WALES 2022
BACK IN SIBERIA, SNOWSTORMS had flurried in horizontal sheets. When you stood with your back to them, it felt like hurtling backwards through a tunnel – except you were standing completely still. That’s how I felt now, disorientated and confused, standing still but moving so unbearably fast.
‘It’s you,’ I whispered, hoarse and suddenly weak.
Dylan bowed his head, a loose lock of dark hair dangling free of its knot, his squared-off jaw clenching fiercely. ‘I’m sorry.’
My vision starred. ‘You can’t be you. You’re twenty. You were always two years above me in school.’
He shrugged, but it was far from nonchalant. It was stiff, apologetic, self-loathing. ‘I skipped a few years in primary. Something about my advanced grasp of the English language, and the fact I remembered how to do long division at the age of six.’
‘I set so many traps,’ I murmured, voice distant even to my own ears. I leaned back against the wall for support, the stone cold and rough through my dress. A pigeon cooed somewhere in the rafters. ‘The poetry, the references to past lives. I even called you Arden.’
His face twisted in a half-smile. ‘Every conversation felt like Russian roulette. I haven’t relaxed in two years.’
‘But you’re … you’re … Dylan is cheerful .’ My shocked brain was creating curious detachments between Arden and Dylan, as though they were entirely different people. ‘He whistles along to the radio. He tells jokes .’
Arden just smiled tightly, the upbeat facade dropped like a mask.
Dylan.
Arden was Dylan .
My mind scrambled to process it.
There had always been a charge between us. Childish infatuation on my part, a familiar warmth on his. The careful distance he kept was not because I was his employer’s younger daughter, but because I was his fated lover – and fated prey.
It scared me how good Arden was getting at hiding beneath new identities. How able he was to slip into my life without me realizing, how he had created a new persona to throw me off the scent. I hadn’t figured it out in El Salvador, either, yet this time … he had woven himself so seamlessly into my family. Flower petals pressed into the shape of a clumsy violin, wrapped in brown paper and handed to my sister with a brotherly smile.
‘I didn’t plan to get so close,’ Arden said, staring up at the echoing rafters as though reading my thoughts. ‘I wanted to keep a careful distance, like I had in El Salvador. Keep you in my periphery, but not under my skin. But Gracie …’ He trailed off, voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t name. ‘She drew me in with her ridiculous humour. Made me perform in her cabaret shows. And before I knew it, I cared .’
He sighed the last word like it was a terminal disease.
I ran my hands through my hair, feeling at once frantic and weak. ‘You do genuinely care about her?’
‘Yes.’ The answer was quick as a whip.
‘Why? I know you guard your heart against the inconvenience of loving people.’
‘Gracie’s different.’ His face was etched with a pain I hadn’t seen on him since Siberia. ‘I was hoping you’d be able to save her before …’
Before you die.
Before I kill you.
Suddenly, my legs couldn’t bear the weight of me any longer, and I folded to the ground like a puppet cut loose of its strings. He sat down too, back against the opposite wall, several feet away from me. It should have put me at ease, but his broad physique blocked the only exit, and I knew I could never overpower him.
I was going to die.
I would never leave these stables again.
Never suck in great lungfuls of the ripe country air, never watch the sun rise over the Beacons.
Mum is buying a lasagne , the child at the heart of me wanted to scream. A tiny detail on to which my brain so willingly latched. She ’ s buying a lasagne for our dinner.
You can ’ t kill me. You can ’ t.
The lasagne.
Strange, the things that torture you in your final moments.
I should have hated him. I should have hated the person in front of me. I should have wanted to cross the room and punch him in the face. I should have wanted to hang him from the rafters with the very rope I’d used to restrain Ceri. I should have wanted to devour the world with my rage.
But I didn’t. I ached for him. I ached to go to him, to feel his heart beat against mine, to press my face into his neck and just sob and sob and sob.
Memories came to me as visceral images: a head on my shoulder as we lay beneath a goat-hide tent in the desert; two ravenous bodies pressed together in a steaming hammam; my jaw cupped in rough hands as I wept beside a pod of dancing whales. Battlefields and asylums, olive groves and caravels, the whole world a backdrop for our doomed love, for our infinite fates.
Sometimes it felt like I spent the first sixteen or seventeen years of every life holding Arden’s existence in my chest like a precious stone, hard and heavy and glittering, only for it to burst suddenly outwards when we met again. An utter evisceration. The sun exploding, devouring the entire galaxy.
It was Arden . Arden was here, with me.
He had been here for years.
Watching, caring.
It made me feel vulnerable, but also comforted. I had not suffered alone.
‘Are you going to kill me now?’ I asked, my voice thick with emotion, dread making it impossible to swallow.
‘I think I have to,’ he replied, a little tremulously. He rolled the bracelets up and down his wrists, his hands shaking. ‘There’s only a week left.’
‘But Gracie … The transplant.’ The anger finally threatened to spill over in me, the way it had in the Viennese opera house, but I knew I had to keep him talking if I were to have any hope of walking out of these stables alive. I softened my pitch. ‘If you kill me now –’
‘I know.’ His eyes fluttered shut, long lashes brushing his skin. ‘Fuck, I know, all right? But at least we won’t be around to watch her go.’
