Chapter 125 Going Home

Chapter 125 Going Home
POV: Carly

She woke up in the window seat with a stiff neck and a blanket she did not remember being there.

She sat up slowly.

The room was grey with early morning. The window showed the grounds in the specific flat light that came before the sun was properly up, the tree line dark against a sky that had not yet decided what color it was going to be.

The blanket was one of the ones from her guest room.

She looked at the doorway.

Niko was not in the room.

She found him in the corridor outside, leaning against the wall with his sketchbook open, the pencil moving. He looked up when she appeared in the doorway with the blanket still around her shoulders and her hair in whatever state it had arrived at after sleeping upright against someone's shoulder.

He looked at her for a moment.

"Good morning." He said.

"You got the blanket." She said.

"You were cold." He said. Simply.

She looked at the sketchbook. "Were you drawing me sleeping."

He turned it slightly so she could see. Her, in the window seat, head against the glass, the blanket half over her. Precise and specific and clearly done from memory rather than observation because she had been asleep and he had been in the corridor.

"From memory." She said.

"Yes." He said.

She looked at it for a moment.

"I meant what I said last night." She said. Not because it needed confirming. Just because the morning deserved its own version of it.

He looked at her.

"I know." He said. "I meant what I said too."

She nodded.

She looked at the window at the end of the corridor. The grounds were coming into focus through it as the light arrived. The white chairs from yesterday still on the lawn, the flowers on the arch beginning to droop slightly in the cold.

"We leave today." She said.

"After lunch." He said. "I want to talk to Freida before we go. And possibly." He paused. "Possibly Harrison."

She looked at him.

"One thing at a time." She said.

"One thing at a time." He agreed.

She went back to her room to wash her face and find something that was not last night's navy dress and think about the week that was ending.

She found Freida in the morning room.

Still in the specific glow of the previous day, still wearing what she had changed into after the reception, tea in hand, Lucien visible through the window on the grounds doing something with his phone that suggested the rest of the world had started up again whether or not the wedding bubble had dissolved.

Freida looked up.

"You're leaving today." She said.

"After lunch." Carly said. She sat in the armchair. "I wanted to say goodbye properly."

Freida looked at her. "And thank you."

"You don't have to thank me." Carly said.

"I do." Freida said. "He came. Whatever the reasons and however it happened, he came and he was here and he was." She stopped. "He was himself. The actual one." She pressed her lips together. "I haven't had that in four years."

Carly looked at the window.

Lucien had put his phone away and was looking at the grounds with the expression of someone who was deciding something positive about them.

"He's going to be okay." She said. The same thing she had told Harrison.

"I know." Freida said. "That's new. The knowing of it." She looked at her tea. "Before this week I wasn't certain."

They sat together in the morning room for a while. Not talking about anything that required managing. Just sitting. The fire Freida had lit early burning steadily. The light coming through the window improving as the morning developed.

"Will you come back." Freida said. Eventually.

"In June." Carly said. "He told me about the light in the west room in summer. I want to see it."

Freida blinked.

She looked at Carly with an expression that had something large in it that she was managing carefully.

"He told you about that room." She said.

"Yes." Carly said.

Freida looked at the fire.

"He hasn't been in that room since before he left." She said quietly. "I know because I check. I've been checking for four years."

Carly said nothing.

"He took you there." Freida said. Not a question.

"Last night." Carly said.

Freida was quiet for a long moment.

She set her cup down.

She looked at Carly with a directness that Carly had come to recognize as Freida being most herself.

"Take care of him." She said. "Not in the managing sense. I know you know the difference." She held Carly's gaze. "Just. Keep being who you are for him. That's all it needs to be."

"I know." Carly said.

They sat until the morning was properly arrived.

POV: Niko

He found Harrison in the architecture books.

Of course in the architecture books. The library off the east passage, where Carly had been when Harrison found her, and now Harrison was in the chair by the window with a book spread across his lap that was either genuine interest or an extremely convincing performance of it.

