“I saved my money from all my shite jobs, so that one day we could get a proper room for just the two of us to live in. A real home. We lived with a slew of others. Sometimes I took him to work with me. I eventually learned how to invest money. I learned about maths and accounting. I talked a bloke into teaching me to read. I decided I was going to have my own gaming establishment, and that I was going to send him to Cambridge or Oxford one day. I was on my way.”
He paused at length.
“Not quite six years,” he finally said. His voice was hoarse. “That’s all we got. A fever swept London, we both caught it. And he—”
He stopped abruptly.
She could hear him breathing.
“I’m so, so terribly sorry.” Her voice was shredded. “I wish I could have met him.”
He looked across at her and watched her for some time. He smiled sadly, faintly, ruefully, as if he was picturing just that. Her heart twisted.
“This might sound ridiculous, Ginny... but I had never felt like such a failure when I realized I couldn’t afford to have a fancy verse carved into his headstone. Because you see, this was well before I founded Lucifer’s Fall. I’m a rich man now, but I was too bloody poor to honor this spectacular person, because back then I was hardly better than a thug with few prospects.” His voice frayed. “It infuriated me. It infuriated me that I didn’t evenknowany fancy verses because let’s just say that I wasn’t any squarer with our alleged maker or the book about him then I am now. And so I didn’t know what his stone should say.”
Ginny understood what he meant. “On my mother’s stone it could have said, ‘Loved peaches.’ And decades from now people might come across her stone and think, ‘Ha, isn’t that quaint’ or ‘How disrespectful! That’s all her family could think to say?’ And maybe they would laugh at it. But peaches were her favorite fruit, and ‘peach’ was my father’s nickname for her, and fanning out from that word are a thousand memories, and when anyone says ‘peaches’ it conjures her for me as clear as day.”
He listened to this with a smile. “Michael’s could have read, ‘Laughed hysterically at every fart. God took one look at his sleeping face and created the angels in his image.’?”
She made a sound, almost but not quite a laugh, as her heart cracked in two.
She laughed. “I’ll probably catch a pox of some sort, and mine will read, ‘Died as she lived. Covered in spots.’?” She absently gestured to her freckles.
She had come to love the way he looked at her when she said things like that. With a sort of awe, mingled with a hilarity that transcended laughter. And something more somber and intent she could not quite interpret.
Finally he gave a slow, very slight shake of his head. As if he could not quite reconcile the wonder of her.
More than anyone she’d ever known in her life, he made her feel singular. He seemed to relish aspects of her character she’d never considered of any worth. He took her for what she was, probably because she’d revealed more of her true colors to him than to any other human being. She’d even discovered a fewnewcolors because of him. How odd that nothing in her life had ever felt quite so luxurious as being known.
“Anyhow, Ginny, according to the stonecutter, I could afford only a few little words or one big word. The decision tormented me. I couldn’t sleep. I dreamed about Michael. This was the last thing I would be able to do for him and I wanted to get it right. So ‘beloved’ is the word I chose. I thought it was a good word. Because it’s the only thing that matters about any of us in the end, isn’t it?”
He said this quietly. Almost defiantly.
As if, for the whole of the time since Michael died, he’d been in search of absolution, some acknowledgment that he’d done the right thing.
She was impotently furious she couldn’t go back in time so she could tell him then that the word was perfect. Devastatingly correct and to the point. Just like Marchand.
“You found the best word,” she told him with absolute conviction. “There’s no better word.”
He looked at her sharply in that way he had, as if he were sifting through her mind for lies and truths. Then gave a shallow nod.
When he exhaled and tension in his shoulders at last eased, she felt as though she’d achieved something of worth.
He stubbed out his cheroot on his flint and steel box then tucked it inside. He strode over to stand before his son’s headstone and matter-of-factly handed his handkerchief to her.
She hadn’t realized tears were coursing down her face.
He didn’t fuss. He didn’t say a word. They were just two people, feeling what they felt. In his presence now, sadness felt as safe and natural as an exhale or a heartbeat.
“Do you want to be alone for a moment to have a chat with him?” she asked. “I’ll wander off.”
He shook his head. “I talk to him all the time,” he said simply.
She hesitated. “I talk to my parents, too.” Her voice was hoarse.
He just nodded, as if to say, of course.
He was studying her thoughtfully now, as if he was considering what to say next.
