Theo. Dead. Theo and Polly.
There was an empty chicken cage strewn to the side of the road, and I kicked it hard. There was a roar, and it took several seconds to realize it had come from me.
I walked until I found myself somehow back at the front door of 348 Cobbler and Brum, Row 5.
The door opened without protest.
My father remained exactly as we’d left him, and I approached with caution.
Mornings had always been easiest. Dawn brought with it a naïve hope. The film over his eyes would be thinner. His mind pounding but clearer, the drink sitting stale in his gut. Not so far gone that it consumed his thoughts, not so fresh that it made him unreachable.
“Dad,” I whispered, and shook him once, twice. He rolled over the third time I called to him, blinked like his eyelids were made of cement.
At one point, my mother must have been taken by those eyes.
“Rose?” he murmured, like he was praying.
I shook my head. “Nina,” I said.
He looked struck for a moment, his eyes tracking over my face. And then he exhaled in a gust that I thought might cave in his chest. “Oh,” he said. “Oh… love.” He reached out to me, thin arms lifting on either side, tears shaking off the rims of his eyes.
I went into them. Like I was a girl again, savoring those only good minutes. His hands clasped over my back.
“You went and grew,” he said into my shoulder. “You grew well and strong.”
I let loose a sob that seemed to have come from my bones. I let him console me this one last time before his mind was stolen. I sat with this version of him while it lasted.
“I had to leave,” I whispered, so softly I wasn’t sure he’d hear it. Didn’t much care if he did. “I had to.” I was only twelve, and the cupboards were empty, and the wages went to the bluff, and I needed someone to look after me.
“You went and got big,” he repeated, patting me over and over, his voice fading. “Big and lovely.”
Moments later, he was asleep again, his breaths coiling into my hair, his arms slipping away to the mattress. But my forehead remained pressed to his shoulder, and I gripped the front of his shirt in my hands like I could draw sustenance from it.
I found Patrick awake when I arrived back at the pub.
I already had my boots on. I’d found a hat my mother used to wear that covered most of my hair and could be pulled low over my face. I’d changed into her clothes, too—trousers and a coat and scarf.
Patrick was standing expectantly, like he’d been awaiting the moment I walked back in. Discarded on the chair he’d vacated was the newsprint, its headline now facing down.
He took one look at me and grimaced. “I’m sorry, Scurry girl.”
I had the vague sensation that I wasn’t really there, that I was wax all the way through. I wouldn’t feel a knife if it plunged into my stomach. “You shouldn’t be,” I said. I was surprised to find that I was, once more, crying. “There was… bad blood.”
Patrick came and tipped my chin up to his. “They were allies in the end, however reluctant,” he said. “And you cared about them.”
“I—I didn’t—”
“You cared about them,” Patrick said again simply. “You don’t need to try and understand any more than that. You cared for them, and now they’re gone. Of course you should mourn them.”
This gentle permission was enough to unbolt the grief. The confusion. The guilt. How did one reconcile the deaths of those who weren’t always friends, but weren’t quite enemies?
I cried silently while Patrick simply sat there with me, waiting. Until the well seemed to empty itself and fill with something else. A restlessness. A need to do something.
“Do you want to eat?” Patrick asked me quietly around the snores of his father one room over.
“No,” I said. “I want to find the Seam.”
“It can wait a moment—”
