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“I just saw Melissa.” Dale spoke abruptly, a fraction too loudly. “She told me what happened last night. Are you – are you sure that you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” said Sophy, more in deference to social norms than because it was true. She wasn’t entirely fine, not yet anyway, but it would be both irrelevant and perhaps cruel to go into the reasons with Dale. “We’re going to the police station to give a statement this afternoon.” She paused. “Um. I mentioned to the officer last night about the…the gifts that I’ve been receiving.”
She was still hoping, even then, that Dale would look genuinely perplexed by the reference.
Instead a mottled shade of crimson crept up under his skin. He didn’t bother to dissemble.
“God, I’m sorry, Sophy,” he said, and sounded genuinely embarrassed. He scuffed one foot hard against the wooden floorboards. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I just – didn’t think. I had no idea.”
No. Sophy didn’t reply, torn between pity for his discomfort and exasperation. It wouldn’t occur to Dale that a stunt like that, however well-intentioned, might be a little unsettling, particularly given what had happened at the exhibition. He had always had a mind and tongue like a whip and a sensitivity tank running on empty.
“I don’t really get…” she began, and he reddened even further. He looked even more like a bashful schoolboy now. He had been a year behind Melissa at university; Sophy sometimes forgot how young he actually was.
“It started off as a joke,” he said. Then as her expression changed irately, he went on hastily, “Not the reason behind it.” He bit his lip. “I’ve had feelings for you for a while.”
Sophy’s fingers plucked frenetically at the sleeve of her light jumper. She found a spot of absorbing interest on the wall behind his ear and examined it in careful, attentive, minute detail.
“Not when I was with Melissa,” he said more firmly, sounding a little more his old self. He winced. “But that made it…a bit awkward,” he added, in a mastery of understatement. “To say the least. I didn’t know how to approach you about it or whether I even should.”
He shouldn’t have. End of story. Melissa was her cousin. They lived together, for God’s sake.
She still said nothing, not wanting to make the moment even worse for him.
“Then I got the idea to send you a few anonymous gifts, just sort of jokingly. It was after we watched that programme, remember?”
Sophy stared at him.
“No…”
“It was on TV not that long ago. This guy sent these, like, heart gifts. Anyway.” Dale sounded flustered. “I would never have done it if I’d thought they would scare you. And I didn’t mean for you to get one right after that messed up thing with the bomb. I’d actually put the vase in your office days before that. I guess you just didn’t notice.”
Sophy winced slightly. Maybe she needed to tidy up just a little.
“Did you follow me after work one night?” she asked suddenly.
Dale winced.
“I wasn’t – following you. Not exactly. I was meeting a client in town that night, and I saw you leaving work on my way home. I was going to stop and offer you a lift, but all of a sudden you bolted and were gone by the time I turned the car around.”
He looked so miserable that she kept a damper on the scathing retort that came to mind.
“Sophy, I’m sorry. About everything. About the gifts. I thought - I thought you’d like them.”
“I did like them,” she said eventually, some of her irritation with him dying away. The presents had been misguided and poorly timed, but undeniably thoughtful in their choosing. If he did…like her, and she was still having a hard time wrapping her head around that, he liked her for who she was. He knew what she would find useful and beautiful. It was difficult to be mad about that. “I couldn’t have chosen better things for myself.”
“But you wouldn’t have chosen to receive them from me,” he said, unemotional now in voice and expression. Only the restless movement of his fingers gave away his tension.
She couldn’t deny it.
“I’m sorry, Dale.”
And she was. To her, comparatively, the whole thing suddenly seemed so very…unimportant. The only part that hurt was the look he was trying to keep from his eyes. She suspected that he might have come here still hoping for the start of something; instead, she rather thought this was the end of a friendship of sorts. They were neither of them the sort who could blithely carry on. He was too proud, still had that core of arrogance, and she lacked the finesse to end the situation gracefully with everyone’s dignity still intact.
They both discovered exactly how graceless she could be when he nodded, just once, and made a move forward. Later, Sophy realised that he had been stepping to avoid her discarded tools. In the moment, her mind and reflexes suffered a flashback to the events of the night before and registered a potential incoming threat. She stumbled back and her heel caught on a jagged crack in the floor. She twisted, her ankle did not, and she went down hard. Dale automatically grabbed for her, but her instinctively flung arms caught hold of a heavier limb. Hades, in all his muscular glory and dead weight, was nevertheless a victim of momentum. The child of Olympus fell.
There were a few seconds of appalled silence after the enormous crash and then doors began to open and voices sounded in the hallway. Sophy lay winded, although thankfully not in the early grips of another asthma attack, despite the horrible similarities of gasping for breath amidst clouds of white dust. For a bizarre moment, she felt no physical sensations at all. She couldn’t even feel the floor beneath her hands. Her brain seemed to be absolutely convinced, however, that her right foot was gone. She would be prepared to swear that it had snapped clean off, as if she was made of detachable Lego bricks or something. She didn’t want to look.
Her eyes stared directly in front of her and into the sightless, broken gaze of Hades. She could vaguely hear the frantic voices of Dale and Don, the hum of interested onlookers in the hall. Raising a trembling hand, Sophy touched the remains of the face she had carved with such care and love, the hints still recognisable here and there of Mick’s features. The work was destroyed beyond repair.
