“That was yours,” he said. “I’ve been keeping it.”
I stared at the locket. My thumb traced the raised pattern on the front – a flower, worn almost flat by years of handling. The brass was warm from his jacket. From his body.
“That was you,” I said.
He looked at the mirror opposite. His jaw was set. When he spoke, his voice sat lower in his chest than I’d ever heard it.
“I was seventeen.”
The memory came back in fragments – the way memories do when they’ve been stored wrong, filed undersurvivinginstead ofremembering. The flat on Clyde Crescent, before Mum died, when the building was full and the stairwell still smelled of someone else’s cooking and the smoke alarm never worked. I was nine.The fire in the corner flat – number seven, the MacAllister place, the one that started in the kitchen and moved through the walls faster than anyone expected because the building was old and the insulation was the specific kind of combustible that council housing liked to pretend wasn’t.
The smoke. The dark. The sound of glass breaking somewhere above me and the heat – not the kind of heat that warms you, the kind that pushes you back, that fills a space until there’s no air left in it and your lungs refuse to work and your legs refuse to work and you’re standing in the corridor at nine years old in your pyjamas and the world is orange and black and very, very loud.
And then the hands.
Very large hands. They picked me up the way you pick up something you’ve been told to be careful with – not rough, not hurried, just efficient, with a grip that saidI have you and you are not falling. A jacket wrapped around my head and shoulders, smelling of sweat and rain and cold air and the clean scent I would not identify for another twelve years. The stairs, taken fast, my body against a chest that felt like a wall – wide and warm and moving with the steady, controlled breathing of someone who was afraid but would not allow the fear to reach his hands. And then outside – the pavement, the cold air, the firemen arriving with their lights and their hoses and their loud, competent voices – and the man was gone. He put me down and he disappeared into the smoke and the dark and the noise, and I never saw his face.
I had carried the gap where his face should have been for twelve years.
I turned the locket over. The chain was fine and oldand it had been caught in my hand when he’d picked me up – caught between my fingers and the fabric of his jacket – and when he’d put me down, it had come with him by accident, snagged on a button or a seam, pulled loose from the neck of a nine-year-old girl in a burning stairwell.
“You kept this,” I said.
“Aye.”
“For twelve years.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The locket in my palm was warm and tarnished and it was the answer to every question I’d been asking since the night I’d seen him standing at the edge of the dock rugby, watching me the way you watch something you’ve been expecting.
He hadn’t been expecting me. He’d beenwaiting. For twelve years. Carrying a locket that didn’t belong to him and a clipping about a dancer he’d never spoken to and a memory of a fire that had given him, at seventeen, the one thing his enormous, silent, careful body existed to do: protect something small.
I looked at him. His face was turned towards the mirror. The dock light caught the line of his jaw, the old break in his nose, the heaviness of his features that should have been brutish and wasn’t – because the eyes were careful, and the mouth was careful, and the hands resting on his thighs were very, very still.
I kissed him.
I didn’t decide to do it. My body decided. My body reached for him the way it reached for the barre – automatically, structurally, from somewhere below thought. I turned and I put my hand on his jaw and I brought his mouth to mine and kissed him.
He went still. For one second – one full, heldsecond – his entire body stopped. Not resistance. The opposite. The devastating stillness of a man who has been carrying something breakable for twelve years and is only now being told he’s allowed to put it down.
Then his hand came up and found the back of my neck, and his fingers threaded into my hair, and he kissed me back. Not softly. Carefully. With the precise, measured attention he brought to everything – the correction of Fergus’s elbow, the count of his footsteps, the distance he maintained on the cliff path until the morning he’d closed it. He kissed me the way a man holds something he’s been told is fragile and has decided for himself is strong.
His mouth was warm. His hand at the back of my neck was enormous and careful and his thumb traced the line of my jaw and I felt it in places I had no business feeling things at two in the morning on the floor of a dance studio. My back was against the mirror and the glass was cold and his body was warm and the contrast of it – the cold behind me, the heat in front of me, the twelve years and the locket and the secondhand taste of tea on his mouth – filled the room until there was no room left, just him and me and the mirrors showing us from every angle, infinite.
He pulled back. Not far. His forehead against mine. His breathing unsteady – the first time I’d heard his breathing be anything other than absolutely controlled. His hand still on the back of my neck, still holding, still careful.
“I need you to understand,” he said. His voice sat in his chest like something that had been waiting to be spoken for a very long time. “You are not in this house because of the Ledger.” A pause. The dock light pulsed. “Not for me.”
I held the locket in one hand and his jaw in the other and I said nothing, because there was nothing I could say that the locket hadn’t already said, and the silence was warm, and his breathing was unsteady, and the studio held us the way the sprung floor held a dancer – with give, and with strength, and with the knowledge of exactly how much weight it could carry.
CHAPTER 22
Nine Years Old
MORVEN
Ilay on my back in the dark, holding the locket. It was very warm from his pocket. I thought:twelve years.
The ceiling of my room at Crag Manor was invisible in the dark – just a flat, heavy absence above me, the weight of the house pressing down through its beams and its stone and its centuries of other people’s sleepless nights. The sea sounded below the cliff. The locket chain pooled in the hollow of my throat and the brass disc sat on my sternum, rising and falling with my breathing, and every breath was a small, involuntary act of archaeology – uncovering the thing, covering it, uncovering it again.
