Even so, he had stared at the message for a long time.
I love you.
Written out of duty, of course. Or worse, out of pity. He refused to allow himself to believe she could possibly mean it—and if she did, she shouldn’t.
Not after everything he had done.
He picked up a couple of sandwiches and took them over to the counter.
“A black coffee as well, please,” he said. “Large.”
The man just stared at him, waiting. Chris fought down the anger inside him. He found his wallet, picked out the money required, and put it down on the counter between them.
The man looked at it, then back up at Chris.
“A. Black. Coffee,” Chris repeated slowly. “Large.”
James was sitting half in the entrance of the tent when he got back, wrapped up in his own coat and hugging his knees. Chris handed him one of the sandwiches and the coffee.
“Here you go,” he said.
“Thanks.”
James shuffled over to make space for Chris to sit beside him, and then they both ate in silence, occasionally passing the coffee back and forth between them.
“Now what?” James said.
Chris screwed up the empty sandwich packet. There wasn’t much they could do yet, but it felt important to take charge. James’s spirits were down, which meant his needed to be up—that was one of the secrets to making a relationship work. They were like seesaws that way.
“Now,” he said, “we get ready.”
Most of the belongings they’d brought with them had remained packed away in their waterproof backpacks, but it still took them half an hour or so, either through lethargy or out of some desire they both had to keep themselves occupied. If you were busy, you didn’t have to think.
Outside, he started removing the poles from the canvas.
“The tent too?” James said.
“Yeah.”
“What about tonight?”
“We’re not going to need it anymore, are we?”
James didn’t reply.
As they worked, Chris noticed how nervous James was. Not just nervous, but frightened—scared for both of them, but especially for Chris. The arrangements for tonight were simple. Chris would be meeting the buyer alone. James would be waiting nearby with the book, close enough to bring it if Chris decided he trusted the man. It was better for them not to be together if things went wrong. After all, it was the book the man wanted. That would give them control over the situation.
A little extra leverage.
James didn’t like the idea, and Chris hadn’t expected him to. If the situation had been reversed, he would have felt the same. But for him, it was non-negotiable. It was he who had taken the book in the first place—he who had gotten them into this—and so he would get them out. Which wasn’t to say he wasn’t nervous himself. His chest was growing tighter the whole time they worked. But he was doing his best to ignore it.
James said something.
“What?” Chris said.
“We don’t have to do this.”
“We don’t really have any choice.”
“Of course we have a choice.”
“We’ll be fine,” Chris said. “I promise. And who knows—after tonight, maybe we’ll even be able to afford a coffee each from now on.”
That got him half a smile, at least.
“Let’s never go that far,” James said.
“All right. Deal.”
Chris continued collapsing the tent. Because they wouldn’t need it again. Everything was going to be fine.
But even so, James’s mention of choice made him think about Alan Hobbes.
All the steps are there at once.
Beginning, middle, and end. They’re all the same.
All the conversations he’d had with the old man came back to him then. Cause and effect. Fate and destiny. And as he carried on packing, Chris couldn’t quite shake the sensation that there were cogs turning below the surface of the world. That events had been set in motion and were now continuing along inevitable paths that had been there all along.
And that however much he tried to reassure them both, he had no real control at all over what would happen next.
Twenty-six
It’s not my story to tell.
Even in the face of Katie’s obvious frustration, her mother refused to tell her more about whatever relationship Nathaniel Leland had to their family.
You need to find your brother. And ask him.
As she left the house, Katie wondered bitterly if she was simply being manipulated into continuing the search for Chris—but the emotion on her mother’s face had been too genuine for that. Whatever the story behind the newspaper clipping was, it clearly upset her in some way. And regardless, the reality was that she did need to find Chris. She needed to understand what had happened to him and what was happening to her family now.
Back in the car, she rubbed some life into her face and gathered her resolve. Then she set off. She drove to James Alderson’s studio first, but it turned out that her luck had run out there. The front door was locked, and when she tried the bell for number six there was no reply. If Chris was inside, he wasn’t answering. And if he had returned since she came yesterday and seen her message, he had obviously decided not to call her.
Which broke her heart again.
She drove across the city, past the prison on the hill, and parked up on the main road outside Chris’s apartment. Late afternoon on a Saturday, the street was busier than it had been on her previous visit, and most of the shops were open now, including the real estate agent and carpet shop on either side of her brother’s front door. She let herself in quietly—locking the door behind her this time—and then searched the apartment again. Everything appeared to be the same as she had left it, but there was a sadness to the air now, and the place felt even more abandoned than before, the sense of it being a home like a light growing steadily dimmer. She worked methodically through each of the rooms again but found nothing. Whatever secrets the apartment held, it had already given them up.
Where are you, Chris? Katie thought.
She picked up the die and rolled it across the top of the shelf.
A blank face, the number long since worn away.
She went back downstairs and locked the door, and then sat in her car for a while, trying to think. Trying to work her way through the little she knew as carefully as she’d just searched the apartment above her.
Two years ago, her brother had effectively vanished off the face of the earth. At that point, he had been an addict and a lost cause. But then he had come back—sober, in what appeared to be a loving relationship, working in some capacity, and building a home and a life for himself here.
It was properly him, she remembered her mother saying.
Like he was meant to be.
Except that, a couple of weeks ago, something had scared Chris badly enough for him to drop everything and run. He had been being watched and followed, and so it seemed reasonable to assume he had been frightened of someone. What she didn’t know was who. Was it connected to the work he’d been doing? Someone from his days on the streets? Or did the answer somehow lie even further back in his past?
And, of course, it wasn’t just about Chris anymore.
Katie looked around the street, remembering being followed back from here two nights ago. There had been the car parked outside Siena’s day care that day. And there had been the intruder in the garden last night, watching her through the kitchen window and then trying the door handle. Any one of those things by itself, she might have put down to coincidence—but not all three. Yes, she worried too much. But whatever Sam might think, she wasn’t imagining the danger her family was in. The question was whether it was connected to what was happening to Chris.