WALES 2022
THE NEXT DAY, THE blonde stranger I’d assaulted outside the flower shop came into Beacon Books while Nia was on her lunch break.
The floor was deserted, and I was perched on an old stool behind the counter, flipping through one of the last remaining copies of Ten Hundred Years of You for any clues I might have missed. Not that it would help me now – the poems had been penned decades ago. But still I yearned for a why , a how . Why was this happening to us? How could I break free? Maybe the simple act of putting ink to paper had unlodged something my searing questions could not.
At the sight of Ceri, I shoved the book beside the till, climbing to my feet for no discernible reason. Some vague sense of being battle-ready, perhaps.
His blonde hair was fine and neat, and he wore a green sweatshirt – frayed at the neckline – and black jeans hanging loose on his angular frame. There was a subtle left hook to his nose, like it had been broken on a rugby pitch and never quite reset, and a smattering of freckles on his white skin.
As he approached the counter, his lips curled upward in a coy smile, as though the whole fiasco had only made me more intriguing. ‘Well, you certainly made my second day in Abergavenny interesting.’
Nausea rose in me as I remembered the tang of chlorine in the Solas’ pool, the metallic swirls of blood in the turquoise water.
Was I about to meet my death once more?
How much was it going to hurt?
And yet … I didn’t feel that profound pull, that raw magnetism. I didn’t feel the rich undercurrent of love.
Could this really be the soul who had held me in the trenches of the Great War?
Paranoia uncurled like a beast from hibernation, and I tried to focus on the facts. He had appeared in Abergavenny as if from nowhere, and immediately fixated on me not two weeks before my eighteenth birthday. He had stood outside the flower shop two days in a row without buying anything – just staring .
Surely that meant something.
‘What was that about, anyway?’ He hoisted the strap of his backpack further up his shoulder. There was a keenness to his close-knit eyes, and he didn’t seem to care about the fact it was awkward to stare so unapologetically. ‘Did you mistake me for someone else?’
I shrugged nonchalantly, but I felt fraught as an arrow nocked in a bow. ‘Guess so.’
He laughed, even though it wasn’t especially funny. ‘Hopefully we’ll get better acquainted, then.’
Was he … flirting?
Or just toying with me?
Surely he wouldn’t still be interested in me if he wasn ’ t Arden. Nobody in their right mind would pursue a girl who’d randomly attacked them outside a florist’s.
It ’ s Arden, it ’ s Arden, it has to be Arden.
‘What’s your story, anyway?’ My throat was dry as sandstone, and my hands shook. I gripped the counter for support. ‘You said it was only your second day in Abergavenny.’
Let something slip. Go on. So I can be sure.
‘Just moved here from the sticks.’ Sure enough, his voice was rural-rough round the edges. ‘Escaping an alcoholic father and controlling nightmare of a mother. Eventually realized I’m better off alone.’ He scoffed in a self-deprecating sort of way. ‘Sorry, that’s probably an overshare.’
‘It’s fine.’
Except it didn’t feel fine at all.
I ’ m better off alone.
His heart a haunted house, surrounded by a moat of his own digging.
Suspicion curdled inside me. Everything was pointing in one direction, and that direction led to my imminent death.
And yet I couldn’t bring myself to ask him outright. I didn’t want to provoke a confrontation before I could save Gracie. I thought of her parading around the living room like a ballroom dancer, small and funny and innocent, and protectiveness swelled in my chest. There had been so many people in my lives that I could not save – neither from famine nor drought, plagues nor crossbows – but I could save her .
‘I really need to get a job.’ Ceri sighed, but there was an air of performance to it; a subtle exaggeration. ‘I’m renting the flat above the petrol station at the moment –’ he gestured to the garage down the street – ‘and cash is already running low. I don’t suppose they’re hiring here, are they?’
I made a mental note of where he lived. Just in case.
I shook my head. ‘Sorry. It took me six months of badgering the owner until he finally relented and took me on. I don’t think I’m actually necessary to the operation.’