He stopped in the doorway.

Harrison looked up.

They looked at each other.

"I'm leaving after lunch." Niko said.

"I know." Harrison said.

Niko came into the room. He did not sit. He stood near the bookshelf and looked at the spines and then turned back to Harrison.

"I should have called." He said. "Or written. Or any of the things that would have told you I was okay without requiring you to wait four years to find out."

Harrison looked at him.

"She said that." He said.

"I know." Niko said. "She was right." He held his brother's gaze. "I'm sorry. Genuinely."

Harrison was quiet.

Then. "Are you actually okay."

"Yes." Niko said. "More so than I've been in a long time."

Harrison looked at the book in his lap. Then back up. "Is that her."

"Mostly her." Niko said. "And some decisions I should have made earlier."

Harrison nodded slowly.

"Edinburgh is good." Niko said. "I'm glad."

"You should visit." Harrison said. "Sometime. If you wanted."

Niko looked at him.

The specific careful quality of the offer. Not demanding. Just opening the door and leaving it open.

"I'd like that." Niko said.

Harrison nodded. He looked back at his book.

Niko stood in the library for another moment.

He had been twelve.

He had been twelve years old and Niko had left without a word and had spent four years being too ashamed of the leaving to address it and had come back this week and found a person on the other side of it who had turned out mostly okay and was studying architecture in Edinburgh and made his girlfriend laugh in a library.

He pressed his lips together.

"Harrison." He said.

His brother looked up.

"I'm proud of you." He said. "The architecture. Edinburgh. All of it. I wanted you to know that."

Something moved through Harrison's face that he managed quickly. A younger brother's face, briefly, before the composure returned.

"Thanks." He said. Simply. Which was enough.

Niko left him to his book.

They left at two.

The car packed. The goodbyes done in the entrance hall with the full family assembled in the specific way of a family that did not naturally assemble, all of them present anyway.

Freida had hugged him first. Long and without saying anything over his shoulder that needed to be said out loud.

Reba had hugged Carly and said something in her ear that made Carly nod seriously and Niko did not ask what it was.

Deacon had shaken his hand with an expression that was performing casualness and not fully landing it.

Harrison had stood at the back and lifted his hand once when Niko looked at him and Niko had lifted his back.

Victor had said nothing. He had stood at the edge of the group and looked at Niko and Niko had looked back and something had passed between them in that look that was not resolved and was not forgiven and was also not the end of the thing. Just a pause in the middle of something longer.

Then Isabel.

She had looked at him for a moment.

Then she had looked at Carly.

"June." She said to Carly.

"June." Carly confirmed.

Isabel nodded once.

Niko put the bags in the car and they got in and he started the engine and the gravel drive moved under the wheels and the bare trees passed on both sides and the gate opened at the end of it and they were out.

He looked in the mirror once.

The house sat against the hillside in the afternoon light.

He looked at the road.

"Okay." Carly said from the passenger seat.

"Okay." He said.

She put her hand on his on the gear shift.

He turned his hand over.

The Black River Falls road opened up ahead of them and the trees pressed in on both sides and the fog was where it always was at the edges of everything and he drove and she kept her hand in his and neither of them said anything for a while.

Then she said. "Harrison gave me his email address."

He looked at her.

"To tell him how the light is in June." She said. "In the west room."

He looked at the road.

Something in his chest that he did not have a name for settled into something that felt like the right shape.

"Good." He said.

She squeezed his hand.

He drove.

The estate fell away behind them.

Black River Falls waited ahead.

Whatever came next, the covenant and Victor's positioning and Isabel's plan and the conversation with Leona that was still waiting on the other side of break, whatever the rest of the semester held —

It was going to be okay.

Not simple. He had stopped expecting simple a long time ago.

But okay.

He was certain of that in the specific way that came from having decided something rather than hoped for it.

He kept driving.