Chapter 131 Courage

Chapter 131 Courage
Alexa’s POV 

Dinner was good. Mom made the lamb stew that had existed in my life since before I had words for things, the one that took the whole afternoon and that she produced with the unhurried certainty of someone who had made it enough times to have stopped measuring anything. We sat at the kitchen table and ate and she talked about the neighbor’s new fence which she had opinions about, and the book she was reading which she had more opinions about, and I listened and contributed where I could and let the ordinary evening be ordinary.

It was good.

It was exactly what I had needed without knowing I needed it.

After dinner I helped clear up, she tolerated this rather than welcomed it, moving around me in the kitchen with the slight adjustments of someone who had a system and was accommodating a variable, and then we watched something on the television that neither of us was fully paying attention to and went to bed at a reasonable hour.

I slept well.

Better than I had in weeks.

The morning arrived with the off-center light fitting and the slightly uneven curtains and Mom moving around downstairs with the sounds of someone beginning their day with no particular urgency and I lay in bed and thought…

Today.

Leon today.

The thought was large but it was no longer shapeless. It had edges now. A direction. The decision had been made in the car coming back from Harlow and the time between then and now had just been the running up to it.

Today.

I got up.

Showered. Dressed with more care than I had been taking with getting dressed, not formally, not in a way that was performing anything. Just care. The kind of care that said I am taking this seriously. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and the person looking back looked like a person who had made a decision and was going to follow it through.

Good.

I went downstairs.

Mom was in the kitchen.

Of course she was.

She looked up when I came in with the expression that mothers had developed across millennia for assessing children who appeared in kitchens, taking in the clothes, the face, the quality of the energy, running the full inventory before committing to a response.

“You look like you’re going somewhere,” she said.

“Just downstairs,” I said.

She looked at me for another moment. Then she turned back to whatever she was doing and said nothing else and I sat at the table and she made tea and we had the first part of the morning in the kitchen the way we’d had it the previous two mornings.

It was peaceful.

I was almost fully into the peaceful when she said….

“Alexa.”

The tone was different from her normal tone. The one she used when she had decided something needed to be said and had been waiting for the right moment.

I looked at her.

She was at the counter, hands around her own cup, looking at me with the direct patience of someone who had been thinking about something for a while and was done thinking.

“I don’t understand,” she said simply.

“What don’t you understand?”

“You,” she said. “This.” She gestured at the kitchen, at me sitting in it, at the general situation. “I thought you were stopping here for a day or two. To gather yourself before going back.” She tilted her head. “But you have been here for days and you seem very comfortable and it is starting to look less like a pause and more like a….” She paused. “Settlement.”

“I’m not settling,” I said.

“Then what are you doing?”

I looked at my tea.

“I just needed some time,” I said.

“Time,” she repeated. In the tone she used when a word was insufficient and she wanted the person who used it to hear that it was insufficient.

“Yes.”

“There are people waiting for you Alexa,” she said. “A child. A husband. People who are in a house somewhere wondering where you are.” She held my eyes. “Unless there is something you are not telling me.”

The kitchen was quiet.

I thought about everything I was not telling her.

The apartment in Harlow. Nora. The hospital. The stabbing that she absolutely did not know about and that I was going to keep not telling her about for the foreseeable future because Catherine Howthorn with that information was a situation I was not equipped to manage.

“Nothing is happening,” I said. “Everything is fine.”

She looked at me.

“I was actually leaving today,” I said. “I was just finishing my tea.”

She held my eyes for a long moment.

The kitchen held its breath.

“Good,” she said.

One word. Satisfied and final.

“Better than sitting here,” she said. Turning back to the counter. “Your house is there. Go to it.”

She said it with the complete confidence of someone who had not even considered the possibility that there might be complications between the statement and the execution of it.

I looked at my tea.

Then at the window.

Then I understood what I had just done.

I had told my mother I was leaving today.

To avoid explaining why I wasn’t.

Which meant I now had to leave today.

The packing took twenty minutes.

Not because I had a lot to pack, the suitcase that had come with me was the same suitcase, mostly the same contents. Just the assembling of it. The checking of the bathroom for things left behind. The making of the bed even though Catherine would remake it anyway.

She was in the entrance hall when I came down with the suitcase.

She looked at it.

Then at me.

Then she hugged me with the efficiency she brought to everything…firm and real and brief, not prolonged, because Catherine Howthorn had always understood that prolonged goodbyes made the leaving harder and the leaving was necessary.

“Go,” she said.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Call me.”

“I will.”

She opened the door.

I went.

I sat in the car outside Catherine’s house for a moment.

The suitcase in the boot. The engine running. The street doing its mid-morning thing around me.

I needed a hotel.

That was the immediate practical thought. I was not ready to walk into that house tonight. I needed one more night, somewhere neutral, somewhere to finish the preparing, somewhere to write the things I needed to say in my head until they were the right version of themselves.

I could find somewhere. The city had hotels. I had a phone and the capacity to use it. This was a solvable problem. I pulled out of the parking space and drove.

I started mentally searching for hotel options. Central enough to be convenient but not so central that I was likely to run into anyone who knew us. Not too expensive because this was not an occasion for luxury, this was an occasion for a clean room and a quiet night.

I drove.

I was at the junction.

Left for the city center. Hotels. One more night.

Right for home.

I sat at the junction.

The indicator ticked left.

I thought about the third stair that creaked. The yellow blanket. The drawing on the kitchen table. The saved seat at the dinner table that Aria had set for me.

I thought about Leon on the staircase.

Not the cold version. Not the are you sure Nora is still your ex version. The other ones. The hand on the seat in the car. The knock on the bedroom door. The hospital corridor and the bad crackers and the forty-eight hours of not stopping.

The indicator ticked.

Ticked.

I said out loud, to the empty car, with the complete honesty of someone who had run out of sophisticated internal processing…

“Oh, for god’s sake.”

And I turned right.

The drive home took eleven minutes. I knew because I watched the clock. Not on purpose. Just the way you watched things when your brain needed something to do while the rest of you was doing something significant. The streets became familiar in stages, the way familiar things became familiar, gradually and then all at once. The roundabout. The road that narrowed. The turning. And then, the house.

I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine.

The house looked exactly as it always had. The lights were on, it was late enough in the day for lights, the afternoon having moved toward evening while I was in the car not finding a hotel. The garden was as Maria kept it. The front door was the same front door.

Everything exactly the same.

Except that I wasn’t there. And now,  I was back.

I am about to face a man who had told me I looked like a woman who had left something behind in a forest and wasn’t ready to be found. Who had gotten out of a hospital bed at six in the morning because someone told him I wasn’t okay. Who I had said go to hell to on a staircase.

I pressed both hands flat on the steering wheel.

Breathed. Whatever happened was going to happen inside. I was done preparing. Done calculating the best approach and the right words and the optimal moment. Done waiting for the version of ready that felt safe.

There was no safe version.

There was just the door.

And me.

I got out of the car.

Left the suitcase in the boot because getting the suitcase felt presumptuous and also because if I stopped to get the suitcase I might get back in the car.

Walked up the path.

Stood at the front door.

Rang the bell.

Waited.