Page 37 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
ds I love anyway.
She said she loves you, and for a minute, you wanted to say it back.
“Want some more gin?” Auden asks abruptly.
God. Yes, please.
“Make it a double,” I say, and then decide to go help him so he doesn’t forget the ice.
Chapter Nine
St. Sebastian
Not far from the thorn chapel and overlooking the River Thorne is a heathered ridge called Reavy Hill. There are no footpaths here, no obvious beauty spots, no standing stones or dolmens to photograph. It’s a wild, gorse-ridden heap, striped with overgrown reaves on one side and rolling down to the thick woods of Thornchapel on the other. I can see the proud stone head of the house among the trees—the tower in particular looking stupidly pretty in a sea of pear-green leaves. Farther off, Thorncombe clusters around the river, a chocolate-box-worthy huddle of stone and thatch, with the medieval St. Brigid’s preening in the middle of it all. It’s easy to understand why the people who built the standing stones, and later the reaves and roundhouses, decided to stay in this veiled and winding vein stretching south to the sea. Even easier to understand why everyone after them stayed too. Like my mother.
Like me.
I sit perched atop a clumsy jumble of granite—which is too squat to be a landmark but still tall enough to earn you some scrapes as you climb it. Auden and I used to come here, as teenagers, flushed with stolen wine and nervous adolescent attraction.
I stare down into the trees, picking out the thorn chapel’s clearing and the teasing crook of one menhir as it peeks through the branches. The rest of the clearing—the other standing stones, the crumbling chapel, the altar—is mostly hidden from view, but I still feel it there, like an extension of myself, aware, breathing, alive. Waiting for me to come back. I look up toward the house, with its glittering windows and grim crenellations.
Is it waiting for me too?
Was it always?
“Thought I might find you here,” a voice says from behind me, and I turn to see a sweaty Becket climbing up onto the boulder next to me—gracefully and without a single scrape at all, despite his flimsy workout clothes, damn him.
I grunt in response and turn my eyes back on the house. It’s impossible to see the front, much less which cars are in the drive, but I know Auden’s already left for London. He usually leaves by late afternoon on Mondays, and anyway, the last few weeks he’s been gone, it’s like Thornchapel itself can sense it. The moment he leaves, you can see the trees arch and stir and shake, you can hear the breeze kick up in fretful gusts, and you can see the warblers and finches and stonechats hopping anxiously about, fussing and flapping their wings in vexation. The river throws fits: sulking and drying into trickles, then surging suddenly again, as if in a tantrum, and then finally, in defeat, abating into its usual whispers and sighs.
Auden is gone, and so even the river weeps for him.
Becket is good at long silences, and the sun has started to sink when he finally says, “Poe is looking for you, you know.”
I know. My phone is in my pocket, turned off after the seventh text message she sent me. I know hiding isn’t healthy, I know it’s something I would have done five months ago. I know she deserves a response at the very least. And it’s perverse, me hiding, because all I want to do is see her. All I want to do is crush her to my chest and fill my hands with her hair as I feel her breathe against me. In fact, I came up to Reavy Hill not to watch the sunset or the herd of wild ponies grazing and swishing their tails, but to watch the house. As if by watching the house I could somehow be closer to her, somehow soak up her comfort without having to expose anything of myself.
Because seeing her, actually seeing her—worry slithers in my belly at the mere thought. She told me via text that she knows about Auden and me, and if I look at her and I see her knowing . . .
I don’t know. It just feels like something that can’t be undone. The final stitch in the shroud of what Auden and I had.
“I don’t have my stole, so I can’t hear a confession at the moment,” Becket says in a casual, oh hey, here’s a fun fact kind of voice. “But if you wanted to talk, just as friends, I’m here.”
I scrub my face with my hands, pulling down on my cheeks as if I can pull the skin away from my face. “I think I might need a confession, actually. I’ve sinned.”
“We’re all sinners,” Becket says placidly. “If we didn’t sin, perhaps we’d never know the gift of grace. The free and undeserved clemency of God. And maybe that would be its own kind of tragedy.”
Grace.
I think of Mamá for some reason, how she would hold me and wipe my tears away when I was little, even after I scratched and kicked at her. How she’d still kiss my cheek and help me with homework and leave my clothes washed and folded in perfect squares on the bed even when I told her I hated her, I hated our life, even when I snarled and sneered at her because I was fifteen and angry and felt like I was deeply and uniquely alone. Still, she loved me.
Grace. Free and definitely undeserved.
“Shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace?” I murmur. “God forbid.”
“Romans,” Becket says, recognizing the verse’s origin immediately. “Book of the angsty.”
“I’m not angsty,” I say reflexively, and then Becket laughs, reaching over to pluck at my hand, where I’ve colored in my fingernails with a black Sharpie.
“I was bored at the library this morning,” I protest, curling my fingers into my palms. I don’t tell him how I wrote a capital M on each nail before scribbling over it.
