Chapter 12
I wish I could say our museum visit ends with a last-minute discovery worth a fortune.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it only rubs in how little cash Dair will raise in London before he leaves it in a few days’ time. He puts on a brave face once we’re outside the museum. “So, a basic house-clearance auction it is for all of Alice’s china.”
“Yeah. Sorry we couldn’t find any matches.”
Dair rallies and is so much brighter than I’d be in his situation.
“I didn’t honestly expect you to. It was still good to do something different.
Didn’t know how much I needed that. And…
” He lowers his voice, although that’s pointless.
The Exes who circle us don’t even pretend to mind their own business.
“And I wouldn’t have missed being here for what you told us. About your aphasia.”
They all nod, then get busy earwigging what else he tells me.
“I’d rather listen to you than think about how much china I’ve still got left to wrap and pack. Wish I hadn’t taken on extra shifts.” He pulls out his phone perhaps to check the time. “I should get going.”
He can’t have meant to show me his lock screen, but there I am, my chin lifted, and it’s a hell of a time to also see Flynn.
Not for real.
He isn’t in central London. I have no clue where in the world he is, yet my expression on Dair’s lock screen is a reminder of Flynn’s determination every time he turned around from a to-do list that still had one box left to check off.
Get back what I lost.
I don’t need to be good at reading or writing to see what Dair’s lock screen means—he doesn’t want to lose me.
Exes notice. Then they get even nosier by asking if me and Dair banging means my new rule is cancelled.
I don’t tell them that we haven’t. Banged, I mean.
We’ve done plenty of rule bending. And not nearly enough.
To be honest, I don’t pay attention to their shit-talking.
I’m locked in on Dair. And on the jacket he wears.
No, I can’t read the logo over his chest, but that heart shape is a reminder that he needs to go care for other people.
Right now, that’s all I want to do for him.
I have to settle for pulling his jacket closed.
For threading together the two sides of his zipper and tugging until he’s warm and cosy.
I can’t even make myself care if that makes me the subject of piss-taking as long as I get to watch Dair smile wider than he has since I shared a secret that Kev always worried meant people would take advantage of me.
That smile fades after Dair’s gaze drops to my mouth.
To my lips. He wets his own, then says, “I have to go.”
He backs off, leaving, and not getting to kiss him goodbye sucks. So does Blake and Adey walking away in opposite directions to each other, but I just saw a photo of how Dair perceives me. That means giving up isn’t an option.
“Hey!” I call out.
Blake turns on his heel. So does Adey. I focus on the third man who stops walking away and who turns to face me. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Dair calls back, “More packing and wrapping between shifts.” His laugh is a little helpless. “It’s never-ending.”
But it will end. And once it does, he’ll hand over his keys to a family who never once showed up for Alice. That injustice turns my order into a growl. I aim it at eavesdropping Exes.
“Give us a minute, yeah?” Once they do, I aim another question at Dair. “What time do you finish?”
“My shift? Sometime tomorrow morning.” Dair smooths the front of his jacket.
“Then I need to be back at work later that afternoon until after midnight, so don’t expect another visit from the furniture fairy.
I’ll need to sleep until lunchtime to get through my last shift.
” He edges closer. “Vincent, before I go, are you okay?”
“Me?”
He nods. “Because that was a lot. You telling everyone. Telling me. Really wish I hadn’t taken these last two shifts. I’d cancel if…”
It wouldn’t let down people just like Alice.
Dair backs away again, and I make up my mind.
I won’t let him down either.
I get started on that as soon as I’m back at my place.
It takes me a while to record a thank-you voice note for the group chat.
I start by speaking into my phone in the same spot where I’ve caught up with so many conversations too late to join in.
Today, it feels all wrong to lock myself in a bathroom to listen to a robot reading out their texts, but reaching out to the Exes while pacing in a new location doesn’t feel much better.
I stop in front of a vision board that I bet some of them could have helped me read much sooner.
Asking for their help feels as wrong here as it did in the bathroom.
I finally send them all a message from a chintzy armchair with my feet up on a gifted footstool, and I start right from the beginning because not all the Exes were at the V&A this morning.
Making myself press Record is still a tough decision.
