Chapter Eighty. Rory
Rory
Through the train window, Rory watched the snow pile outside, white on white. An erasure. The fields, the trees, the train tracks, all of it eaten by blankness, flake by flake.
He was already so, so tired of winter. So very ready to go home.
Would Mrs. Matthews have even opened the house yet?
He’d tried calling her from the station at Aranrhod to let her know he’d be home a day earlier than planned.
He ended up leaving a hurried message on her answering machine, words half swallowed by the din of the station, before running to catch his train.
He had no idea if she’d ever gotten his message, or if it was even intelligible with the honk of trains punctuating his words.
And even if she got it, would she come to open the house a day earlier than they’d agreed?
It was Saint Winebald’s Day, which meant the whole village would be an ant’s nest of activity.
Rory swallowed a smile, remembering how shocked he was to realize that no one celebrated it in the city. That barely anyone had heard of it.
But even this frayed amusement drained away.
He imagined returning to an empty house, four months’ worth of dust covering everything.
No pots of Mrs. Matthews’s stew waiting for him on the stove.
Not even bread. His stomach gurgled in protest. After two days of living on train sandwiches, he wasn’t looking forward to coming back to an empty pantry.
And would Daye be around, thinking he wouldn’t be back until the next evening? He swallowed, finally letting himself ask the question he had been shoving down ever since he had boarded the train home: Would she be around if she knew he’d be home tonight?
Rory rubbed his eyes. He hated how they’d left things.
He hated that it had been four months without talking.
He had tried calling a few times, that first month, but Daye never picked up.
He was almost relieved that she hadn’t. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if she did answer, what words he could have offered to try and fix up the mess he made.
Eventually, he stopped trying. It was better, he decided, to wait until they could talk in person. Until they could sort it all out.
Instead, he had spent hours imagining how it would have been if he had brought Daye with him.
Waking up with her every morning, her hair smelling of brine and stone.
Walking with her on the beach after classes, her hand in his as they watched the sunset spilling into the waves.
Daye would have liked the ocean, how vast and loud it was.
It would have complicated everything, Rory reminded himself. She would have been alone all day, in a strange city. And she would have hated the whispers and stares that would have followed her everywhere. But even in his head, it sounded feeble.
No. The real problem would have been explaining to Daye that she could have come with him all along.
He wasn’t even sure why he’d done it. For a while, he’d pretended that it was only absentmindedness that made him put off looking into Daye coming to the city with him.
And later, when it became obvious that there was no hindrance, that she could board a train and visit him any time she wanted, he told himself that it didn’t matter anyway, since he wasn’t going anywhere, not with the experiments promising to end any moment, not with Daye in his arms, meltingly soft.
And after that—
He had no explanations for that. Nothing but a visceral reaction. A no that echoed in his bones. Even the thought of the two parts of his life touching—of Daye and Noah in the same room—made his heart pound.
And now he had no way to tell her he had been … not lying, exactly—he had never actually told her she couldn’t go, he’d made sure of it—but close enough to count. Not without deepening the rift between them. Not with everything feeling so tenuous, so fragile.
No, he told himself. It was better this way, with the grounding. With Daye and the university separated by miles and miles of train tracks, even if it meant he had to spend the last four months alone, missing her.
Rory toed his duffel bag. It was full of presents: Silly plaque-mounted fish. A set of botanical drawings. Notebooks with shells sewn into their covers. A new dress, summer-sky blue.
Would any of it be enough to make her smile? What other promises would he have to make, to get her to meet his eyes?
Rory leaned his head on the window and closed his eyes, blotting out the sight of the snow swallowing the world whole.
It was already six thirty. He’d be home in two hours. Two and a half, tops, if the snow was bad. He’d be home, and then he’d see.