shame. He’s the sort of man who helps ladies across roads, who stops to open doors for others, who compliments everyone he ever seems to meet. He’d taught Tom to pilot planes and drive cars, and always encouraged him to fly a little faster and take the road unseen.
“You can get this bird up to Vh at least,” Doug would drawl from the co-pilot seat of his Cessna, patting Tom on the back in the pilot’s chair.
“That’s a risk,” Tom would reply, but he’d apply thrust all the same. “Why are you such a daredevil?”
