Chapter 32 32

Chapter 32 32
Portugal in winter was nothing like I’d pictured. I guess I thought it’d be grey, maybe, something to match why we were there. But the sky outside the airport was a sharp, pale blue, and the cold air felt different—cleaner than back home. The light was honest. Edges of things felt clearer, colors sharper, like the world had decided not to bother hiding anything.

James stood next to me on the curb, tipped his head back, and just looked up for a moment.

“Right,” he said. Almost to himself.

Frederick rolled up in the car he rented. We tossed our bags in the back and climbed in without saying much, Frederick tapping the address into the navigation and pulling away from the terminal like this was just any other drive.

Dad had given James an address that took us south, away from Lisbon, through empty flats and dry scrub and silent, forgettable towns that blinked past quick as anything. We stayed quiet. The GPS murmured directions. Frederick kept his eyes on the road. James watched the land slide by. I rode up front with my hands folded in my lap and my mother’s photo in my bag. Every once in a while, I’d slow my breathing on purpose.

About an hour out, the highway shrank, two lanes dropping to one, then narrowed into something barely clinging to the title of “road.” Towns faded into villages, the villages into dusty stretches with the odd house, tucked behind old stone walls and groaning trees.

“Next left,” Frederick said.

He turned.

This road was nothing—just dust, loose stones, lined with eucalyptus so tall it made a green tunnel overhead. We rattled down it maybe half a mile before the world widened into a quiet property: a low white house with a terracotta roof, the kind of garden somebody still loved, potted winter herbs along the walls, a little lemon tree by the gate, the last sad fruit still hanging on.

Frederick pulled up and cut the engine.

No one moved for a second.

The house looked lived in. That’s the first thing I noticed. Curtains in the windows. A pair of shoes by the door. A coffee cup resting on the wall near the gate—fresh, like someone just set it down.

Somebody was home.

“Okay,” James murmured from the back seat.

I climbed out. The air was thick with eucalyptus and dust and something sweet I couldn’t pin down. My shoes on the gravel sounded way too loud. Frederick got out behind me, James on my other side, and together we walked toward the gate under the thin winter sun. The whole thing felt dreamlike, as if staring too hard would make it disappear.

I pushed the gate open.

The front path was lined with river stones. Fourteen, I counted without trying. I knocked, the sound buzzing straight through me, and waited. Nothing. Knocked again.

Still nothing.

James looked at me. I glanced at that coffee cup—still warm when I picked it up.

“She’s here,” I said.

I wandered around the side of the house, down a skinny path between the wall and a small hedge. The back garden opened out, wilder than the front, a fig tree heavy in the corner and a table with two chairs, the land stretching away to a line of still, far-off hills.

And there she was.

At the far end of the garden stood a woman, her back to us, staring at those hills. She was small, her hair gone gray, bundled in a dark coat that didn’t quite fit. Her arms crossed against the cold. Her head cocked in a way I knew instantly—from a photo I’d memorized.

And suddenly I was frozen.

No idea how long I stood there. Could’ve been a blink or a year. James let out a sound beside me, barely audible, and the woman turned.

She saw me first.

Her face changed in a way I can’t really explain. Something sparked in her eyes, spilling out across her whole face: pure, total recognition. No confusion. Nothing to explain.

She knew me.

She walked toward me. I moved, too, and we met halfway, her hands coming up to cup my face like it should’ve been gone but somehow wasn’t. Her eyes shining. And she said my name—Charlie—the way you say something you’ve been guarding forever.

I didn’t say a word.

On the plane, I’d prepped a million things. Practiced my lines, planned which questions to ask and how to keep it all neat and under control, the way I’ve taught myself to do the last year.

None of it mattered.

She was right there. Smaller than I’d imagined. Her hair grayer than in the picture. New lines at the corners of her eyes. But her hands holding my face, her voice saying my name—it left my plans in the dust.

James made a sound behind me. I heard him exhale when she looked at him. Her face lit up that same impossible way, and she reached for him without even letting go of me.

He stepped up and took her hand.

So the three of us stood there in that chilly Portuguese garden, dirt road behind us, hills waiting quietly in the distance, and the pale sky just holding the whole moment steady, saying nothing.

I felt Frederick behind us—not too close, giving us space. But present.

And honestly, I was grateful for that.