CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aoife
WILLIAM'S PHONE GOES off at half past six in the morning.
I'm already half-awake when it buzzes. The bedroom ceiling is gray with early light. I hear the shift of his weight from the other room, a pause, then silence while he reads whatever it says.
A knock at the door.
"Come in."
He opens it, but stays in the frame. No shirt.
The hallway light catches the lines of his shoulders, chest, the flat plane of his stomach, and I make a conscious effort not to stare.
Three days ago, he could barely hold himself upright.
Now he's standing there like that, and I'm not prepared for it.
His eyes are clear. That's what gets me. For three days, they were glazed or wild or somewhere unreachable, and now he's just looking at me. Directly. Like he actually sees me sitting here in his t-shirt with my hair a mess and the sleep barely off my face.
I reach up to run a hand through my hair and make myself stop.
"How'd you sleep?"
I look at his face instead of his chest. It takes some effort. "Fine. You?"
"Better than the last few nights." The corner of his mouth pulls.
Something happens in my chest. I can't help it.
Three days ago, I was holding a bucket under his chin, and now he's standing in my doorway with clear eyes and that half-smirk, and it lands somewhere completely inconvenient.
He's fully present in a way he hasn't been since I met him.
No fog, no chemical edge, no distance. Just him, looking at me, almost amused, and I am not remotely prepared for what that does.
He holds up the phone. "Aidan sent through a new location. We need to move."
"How long will we be there?"
"Few days." He pockets the phone. "I'm going for a shower. Give me twenty minutes."
He pulls the door closed.
I flop back against the pillow and put my arm over my face.
Twenty minutes. I am not going to spend twenty minutes thinking about William Murphy in the shower.
I spend approximately four seconds thinking about NOT thinking about it before I give up and get up instead.
I pull on the sweatpants from the chair and keep his t-shirt on.
It's that or nothing. I make the bed because I need something to do with my hands, and because the alternative is lying there thinking about my father in a hospital bed and Reilan in whatever safe house Aidan put him in, and all the things I can't fix from here.
The bed takes less than two minutes. I'm smoothing down the last corner when I hear the shower cut off.
He comes in a few minutes later, dressed, hair still damp, rucksack over one shoulder. He moves around the room without a word, opening the wardrobe, checking under the bed, clearing out what little is his. Efficient. Methodical. I sit on the edge of the freshly made bed and watch him work.
He stops at the dresser.
His hand rests on the third drawer for a moment. Then he glances at me, just once, before he pulls it open. The journals are exactly where I found them. He takes all three out and sets them in the bottom of the rucksack before anything else goes in on top.
He doesn't say anything.
Neither do I.
The whole drive, he barely speaks. I don't push it.
I watch the countryside move past the passenger window, fields and hedgerows and the occasional farmhouse set back from the road, and I think about the journals at the bottom of that bag, packed first, before anything else.
What it means to carry something like that. What it means to need to.
His hands on the wheel are steady. That's what I keep coming back to.
I watched them shake for three days, watched him grip the edge of the sink just to stay upright, watched him press his palms flat against his thighs when the tremors got bad.
Now they're still. He drives like he has somewhere to be and every intention of getting there.
He's pale still, dark circles carved under his eyes, but the shaking has stopped. He ate half a piece of toast this morning and kept it down. Progress. Small, measurable, real.
He pulls up outside a large Tesco on the edge of town and cuts the engine. The silence after the road noise is sudden.
"We need food." He reaches into the back seat and comes up with two black caps. "Safe house is about forty minutes out. We'll be there for a few days."
He holds one out. I reach for it. But instead of handing it across, he turns toward me in the seat, and before I understand what he's doing, he leans in and reaches across my body to unbuckle my seatbelt.
I don't move.
He's close enough that I can hear him breathe.
Close enough that if I turned my head even slightly, we'd be face to face with nothing between us.
The click of the buckle releasing is very loud in the quiet car.
His arm brushes mine as he draws back, and he doesn't rush it.