I force myself to do it.
“Listen up everyone who wasn’t at the meet-up earlier. You might have already heard this from the gobshites in the group, but just in case you didn’t, I got a thing called aphasia.”
Explaining what that means takes a while. I ramble. Stop and start over and over. Get lost and repeat myself, I bet, but I don’t delete a single message. I keep recording until I can finally get to the point by asking them to help me make Dair’s last few days here less painful.
“I know it’s Sunday tomorrow, and a lot of you will already have plans.
If you haven’t, come and help out with some wrapping and packing, yeah?
” I make myself ask for the very last thing that I want to happen.
“Because the sooner his stuff is packed up and sorted ready for auction, the sooner he can get home, and he’s running out of time. ”
Answer after answer pings in, a squadron of thumbs pointing upwards.
The one thumbs down isn’t from an Ex.
It comes the next morning just before I leave for Dair’s place, and it comes from my cousin.
Kev calls me to say, “No, I can’t bring the van over on Monday morning. We already got a job booked in.” Just as quickly, he asks, “Why’d you want it?”
“To pick up a load first thing. We could do it early.”
“You finally finished that private job of yours?” Kev’s suddenly all business. “Want me to sort an invoice for you? Tell me what they owe you and give me their email. I’ll do it right now.”
“No.”
“No?” Kev somehow sighs and growls at the same time. “This private client of yours. It’s the one you brought over, isn’t it?”
I don’t know why I shove against that like there’s a sofa wedged between us.
“So what if it is?”
Kev shoves back even harder, fierce like he’s been for me so often.
“Because I don’t know a fucking thing about him, apart from Marilyn telling me it’s the first time she’s seen you happy in forever.
” If there was a sofa between us for real, it disappears with a single sentence.
“Which is more than I can say for us working together.”
“I like working with you.”
“Not lately you don’t.”
Like so many times at school, I’m voiceless. It’s frustrating. I’m a fucking grown-up, so I work hard on getting verbal. Kev gets there so much faster. “Let me tell you what I can’t keep ignoring, yeah?”
“Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.”
“You haven’t been happy since I mentioned putting your name on the van.” Kev clears his throat. This still sounds strangled. “Then something changed. You started coming alive whenever I dropped you off after work. The last time you got all excited at clocking off time didn’t end well, did it?”
I don’t get the chance to say that it wasn’t Flynn who used to make me want to hurry back here each evening. It was having a purpose other than schlepping furniture up and down staircases.
Kev summarises all too neatly. “Because if you’ve got yourself tangled up with another dick who just wants to use you, I’ll—”
“Dair hasn’t used me.”
“You planning on billing him for shifting his stuff?”
No.
Kev doesn’t make me admit that aloud. “Just talk to me, yeah? Don’t keep it all bottled up like I’ve been keeping something bottled up from you for weeks now.”
“What?”
“That desk of yours. What did you pick it up for at auction?”
“Twenty quid.”
“Why did you bid on it?”
“Because…” I picture the one restoration workshop I sat in on at the V&A. “Because it looked like a genuine piece that I saw an expert work on. An early Chippendale.”
He huffs, “Wasn’t gonna tell you this, but that would be me keeping you in the dark, like that other dick did.”
I’d deny that and tell him that Flynn couldn’t have been any clearer, that it was me who didn’t read the literal writing on the wall, only Kev keeps going.
“Can’t stand the idea of another fucker taking advantage, so hear this. I saw your desk in an auction listing.”
My heart rate picks up. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. It had that mahogany top you stripped back. All those gold—”
“Inlays?” I close my eyes and see the satinwood I polished until it seemed to ripple under my fingers, an illusion like the future Flynn as good as promised.
“Yeah, them,” Kev confirms. “Recognised it right away. Did some digging and found out what it sold for.”
“It sold already?” I’m sitting in an almost empty flat. My gaze fixes on the spot where that desk once sat, and where Flynn posed for a photoshoot that put him on the radar of wealthy backers. “How much for?”
Kev sounds sorry. “Three bags.”
My jaw drops. He means bags of sand. That rhymes with grand. Three thousand fucking quid for something I spotted, saved from being scrapped, and that Kev tells me a real expert must have valued.