Chapter 126: The Last Morning

POV: Carly

She woke early on the last morning without meaning to.

The room was still dark. The south-facing window showed the specific pre-dawn grey she had been waking to all week, the rose garden below invisible except for the geometric suggestion of it in the low light.

She lay still and listened to the house.

It had changed over the week. Or her relationship to it had changed, which might be the same thing. The first morning it had been performing at her. By the third it had simply been existing around her. This morning it felt, in some way she was not going to examine too closely, like somewhere she had been before.

She was not going to mistake familiarity for belonging.

But she noted it.

She got up and dressed and went out into the corridor.

The adjoining door was open.

She pushed it further.

Niko's room was empty. Bed made in the specific way of someone who had gotten up very early, the covers pulled back to the center with the unhurried tidiness of someone who did not need sleep and had been awake long enough to bother.

She went downstairs.

She found him in the kitchen.

This surprised her more than almost anything the week had produced. The kitchen was the most ordinary room in the house, large and functional and stripped of the performative quality that ran through every other space. He was standing at the counter with a cup of something dark and a sketchbook open beside it, the pencil in his right hand moving without his eyes being on it.

He was drawing and not watching himself draw.

She had seen him do this once before, the very first time she had come to his room, the same quality of absorption that existed at a level below conscious attention. She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched it for a moment.

He sensed her.

He looked up.

"Morning." He said.

"Morning." She said. She crossed to the counter and looked at the sketchbook.

He tilted it slightly so she could see.

The grounds. The white chairs still visible through the kitchen window, slightly disheveled now from the reception, the arch of winter branches at the end of the aisle. He had drawn it in the grey pre-dawn light with the specific quality of something being recorded rather than composed.

"We leave at ten." She said.

"I know." He said.

She looked at the sketchbook.

She looked at the kitchen, the most ordinary room in an extraordinary house.

"How are you." She said.

He put the pencil down.

He thought about it the way he always thought about things that deserved a real answer rather than an automatic one.

"Better than I've been in this house in a very long time." He said. "Which is strange to say."

"Is it." She said.

"I came back expecting to feel what I felt when I left." He said. "I don't feel that."

"What do you feel." She said.

He looked at the window. "Like it's somewhere I'm allowed to have complicated feelings about." He said. "Rather than somewhere I have to have one specific feeling about."

She looked at him.

"That's different." She said.

"It is." He agreed.

She leaned against the counter beside him and looked at the grounds through the window. The white chairs. The arch. The lawn in the early grey light.

"Freida asked if we'd come back." She said. "When the roses are in."

He looked at the window.

"June." He said.

"She said June." Carly said.

He was quiet.

She did not push.

She reached over and picked up his pencil and put it back in his hand.

He looked at it.

He started drawing again.

She went to find tea.

The goodbyes happened in stages.

Freida was first, pulling Carly into an embrace that was firm and brief and said everything it needed to without requiring words. She held Niko's face in her hands the same way she had when he arrived and looked at him for a moment and then kissed his cheek and stepped back.

"June." She said to both of them.

Harrison appeared from somewhere inside and stood on the steps with his hands in his pockets looking at Niko with the expression of someone who had more to say and had decided to save it.

"Edinburgh in the summer." Niko said. "If you want."

Harrison's face did something that tried to stay neutral and did not manage it. "Yeah." He said. "Okay."

They did not hug. They stood with the specific distance of two people who were working their way toward something and both knew it and neither was going to rush it.

That was enough.

Deacon said goodbye to Carly with a bow that was theatrical enough to be ironic and genuine enough to not be entirely ironic, and she shook her head at him and he grinned and she thought that she was going to find him significantly more interesting the next time she saw him now that she knew he was significantly smarter than he presented.

Reba had come down in her pajamas specifically to say goodbye. She pointed at Niko. Then at Carly. Then back at Niko.

"Don't mess it up." She said.

"Noted." He said.

She pointed at Carly. "June. You're staying for the whole weekend, not just the day."

"I'll check my schedule." Carly said.

Reba gave her the look she gave anyone who invoked their schedule when Reba had made a decision.

"The whole weekend." Reba said.

"The whole weekend." Carly agreed.

Victor was not at the goodbye.

She noted that without making anything of it.

Isabel was.

She stood on the terrace steps in her green dressing gown with her hands folded in front of her, the cold morning not appearing to touch her the way it touched everyone else. She looked at Niko.

"Safe drive." She said.

"Thank you." He said. After a pause that was not hostile. Just real. "For having us."

Something moved through Isabel's expression.

"Thank you for coming." She said.

She looked at Carly.

"June." She said.

"June." Carly said.

Isabel nodded once.

They got in the car.

The gravel crunched under the tyres.

The gate opened.

She watched the house get smaller in the side mirror as they moved down the drive. The bare trees lining it. The stone facade. The windows.

The window of the room that had been hers looking out over the rose garden.

She looked forward.

She reached over and put her hand on his on the gear shift.

He turned his hand over.

They drove.

POV: Niko

The Black River Falls town limits appeared on the road sign at half past eleven.

He had been waiting to feel something when they crossed back into the town. Some shift in his body that marked the difference between there and here.

What he felt was that he was home.

Not the estate. Not the house on the hill with the four hundred years of accumulated history and the complicated people he had been managing all week.

This. The narrow road. The Douglas firs. The fog sitting against the treeline in the way that was specific to Black River Falls and nowhere else he had lived.

Carly's hand in his on the gear shift.

He thought about that for a moment.

He had spent four years in this town telling himself he was here temporarily. Telling himself the school was a way station between the place he had left and some future place that had not yet defined itself. He had not put down roots deliberately. He had kept his options open. He had maintained the wall.

He had been here four years.

He had a room in Silas Hall that had accumulated more of himself in it than any space he had occupied in the past century.

He had Enzo and Mauricio, who knew him well enough to give him a free punch and then talk him out of his own head.

He had Reba, who had known about the covenant and sat on it and warned him when she could and loved him in the specific Reba way that was sometimes indistinguishable from aggravation.

He had Carly.

He turned off the main road toward the campus.

"You've gone quiet." She said.

"Thinking." He said.

"About." She said.

"Home." He said.

He felt her look at him.

He kept his eyes on the road.

"Black River Falls." He said. Clarifying. Or not clarifying. Letting both meanings sit.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Yeah." She said softly. "Me too."

He pulled through the campus gate.

The Black River Academy buildings came into view through the fog, familiar and functional and completely ordinary and exactly right.

He pulled to a stop in front of Degrassi Hall.

She unbuckled.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"Thank you." He said. "For coming. For all of it. For the garden and the dinner and Harrison and the ceremony and—"

"Stop." She said gently.

He stopped.

She leaned across the gear shift and kissed him.

Soft and certain and complete.

She pulled back.

"Thank you for taking me." She said.

She got out.

She grabbed her bag from the boot.

She looked at him through the window.

He looked back.

She smiled.

She went inside.

He sat in the car in front of Degrassi Hall for a moment and looked at the door she had gone through and thought that whatever came next, whatever the covenant required and whatever Isabel had planned and whatever Victor was positioning toward and whatever this final stretch of senior year was going to demand of both of them, he was ready for it.

He started the car.

He pulled toward Silas Hall.

He was home.