Page 43 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Toby looked up, and his face lit up. He scrambled to his feet to race over to him, then remembered his manners and came to a halt. “Mr. Garrick.”

“Toby.” Garrick walked over to join them, softening his voice to make it more suitable for a five-year-old. “You’re back.”

“Mama said I could come if I stayed out of the way of the tools.”

“You’re not in the way of the tools.”

She looked up then, sitting back on her heels, and their eyes met. The memory of Saturday night rushed back, both the heat and the wariness. From the look in her eyes, she was feeling it too, but it wasn’t a conversation they could have in front of the boy. Color flooded her freckled cheeks. She looked away first, back down at her plants, and a small, rueful smile curled her lips.

“Afternoon,” she said.

“Good afternoon.”

That was all either of them managed, and it was both enough and too much. And Toby, who missed nothing, looked between the two of them with his serious little face, and thought about it.

Then he asked, “Were you on the roof yesterday?”

Garrick froze.

“On Sunday. In the afternoon.” Toby’s hazel eyes were fixed on him, earnest and direct in the way only a small child’s could be. “When we walked past your house on the way to the café for pancakes, I looked up and there was a statue on the corner of your house that wasn’t there before. Up high. On the pointy part.”

Maris hadn’t moved either. She was watching him now, over the top of the divided plants, and there was a question in her face beneath the surprise. She knew what he was, and she’d found him in stone once, in the garden, and had thought something had happened to him. But she said nothing, and she let the boy ask.

“Yes,” he said. “That was me.”

Toby nodded slowly, entirely unafraid, the way he’d been unafraid the very first day, and the way his mother wasn’t afraid. Garrick felt the same helpless thing he’d felt on the roof, the same hand closing around his chest. The boy took him as he was. A male who turned to stone on a rooftop was simply a fact of the world to be understood, no more alarming than a plant that closed its flowers at night.

“Why?” Toby asked.

Not how. Not is it scary or does it hurt. Just why, the way he asked why the flowers closed, the way he asked why anything.

He crouched down so his eyes came nearer to level with Toby’s, and his wings settled behind him.

“It’s restful,” he said. “Kind of like sleeping.” He paused, aware of Maris watching, and aware that he was telling more of the truth than the boy had asked for. “When there’s something I need to think about, sometimes I go and be still for a while. The sun helps me be still.”

Toby considered this with the full weight of his five years. He looked up at the manor’s roofline, and the far eastern gable, small against the sky. Then he looked back at Garrick, and his brow creased, working out a problem that the grown-ups had all somehow failed to notice.

“But if the sun makes you still,” Toby said, “and you can’t move⁠—”

Garrick waited, and the boy finished it.

“—who wakes you up?”

He didn’t answer.

The garden went on around them, bees in the roses, the river far off, Maris kneeling with a trowel forgotten in her dirty hand and her hazel eyes gone soft and stricken, watching him not answer. And the boy stood there patient and earnest, wanting only to understand. And there was no answer he could give.

CHAPTER 14

The trowel stopped in Maris’s hand the moment she looked up and saw Garrick crouching down beside her son. Just like that she was back in her kitchen on Saturday night with his mouth on hers and her legs around his waist and her sensible life coming apart against a cabinet.

She’d been thinking about it ever since. She’d thought about it dividing perennials and she’d thought about it taking a shower and she’d thought about it lying in the dark long after Toby was asleep. The memory arrived with such vivid, specific heat that she’d had to press the heels of her hands against her eyes and mutter too fast, I told him too fast, I meant it. She had meant it. She’d also spent the last day and a half wanting to take it back.

And this morning she’d walked the long way around the block, pushing the wheelbarrow through Stonehaven’s front gates, and she’d been listening for him the whole way. She’d half-expected his enormous body to come around the box hedge. He hadn’t. She’d knelt down in the roses and gotten to work and told herself, firmly, with dirt already under her nails, that she was not disappointed.

She was a terrible liar, even to herself. Especially to herself.

Now here he was, crouched down small as he could make himself, which was not small at all, his grey wings settling behind him like folded sails. Toby stood as straight as a soldier with his hands clasped politely in front of him. The two of them were looking at each other with such grave mutual respect that something in her chest twisted, sweet and painful all at once.