Chapter 115: The Drive

POV: Carly

He pulled up at eight exactly.

She had been standing at the Degrassi Hall entrance since seven fifty, bag at her feet, coffee in her hand, watching the fog sit against the campus fence the way it always did in the mornings, telling herself she was not nervous. She counted the minutes without meaning to. She rehearsed things to say and then discarded them. She was, in short, exactly the kind of nervous that pretended it wasn't.

She was nervous.

The car was not the same one from their first date. This one was older, a dark green thing with worn leather seats and a stick shift, carrying the specific quality of something maintained very carefully over a very long time. She had not known he drove. She had never seen him drive. He had always flashed everywhere she had seen him go, or they had taken hired cars together, and something about the ordinariness of a manual transmission and a scuffed dashboard made him feel briefly, strangely human.

He got out when he saw her.

He wore a dark jacket over a grey Henley and jeans, his curls slightly damp from a recent shower, and he looked, as he always looked, entirely unfair about it. She had stopped trying to be unaffected by that particular unfairness months ago.

He took her bag without asking, put it in the boot, and opened the passenger door. She got in. The interior smelled like old leather and something she recognized as specifically him, warm and familiar in a way that loosened something in her chest. She sat down, wrapped both hands around her coffee cup, and looked at the dashboard, giving herself a moment before she had to look at him.

He got in the other side.

He looked at her.

"Ready?" He said.

"Katy says readiness is a story we tell ourselves." She said.

He considered that. "I've always liked her." He said. "Against my better instincts."

She almost smiled.

He started the car.

They were twenty minutes out of Black River Falls before she said anything.

The road was the kind that only existed in the specific geography of western Washington, narrow and lined with Douglas firs that pressed in close on both sides and made the sky into a strip of grey overhead. The fog was thinner out here, diffused by the trees into something more like atmosphere than obstruction. She watched it through the window and thought about nothing specific, letting the rhythm of the drive settle her.

Then she thought about something specific.

"Can I ask you about the house." She said.

He kept his eyes on the road. "Yes."

"What's it like." She said. "Not the layout. I mean what it feels like to be there."

He was quiet for a moment. His hands shifted slightly on the steering wheel, and she noticed the small tension gathering in his knuckles.

"Cold." He said. "Not literally. The heating works fine." He paused. "Just cold in the way that houses are when everyone in them is performing a version of themselves for everyone else."

She looked at his profile, at the careful stillness he seemed to be holding himself in.

"My mother turns it into something welcoming the moment guests arrive." He said. "She's very good at that. Making spaces feel warm when she wants to. It was the thing I found most confusing as a child. The gap between what the house felt like when it was just us and what it became when other people were present." He shook his head slightly. "I spent a long time thinking the cold version was the true version and the warm version was the lie. Now I think they're both true. Just for different audiences."

Carly turned that over, feeling the weight behind the careful, measured way he was saying it.

"And your father." She said carefully.

He exhaled. Not a sigh exactly. Just air, released deliberately, as though he were making room for what came next.

"Victor." He said, the way he always said the name, like it was a fact he was stating rather than a person he was referring to. "My father is the most effective person I have ever known. Efficient. Strategic. Completely certain of his own correctness in every situation." He paused. "He is also the reason I spent a hundred years believing the cocky Niko Monroeson was a real person instead of something I built to survive being raised by him."

She was very still, aware suddenly of how much it must have cost him to say that out loud, in daylight, with his hands on a steering wheel instead of hidden in his pockets.

He glanced at her briefly and then back at the road.

"I told you something of this in the courtyard." He said. "The broad shape of it. This is the more specific version."

"You don't have to." She said.

"I know." He said. "That's why I'm choosing to."

She understood that. She did not push. She only watched him, letting her silence be its own kind of answer.

He kept going.

"He never raised his voice." He said. "That's the thing people don't understand about that kind of person. It was always very quiet. Very certain. Just the consistent, patient communication that you were a disappointment, and the specific disappointment varied depending on what he needed it to be." He turned the steering wheel through a long curve in the road. "I left when I was able to leave. Which was later than it should have been, given what I am and what I can do. But leaving your own family is harder than it sounds even when the family is the problem."

"I know." She said quietly, thinking of her own leavings, small as they were by comparison.

He looked at her again. "I know you do."

They were quiet for a moment.

The trees moved past on both sides, dark green blurring into deeper green, the fog catching in their upper branches like something caught mid-thought.

"I need you to know something before we get there." He said.

She turned toward him, something in his tone pulling her fully out of her own head.

"Whatever happens this week." He said. "Whatever my family does or says or doesn't do. Whatever version of things my mother presents and whatever Victor decides to make of your presence." He glanced at her. "I am on your side. Not theirs. Not in any version of this."

She looked at him, throat tightening unexpectedly.

"I left because I chose to." He said. "I'm going back because I'm choosing to. But my choosing it doesn't mean I'm returning to anything. I'm going back as the person I am now, which is different from the person I was when I left." He held her gaze for one second before looking back at the road. "And the person I am now includes you."

She felt it land somewhere deep and specific, a warmth spreading slowly through her chest that had nothing to do with the coffee in her hands.

She looked forward at the road.

