Unless someone could help him.
Unless …
He willed strength back into his legs and ran.
Mr Briggs was saying something, but Ava could not focus on the words. They slipped through her mind like water, drowned out by the same thoughts, over and again.
He’s gone.
I made him run again.
She bit down upon her lip, trying to stop the ache in her throat from spreading, though it was near impossible. For the thread that had wound itself around her heart was now pinched between two thoughts, and pulled endlessly back and forth in a game of tug and war that only tightened it ever further.
What if you never see him again?whispered the first voice.
What does it matter now?countered the second.He was Lillian’s creature. Lillian’s. He betrayed your trust, just as you betrayed his.
‘Ava?’ It was Jem who spoke now, Jem’s hand upon her elbow. She hadn’t remembered sliding to the floor, but she was in a puddle of her own dress, the cotton spooling around her in blue-grey reams. ‘Ava, that man has gone to try and find him. Whathappened?’
‘Me.’ She didn’t want him to see her cry, and yet she knew, as she turned to face him, that her eyes were already filling up with tears, for his face had gone from sharp to a wobbling blur of pale skin and copper hair. ‘I happened. I hurt him, and I hurt myself. I … I did it all over again.’
Because fordaysshe had walked around with this jittering feeling in her stomach, this flopping worry that she had done the wrong thing in speaking to the man at her door – this Mr Briggs – and all the while Damien had been lying to her. Working against her. WorkingforLillian.
‘Come on,’ said Jem, his grip around her elbow tightening. ‘Let me help you up, Ava.’
She pinched her lips into a line, but let him hoist her up, brushing some of the dust from her skirt. ‘Miss Fairchild saw him there …’ she said dazedly. ‘And Lillian … is that why Lillian took my mother’s things? Because he’d told her what I’d said?’
Jem’s eyebrows twitched. ‘Lillian? Whatever are you talking about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Ava, brushing the dust from her skirts, and feeling some of the ticking sensation in her chest settle into something else. Something that began to smoulder, an ember flaring into flame in the pit of her stomach, sharp and searing. ‘I suppose Oliver was right, after all.’
‘In what?’ Jem asked, his voice a little gentler now.
‘Love is just giving another person everything they could ever need to hurt you, isn’t it?’
And she didn’t see how Jem’s expression stuttered. Didn’t see how it clouded.
‘Come on,’ he said, his voice taut. ‘Let me help you home.’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Oliver had put her to bed that evening with a small cup of whisky – though she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t do anything but stare at the notebook in her hands – all the ways in which she’d drawn Damien – and wonder what on earth she had done.
‘Ava?’
She blinked, for it was her father who’d poked his head through the door. ‘Can I come in?’
He had slicked his hay-coloured hair back, and for once was wearing proper clothes – cotton trousers, a white shirt, even his old, tweed waistcoat. She felt the bed sag downwards.
‘Oliver said you were upset.’
She turned her gaze back to the fire, plucking up the whisky, the glass cool against her palm. ‘Do you think it is worth it?’ she asked softly. ‘All the happy moments you had with Ma? If they all become knives in the end? Sharp little cuts, that sting every time you reach for them?’
Her father cleared his throat a little, reaching to scratch a line across his jaw. ‘They don’tallbecome knives,’ he said. ‘Even if they all might start out feeling that way.’
Ava took a sip of the whisky and winced. ‘Remembering Mother never felt that way to me,’ she said. ‘It never hurtin the way that …’ Her throat closed around the crash of thoughts that came then, and almost all of them of Damien. ‘That other things do.’
‘Because you did not feel guilty, like I do,’ her father said.