The sheer heartlessness of his statement stole the air from my lungs, and the rage became impossible to temper.
‘That’s possibly the worst thing you’ve ever said,’ I snapped, shaking my head in disgust.
I thought he might meet my heat with his own, but instead he looked appalled at himself. ‘I didn’t mean –’
‘My mum, Arden.’ I kicked at a strand of hay, wishing it was one of his ribs. ‘Jesus. Think of my mum.’ Tears sprang to my eyes unbidden. I wished I could cling to the righteous fury, but it was already ebbing into deep despair. ‘How will she cope with losing all of us at once?’
Arden’s body had stilled, as though moving a single muscle might have betrayed some secret emotion he was trying desperately hard to keep buried. Somewhere in my chest I understood that he had not always been like this – that the mile-high walls round his heart were a relatively recent construct – but I couldn’t think back to when he’d first started laying the foundations.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his bent knees. ‘Gracie might find another donor.’
‘She might not,’ I insisted. ‘She’s just an innocent kid. How can you sentence her to die? Just so you can fulfil some twisted vendetta you have against me? God, I hate you.’
He raised a fist and glared at the floor, as though about to punch a hole through it. ‘It’s not just – Arghhhhh.’ The groan was deep enough to rumble the earth. ‘I would give anything in the world not to have to do this. You know that, Evelyn. You’ve seen me grapple with it life after life, death after death. Back in the trenches, you told me you trusted me. Trusted that I did this for the right reasons. Nothing has changed.’
I shook my head sadly. ‘No. You ’ ve changed. Ever since Siberia. The cold killer in El Salvador … that wasn’t you.’ Forcibly reining in my breathing, I added in a rush, ‘Look, just give me a few more days. There’s still a week until we turn eighteen. Maybe I can find a way to do my part of the transplant before then. They can store the marrow until Gracie’s well enough to take it.’
His fist unfurled the slightest bit, and he looked up at me. The grief in his daylight-blue eyes threatened to unravel me, and suddenly I could not remember how that handsome face looked when it smiled. ‘How are you going to do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But I have to try.’
Maybe it was impossible. The health service worked in mysterious and rigid ways. Where would I even begin? How could I justify my burning need to have my marrow extracted this week? Perhaps I could find a way to have it done privately, but again, what excuse would a medical professional accept for the absurd rush?
Once I got out of these stables, I could think of a plan.
First I had to get Arden to agree. He’d spent two whole years weaving himself into my family, braiding himself into our traditions and rituals, stitching laughter and bear hugs into our most intimate moments. That had to count for something.
The chink in his armour was there. I just had to drive the spear in.
‘Arden, you’ve seen me grieve a hundred family members. You’ve seen how it destroys me. You’ve held me as I sobbed like a child over fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. You’ve seen me hollowed out and weak from loss after loss after loss.’ I swallowed down the lump in my throat. ‘I know you don’t let yourself get so close to people any more – self-preservation, and I get it – but I’m not like that. I can’t do it. I would walk to the ends of the earth to save Gracie. So help me do that. For all the past versions of us. For all the times you stroked my hair and told me you understood .’
For a second he looked like he was about to concede; a subtle nod, a slight easing of the tension across his shoulders. Then he shook his head almost frantically, as though trying to usher away an intrusive thought.
‘Why not?’ I urged, desperation clawing at me like a rabid animal. ‘You said yourself, you adore the bones of Gracie. Why wouldn’t you let me try and save her?’
A heavy moment, followed by a pained whisper. ‘Because you might run.’
I crossed my arms. ‘I won’t run.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
He had a point. I thought of the mountain cave in Portugal, of how sure I had been that Arden wouldn’t find me. Of how the tether had led them to me anyway.
‘You have my word that I won’t run.’ My pulse was high and thin in my temples. ‘I’ll let you kill me when the time comes.’
He laughed bitterly. ‘With absolutely no due respect, I do not believe you.’
‘So don’t leave my side. Ever.’ I slid over to him on hands and knees, shuffling over hay and concrete, resisting the urge to grab his ankles and beg. ‘Stay in the bookshop while I work. I’ll spend my days off on the farm with you. Apart from when I have to go to the hospital, but you can come with me. I’ll never leave your side. There won’t be a chance for me to run.’
He laid his head back against the wall, the muscles in his jaw flickering, clenching. ‘What about at night?’
‘We’ll tell my mum we’re seeing each other. She’s pretty lax, so she’ll probably let me stay in the cottage with you. Tie me to the bed before you go to sleep, if you have to.’
Running wilderness-rough hands over his exhausted face, he finally said, ‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’ I repeated, disbelieving.
His hands dropped, and he fixed his gaze on me. ‘Six days.’
‘And on the seventh, we die.’ I swallowed hard. It never got any easier, the knowledge of impending demise. ‘Whether I save Gracie or not.’
Nodding, he whispered, ‘It’s the way it has to be.’
It was a terrible deal, but it was the only one I had.