Lachlan caught me in the entrance hall.
I was pulling on my coat. He was coming from the study with a coffee in his hand and papers under his arm, and he stopped. He looked at me – the coat, the bag, the intention to leave the house alone to visit a man he had exiled – and I waited for the objection. Lachlan objected to things in precise, well-constructed sentences that sounded like suggestions and operated like instructions.
He did not object. He stepped forward and reached for my collar. The collar of my coat was turned under on the left side, folded against itself, and his fingers found it and straightened it with the practised economy of a man who noticed details and corrected them without being asked.
His fingers stopped.
The bruise was below my collarbone. Left side. Al’s mouth, two nights ago, in the dark bedroom, the moment where gentleness tipped into urgency and his teeth found my skin and the sound I made was not protest. The mark was purple at the centre, yellow at the edges. Healing. Still visible.
Lachlan’s fingers were on my collar. His knuckles were white.
He did not look at the bruise. He looked at my face. His eyes were the eyes I knew – cool, grey-blue, the precision instruments of a man who assessed everything and reacted to nothing – buthis hand was telling a different story. His hand was telling me that the man who ran systems and built strategies and processed threats with architectural calm had just encountered a piece of information his systems could not file.
He straightened the collar. He smoothed the fabric against my shoulder. The smoothing lasted one second longer than it needed to.
“Take the coast road,” he said. “The dock road has a speed trap this week.”
“Thank you.”
He stepped back. Coffee. Papers. The study. The door closed behind him and I stood in the entrance hall with my coat straightened and the bruise hidden and the memory of his white knuckles on my collar and the controlled way he had chosen to say nothing, and I understood that Lachlan’s silence was not acceptance. It was discipline. And discipline, when stretched thin enough, looked exactly like pain.
He opened the door in a jumper and trousers that were clean and pressed and too large for him. He had lost weight. The broadness that I remembered – the barrel chest, the heavy shoulders of a man who had carried physical labour and drink in equal measure – had gone thin. His face was narrower. His eyes were clearer. He had shaved. He smelled of soap and tea and the flat behind him smelled of nothing much at all, which was its own kind of information: the smell of a man who cooked plain food and cleaned up after himself and did not accumulate the chaos that drink had always generated around him.
“Morven,” he said.
“Dad.”
The word sat between us. I had not called him Dad in a long time. I had called him Duncan in the cold study at Crag Manor when I told him what I thought of what he had done. I had called him nothing at all in the months since. But standing in the doorway of his exile flat, looking at the thinness and the clean jumper and the clear eyes, the word came out before I could redirect it.
He stepped back. I stepped in.
The flat was two rooms. A living room with a kitchenette along one wall, and a bedroom behind a closed door. The living room was tidy in the careful way of a man who had very few possessions and maintained them with the attention that having very few possessions required. A sofa. A table with one chair. A television that was off. A shelf with eight books – paperbacks, their spines uncracked, the books of a man who had bought them with the intention of reading and had not yet started.
A photograph. On the shelf beside the books. Me, aged twelve, in a ballet leotard, standing on one leg with my arms above my head in a fifth-position relevé. I remembered the photograph. Isobel had taken it. My hair was in a bun and my face was serious and my left knee – the one that would be destroyed ten years later – was straight and strong and untouched.
He saw me looking at it. He did not comment.
“Tea?” he said.
“Please.”
He made tea in the careful way of a man who had relearned ordinary domestic tasks after years of having them done badly or not at all. The kettle. The mugs. The milk from the fridge, which was small and clean and contained milk and butter and a packet of ham and nothing else. The tea was strong and made correctly and he brought it to the table and sat across from me and we drank in the quiet of a flat that contained almost nothing except two people who had hurt each other and were now sitting in the wreckage with cups of tea.
“How’s the sobriety?” I said. I asked it directly because the old Morven would not have asked it at all, and asking was the new Morven’s version of care.
“Hard,” he said. “Not as hard as it was. The first month I couldn’t sleep. The second month I couldn’t stop sleeping. The third month I found a routine.” He gestured at the flat – the tidy surfaces, the clean kitchen, the folded blanket on the sofa. “The routine helps. I get up at six. I walk along the waterfront. I buy a paper. I come back and I clean something. Most days there’s nothing left to clean, but I clean it anyway.”
The description was unbearable in its modesty. A man who had held the Syndicate’s second seat, who had commanded rooms, who had sold his daughter for a debt he could not face – that man was now cleaning a tidy flat at seven in the morning because the cleaning gave him structure.
“You look well,” he said. It was the careful, measured compliment of a man who was afraid of saying the wrong thing and had decided that safe observations were better than honest ones.
“I am well.”
“Lachlan’s treating you right?”
“Lachlan treats me as an equal. That’s more than right.”
He absorbed this. His face did a small movement – the mouth tightening, the jaw adjusting – and I recognised it as theexpression he wore when he was processing information that reflected badly on his own history. Lachlan treating me as an equal. The implication: Duncan had not.