The trees were thinning slightly on the left side. Through the gaps she could see the change in the terrain, the land opening up, the specific quality of the Black River Falls outskirts giving way to something larger, something that felt, even from a distance, deliberately imposing.

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

He looked at it.

He turned his hand over and held hers, his fingers closing around hers with a firmness that felt like reassurance offered in both directions.

They drove for another twenty minutes like that. Hand in hand. The fog thinning as they moved. The road straightening out. Neither of them spoke, but the silence had changed texture, become something companionable instead of heavy.

Then through a break in the treeline on the right she saw it.

A gate. Wrought iron. Old and elaborate and maintained with the specific care of something meant to communicate a message before you even reached the door.

Beyond it, at the end of a long gravel drive lined with bare trees, a house.

She had known it was going to be large.

She had not fully understood what large meant in this context until right now.

It sat against the hillside like it had been there since the hill itself was formed. Stone facade, four floors of windows, east and west wings extending out from the central structure, the whole thing framed by grounds that were still and perfectly maintained despite the grey of the season. Something about its stillness struck her as deliberate, as though the house itself had been trained to hold its breath for visitors.

The largest mansion in Black River Falls.

She had known that.

Knowing it and seeing it were different things.

She said nothing.

He said nothing.

The gate opened as they approached, automatically, or by some other mechanism she could not see. The gravel crunched under the tyres as they moved down the drive, the bare trees passing on both sides, the house growing larger with every second, until it seemed to fill the entire windshield, patient and enormous and waiting.

She kept her hand in his.

He kept his eyes forward.

"Welcome to the Monroeson estate." He said quietly. Not proudly. Not sarcastically. Just the fact of it, acknowledged, laid down between them like something he needed her to hold too.

She breathed.

"Okay." She said. To herself as much as to him. "Okay."

The car stopped in front of the entrance.

She looked at the door.

The door opened before either of them moved.

POV: Niko

He had expected it to feel worse.

Coming back to this road, this gate, this drive, he had spent four years actively avoiding this specific stretch of ground and had been prepared for the approach to feel like something pressing down on him from above.

It did not feel like that.

He was not sure if that was because he had spent the drive talking about it in a way he had never talked about it before, or because Carly's hand was in his, or because he was here by choice this time, and the distinction between choosing to come and being pulled back against his will was apparently significant enough to change the quality of the whole experience.

Possibly all three.

He pulled the car to a stop in front of the entrance and looked at the door.

He had stood in front of this door thousands of times. He had stood in front of it as a child and as a young man and as the specific age he had been when he left, which was technically always but felt more specifically like the evening he had packed one bag and walked down this drive for the last time without looking back.

He looked back now.

He looked at the gravel drive behind them and the bare trees lining it and the gate at the end of it, thinking about that evening and feeling a distance from it that surprised him. He had expected the memory to still have teeth. Instead it felt almost gentle, softened by time and by everything that had happened since, as though he were looking at it through glass rather than living inside it again.

It felt like a very long time ago.

It was a very long time ago.

He looked at Carly.

She was looking at the house with the expression she got when she was assessing something. Not afraid. Just reading it, the way she read rooms and people and situations. He watched her take in the facade, the windows, the grounds. He watched her processing, her mind visibly working, and felt a rush of something close to gratitude that she was doing this at all, that she had agreed to walk into the middle of everything he had run from.

She looked at him.

"It's beautiful." She said. "In a cold kind of way."

He almost smiled. "That is possibly the most accurate description anyone has ever given it."

She squeezed his hand, and the small pressure of it steadied him more than he expected.

The front door had opened. Someone was standing in it.

He looked.

Deacon.

Of course Deacon.

He was leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed, wearing the specific grin of someone who had been waiting for this moment and had prepared something to say.

"Well." Deacon called down the steps. "The prodigal brother returns. And he's brought a witch." He looked at Carly with open approval. "The cafeteria witch, specifically. This week just got significantly more interesting."

Niko got out of the car.

"Don't." He said.

"I haven't done anything yet." Deacon said pleasantly. "Give me five minutes."

Carly got out on her side, came around the car, and stood beside Niko, looking up at Deacon on the steps with the same assessing calm she had turned on the house.

Deacon looked back at her.

"We've met." She said. "Sort of."

"We have." He said, his grin widening. "Though I feel we have significantly more to discuss now that you're here for the week." He pushed off the door frame. "Welcome to the family seat, Carly McPherson. I have to say, the look on Niko's face right now is making the whole thing worth it."

Niko looked at the sky briefly, praying for patience he wasn't sure he had.

Carly glanced at him sideways, and he could see her trying not to smile.

He picked up both bags from the boot.

"Deacon." He said. "Make yourself useful and take her bag."

Deacon descended the steps and took Carly's bag with a small theatrical bow that made her actually laugh, the real one, the one that surprised her on the way out and softened something in Niko's chest to hear.

Niko watched Deacon carry the bag up the steps, looked at the house, and took one breath.

He was here.

He was choosing to be here.

He walked up the steps with Carly beside him, through the door that was larger on the inside than it looked from outside, and felt the house close around him, familiar and strange, full of everything he had left and everything he had become since.

He kept walking.