“I pick up languages quickly,” I was saying, “and I notice things, and I can get into places no one else can. There are other girls out there who need help they don’t even think they can ask for. Girls like Matilda. I always felt so alone, you know, but now? I think I could be that person for them. Their . . . champion, I suppose. I want to find a way to put all that together.”
He took off his hat, held it loosely by his side, waiting. He could hear it, I think. What was coming.
I laughed hollowly. “These past few months have been the happiest I’ve ever been.”
I hadn’t known why my aunt had taken me to that little gilded restaurant where August had been tending bar. The towel tied in his apron strings. His hair longer, now, falling around his temples. His smile quicker than I’d ever seen. I’d never see it again.
I’d thought it was a punishment, of sorts. That had been so much of my past few years: people coming out of the woodwork to punish me for being who I was. A girl who’d been fashioned as a weapon, then left to rust out in the rain.
But it hadn’t been a punishment. She had offered me a kind of freedom.
And Watson was just looking at me.
“I love you,” I said. “But I don’t know if I can stay here, after all this is settled.”
He nodded once, twice. Took a step off to the side. Pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, and turned from me, walking out of the grove and into the darkening night.
It was selfish to follow, but I did.
“Jamie,” I said, crashing after him. “Jamie!” He sped up, but I lunged forward, close enough now to catch him by the elbow.
He stopped there, his back to me still. “You say the two things like they go together. That you love me, and that you have to go. Do you understand how—I have no idea what to say to that, Holmes.”
“Come with me,” I said. “I never said I didn’t want you to come.”
At that, he spun, so close to me that I could feel the heat of him through his shirt. “I don’t have the money,” he said. “I don’t have the time. I need to go to college. That’s what I’m doing this fall, Holmes. College. Not—not Tromso. Despite everything, I got into a good school, and I need to get a degree. And then maybe I’ll make, like, a wild decision and go to grad school for fiction instead of immediately getting a job as . . . as a copywriter. Which I would be lucky to get! I can’t just hare off after you while you go extravagantly find yourself. I think, actually, that would kind of defeat the purpose, don’t you?”
He shut his eyes, hard, and I felt childish. I felt like a fool. I had rehearsed all this in my head so many times. What had I expected?
“I can’t stay here,” I said desperately. I had to make him understand. “I can’t. I’ve changed. For the better, I think, but there’s still this . . . shadow over me. No one trusts me. No one but you.”
“I trust you,” he said. “How long? How long before you go—fuck, before you go wherever you’re going to go, and—” He was crying now, and he wiped at his eyes with his knuckles. “God.”
I couldn’t help it. I reached out and pulled his arms apart and stepped between them. He stood still and resistant for a moment, and then he collapsed, his arms going around my waist, tucking me up close. I could hear the hard echo of his heart.
“I love you,” he said quietly. “I’ve never in my life loved anything more.”
And somehow, somehow, that had been the last thing I’d imagined him saying.
“I’ll be back,” I promised. “I won’t be long. A year. Maybe two. And even if it isn’t to stay—maybe you can take a long summer, and come away with me.”
“You’re asking me to wait for you,” he said, pulling away. There was something broken in his eyes. “And you know I will. But I can’t make you feel better about this. I can’t. Not right now.”
“Jamie—”
“Come on,” he said, walking back to the boat. “I’ll take us home.”
Epilogue
Two years later
THE TRAINS FROM LONDON PADDINGTON STATION TO Oxford ran more than 150 times a day; the journey itself took about an hour. It cost seventeen quid to go there and back, twenty if you factored in the sausage roll I liked to buy in the station. I usually didn’t have a seatmate, but if I did, more often than not they’d be someone who looked like me—a university student with a weekender bag and a textbook they weren’t reading, off to visit a friend in another town.
She had a small little set of rooms in East Oxford, near Cowley Road, the sort of place with a half kitchen and radiators that hissed and a bedroom that didn’t have a door. But the view from the sitting room window was magnificent—you could glimpse the dreaming spires of the university from her gray velvet sofa, and she sat there in the mornings, her silk blanket tossed over her shoulders, while she saw clients during her business hours. Fridays only, ten to two, and what she made in those sessions covered her rent, because she had to pay her own rent now. Her reputation had gotten round town to her satisfaction in the year since she’d been back. There wasn’t ever a wait to speak with her, but she was never in want of work, either.
I’d rearranged my classes this term so I could sit in and assist where I could. It meant forgoing the Robert Louis Stevenson tutorial I wanted in favor of one on American poetry, but in the end I found I didn’t mind. Mrs. Dunham would be proud of me, carrying John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs around, reading even the ones I hadn’t been assigned. The rhythms of them got into my head, and as I took the stairs two at a time to her door, I ran compulsively through my favorite bits. I don’t know how Henry pried / open for all the world to see survived. A one-two tap, and then I’d call out, “Charlotte?”
There wasn’t ever an answer, but I wanted to give her a moment, in case she was on the phone or wasn’t dressed. Sometimes I thought if we lived in the same city I’d be more comfortable treating her flat as my own, but as it stood, I showed up with my duffel and my train ticket home, and when I got to her door, I knocked.
I was a visitor here.
Inside, I’d find her at her little stove, the electric kettle already going. She made herself breakfast now, two hard-boiled eggs and a green leafy something. Gone were the experiments that she’d made for me in Leander’s kitchen; when she cooked for herself now, it was with the grim determination of a soldier tearing into rations. If the first of her clients arrived at her door during breakfast, she took her meal to her bedroom and let me entertain her visitor until she’d properly finished.
“Entertaining” maybe wasn’t the best word for what I did for the shivering wrecks who showed up on those Friday mornings. Even when it wasn’t raining, they gave you the feeling of having wandered in the dark and wet for days, waiting for ten o’clock on Friday morning to finally roll around. In the beginning it had been only girls our age, university students and bartenders and shopgirls, the occasional younger one snuck out of her morning classes. At first it galled me to think that there were boys out there who needed Holmes’s skills, but who refused to trust themselves to a mere girl. She read that thought from something I did (my posture, a frown, all those signals I let myself project so that she could pretend to read my mind) and told me that, no, in fact, her name was passed like a secret between girls—you came to this flat if you needed a particular kind of assistance, if you needed your case to be heard. She would decide if she would help you, then if you had to pay, and when that was settled, you’d have your problem solved within the week.