He's not in a hurry. He settles back into his seat and picks up the cap again, and I'm still not breathing properly.
He lifts it and leans across again and sets it on my head, taking his time adjusting the brim down.
His fingers graze my temple. He's near enough that I can feel the warmth off him, smell the soap from this morning, and underneath it something that is just him, just William, and my body responds before my brain catches up.
I make myself look at him.
He's already looking at me. His eyes are dark and steady, and there is the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth. He knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows exactly what he's doing to me.
He holds my gaze for one long moment. Then he pulls back, settles his own cap on without so much as glancing in the mirror, and pops the glove compartment for a wad of cash like nothing happened at all.
"Come on," he says.
We move through the supermarket like any couple on a Tuesday afternoon.
He pushes the cart. I put things in it. We don't talk much, but we don't need to.
I reach past him for pasta, and he's already picking up a jar of sauce, and somewhere in the cereal aisle, he holds up two boxes with a look that says pick one, and I point left without breaking stride.
At the checkout, the girl behind the till smiles at him, wide and slow, her eyes tracking up before she remembers herself.
William doesn't notice, or pretends not to. He pays cash and looks at me instead.
Outside, loading bags into the trunk, I catch him watching me over the roof of the car.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing." He closes the trunk. "You're good at that."
"At what?"
"Looking normal."
I get into the passenger seat before he can see that lands as more of a compliment than he probably meant it.
The safe house is small. One bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen just wide enough for one person to move around in comfortably.
The air has that closed-up flatness to it, the kind that settles into a place when no one's opened a window in weeks.
I've done a full inventory because that's what I do when I'm overwhelmed. I count things. I catalog.
A couch in a shade of beige that doesn't offend and doesn't interest. Two chairs that match.
A table that seats four, even though it will never seat four here.
Generic prints on the walls, the sort sold in bulk and hung without thought.
Everything functional, everything unremarkable.
A kitchen with the basics, the pots and plates stacked neatly in cupboards like a show home nobody's ever lived in.
Inside, William sets the bags on the floor and disappears to check the rest of the house. I start unpacking the shopping.
I'm stacking cans on the counter when he comes back.
He doesn't say anything, just picks up a bag and starts taking things out.
The kitchen is barely wide enough for one.
With two of us, it becomes a problem of geometry.
I'm standing at the counter with my back to him, reaching into the cupboard above, when he steps in behind me to get to the one beside it, and the warmth of him is right there at my back, and I go completely still for half a second before I make myself keep moving.
"Sorry," he says, not sounding particularly sorry.
"It’s fine." I move left, give him space on the right, and we work in opposite directions for a moment until I need the cupboard he's just closed, and I have to wait, a bag of pasta in my hands, while he shifts.
He looks at me. He knows I'm waiting. He takes a small step back, and I step forward, and there are about four inches between us as I open the door, and I am concentrating very hard on the shelf in front of me.
"You know there's a perfectly good cupboard on the other side," he says.
"This one's at the right height."
I hear something in his exhale that might be amusement.
We find a rhythm eventually. He takes the high cupboards, I take the lower ones, and we stop crossing paths so much, but the kitchen is still only a kitchen, and he is still very much the size he is, and every time I turn around, he is closer than I expect.
Not doing anything. Just there. Just present.
My heart hasn't received the update that we are simply putting away groceries.
When the bags are empty, he folds them and sets them under the sink and leans back against the counter with his arms loosely folded. I lean against the opposite one. Three feet of space between us. In this kitchen, it feels like almost nothing.
"I'll take the couch," he says.
"You don't have to…"
"I'll take the couch, Aoife."
I don't argue.
I walk through the house after he leaves the kitchen. Check the exits, the back bolt, the latch on the window I already heard him test. Then I sit in one of the chairs in the sitting room and breathe. In, out.
We're alive. We're here. Nobody is trying to kill us right at this moment.
I add the chair to my count. Steady on all four legs. Everything in here is functional and fine. Small mercies.