Page 180 of These Tears

For a while, we’re just quiet. The log is cold beneath me, the bark scraping roughly over the thick layer. His hand is no longer in mine, and somehow it feels like loss.

It isn’t until his breathing steadies that I decide to open my mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say at last. The trees claim half of it, so it comes out weaker than I mean to.

He tenses, but I don’t turn towards him or touch him. I let the words fall where they fall. ‘I want to apologise. For everything, for—I should not have said it like that. Any of it.’

His mouth moves once before sound follows. ‘Don’t give me that. You weren’t meant to know.’

The answer sits there without cruelty in the notes, which somehow twists the knife.

I incline my head, staring at the snow churning beneath my boots.

The old Leandra wants to explain things, to make him understand that I would never have thrown the words if I’d known where they would hook into.

But the shape of his shoulders stops me.

So I just stay still and present.

‘I didn’t take you because I lost my mind,’ he finally says.

I don’t respond to that because that frightened, furious part of me had wanted it to be that simple.

My back straightens as I let my gaze drift towards the bonfire in the distance.

His stays on the ruined prints around our boots. ‘I could make it sound noble, say there were reasons. Timing. What you knew and what you didn’t. I could even say you walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of it would even be true.’

‘It is true, if you think about it.’

He scoffs but doesn’t smile even as his spine relaxes.

‘You were leaving,’ he says. An old fact laid bare between us. ‘You gave me a goodbye on a piece of paper with some photos of you, and while I thought that was for the best, reality bit me in the arse quick enough.’

My mind snags.

Photos of me?

It comes back with a hot rush of mortification: the prints from the Reservoir. Anna at my side. The ordinary evidence of a life I had been trying to choose without him in it.

So they did end up with him.

How pathetic it must have looked. Like I was some lost romantic staging a goodbye.

I swallow the excuses, though. ‘What do you mean?’

He looks away into the dark and draws a deep breath. Snow begins to fall between us. Laughter carries from the small bunch ahead, absurdly ordinary after everything that had come to light.

‘We need to get back. It’s not polite,’ he mutters.

I promised not to probe him. I promised not to ask questions. But still—

‘Hey,’ I catch him just before he stands.

Our eyes lock.

The blue in them has always chilled me. While beautiful, it was prison blue. Distant blue. But I see the strain in them now. The boy trapped behind the frost, tired of being read wrong.

‘Choose,’ I say. ‘My touch or theirs.’