Chapter 6 Three Steps

Three steps across the kitchen and my arms are around her from behind and my face is in her shoulder and I hold on.

Both hands grip the back of her cardigan, my face pressed into the blue wool, holding on with everything I have because she is real and she is here and I have been on the other side of thirty-two unanswered calls and I know, I know in a way I cannot explain and will not try to explain, what it costs to lose this.

She goes still for one breath.

Then she sets her mug down.

Her hands come up and cover mine where they are locked around her and she does not say anything. She does not ask. Her thumb begins to move, slowly, back and forth across my knuckles, the same motion she used when I was small and could not sleep and she sat on the edge of my bed and waited with me until the dark felt less large.

I cry.

Not quietly. The way you cry when you have been holding something for so long that your body simply runs out of the strength to keep it contained, in deep silent waves, face buried in blue wool, hands holding her so tight like she might be taken if I loosen my hold even slightly.

Sunday by Sunday, missed call by missed call, one small surrender at a time, until she was a voicemail I had trained myself not to check and a name I had learned to scroll past and she called anyway. She kept calling. Thirty-two times she called and I let it ring and the following Sunday she called again because she is this woman, right here, whose thumb is moving back and forth across my knuckles, and she does not stop.

"Sera." Her voice is low and careful and completely hers. "Baby, talk to me. What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I manage. My voice is wrecked. "I'm fine."

"You are holding onto me like I am going somewhere. That is not fine."

"I just missed you."

She pauses tilting her head at me, "Sera, I saw you four days ago."

"I know." I sniff refusing to raise my head.

"That is not, by any normal measure a long time, baby"

"I know, Mum. I know." I press my face further into her shoulder.

"Are you okay? Did something happen?"

I shake my head, my tears wetting her wool cardigan.

"Is it the job search? Do you feel exhausted by it? You can take a break, you know?"

"Can we just stay like this for a minute?."

Her arms tighten around me, "Okay," she says simply.

We stay like that. Long past the point where a normal embrace would have ended. Long enough that the tea goes cold and the morning light shifts across the kitchen floor and my father very carefully and very quietly turns another page of his newspaper without saying a single word, which is the kindest thing he has done in twenty years of breakfasts.

When I finally pull back my face is a complete disaster and my mother looks at me with those steady eyes and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and says nothing for a long moment.

Then she says, "I'm going to make more tea. And you're going to sit there and drink it. And you don't have to tell me anything."

"Okay," I whisper.

"But ---" She holds up one finger. "When you're ready, whenever you decide that is, I'll be here."

I nod fisting my hands in my shirt, "I know, Mum."

"Good." She stands and picks up our mugs. Then pauses and looks back at me over her shoulder, and there is something in her face, carefully controlled, that tells me she is more worried than she is showing and has decided, deliberately, not to show it.

"Also you have your father's dramatic streak. The crying out of nowhere. Very him." She rolls her eyes playfully at me.

From behind his newspaper my father says, "I heard that."

"You were meant to," my mother giggles, and turns back to the kettle.

I look at the table.

At my half eaten eggs and the worn wood grain and the sticky ring from my mother's mug that she will wipe up when she sits back down without mentioning it.

At my hands.

Twenty-four years old and carrying the full weight of a life I have already lived and lost and been given back in a way I do not yet understand and am not sure I deserve.

I turn them over in my lap.

I think about Callum Weston waking up this morning in a world where I am already three moves ahead of everything he is about to do.

I think about the hollow foundations.

I think about the cracks.

My mother sets a fresh mug of tea in front of me. She squeezes my shoulder once, brief and warm, and goes back to her chair. My father turns his page. The kitchen settles back into its ordinary morning sounds, the kettle cooling, the newspaper rustling, the particular quiet of a house that does not know it is the safest place I have been in six years.

I wrap both hands around the mug and let it warm my palms.

Outside the window the city is already moving, already loud, already full of people who have no idea that the woman sitting at the kitchen table in the house on Calloway Street has been here before. Has seen how it ends. Has come back with the full map of everything that is about to happen and the cold specific knowledge of exactly where to apply pressure.

I take a sip of my warm tea and let myself sit in this kitchen for one more ordinary morning.

Tomorrow, I begin.

Who would have guessed? The meek and nice girl insanely in love with Callum Weston is about to become a vengeful spirit.