‘Fair enough.’ He smiled almost apologetically. ‘Hey, sorry to be ridiculously forward, but I don’t suppose you’d want to go out for a coffee with me sometime?’
Surely nobody but Arden would ask me out in such a situation.
Surely.
It had been nearly eighteen years since we’d last spoken, and as much as I dreaded the sharp agony of death, a tiny, ridiculous part of me was exhilarated that I might be in Arden’s presence once again.
We had loved each other for so long, through the darkest times in history, through impossible circumstances, through terrible fates and insurmountable grief. The joy and pain we shared had knotted the very fabric of us together.
Nobody knew me better. Nobody else understood what this was like. There was a kinship between us, our shared secret a fortress that could never be breached from the outside. Without Arden, I felt utterly alone in the world.
I thought of sweet, stubbled kisses in a rank trench. Of our bodies folded around each other on a salt-licked fishing trawler. Of thick fur bedding in darkest Siberia, of my head on a broad chest, of forehead kisses and laced fingers and how it felt to be slowly, fatally poisoned.
The love, then the death. Until El Salvador.
A change so sudden, so stark, that I still had not made sense of it.
I studied Ceri carefully, realizing I felt nothing for this stranger.
But after the Solas’ swimming pool, that did not mean it was not Arden.
My mind unreeled, a fishing hook catching on nothing.
‘Why would you want to go out with me?’ I asked steadily, my mind smeared with conflicting emotions. ‘I attacked you.’
He shrugged carelessly. ‘I like interesting girls.’
Such an un-Arden answer. It wasn’t poetic or deep. It didn’t pulse with unspoken meaning.
‘No rush. Just think about it.’ He held out a hand, fingers long and pale and slender. ‘Have you got a pen? I’ll give you my number.’
As I handed him a biro, a sudden whim took me. I passed the pen over on top of my copy of Ten Hundred Years of You , studying him closely for a reaction.
His gaze snagged on the title, but his expression betrayed little. ‘Is that what you were reading when I came in?’
‘It was.’ My pulse pattered like mice through the walls of our farmhouse.
‘“Author unknown.”’ He shifted from one foot to the other, and I couldn’t read him, and I hated that I couldn’t. ‘What is it?’
My hands were shaking so hard I clasped them together, left fist balled up in the palm of my right. ‘A book of poetry they found in the Siberian wilderness. It’s about love and reincarnation and soulmates.’
A flicker of something darted across his face, but it was fleeting, like the vivid snapshot memories I struggled so hard to pin down. ‘What do you think of it?’
Was he asking like an awkward teenage boy making conversation? Or like a writer with an immortal soul who had finally, unwittingly, shared his work with the world?
‘It’s beautiful,’ I admitted, feeling a low heat spread over my cheeks. It was about me, after all. And if Ceri really was Arden, I wanted him to know how much it meant to read it. ‘I’m glad it was finally published.’
He paused for a moment, staring fixedly at the cover, then nodded as though suddenly deciding something. ‘I want to buy it.’
My blood fizzed as I rang it through the till and passed it to him. Was he buying something back from a past version of himself? Or was I imagining the wistful texture to the conversation?
On the receipt, he wrote his phone number and handed it back.
When Ceri left the shop, I couldn’t relax, couldn’t let loose the breath I’d been holding since the second he’d walked in.
Because even though I was safe for now, I was not safe for long.
I thought about our interaction for the rest of my shift, replaying it over and over in my mind, searching for unimpeachable evidence, turning over each and every word like I was checking precious pearls for imperfections. I found none.
And yet that feeling of unease calcified into certainty as the hours wore on. The sudden appearance, the immediate gravitation towards me, the interest in the poetry book …
Checking my phone at the end of my shift, I saw that Gracie had messaged me:
mum called me a hard-boiled egg last night
she looked like she wanted to die from discomfort
why do I feel like this was your doing
As I fired off a reply, my stomach still clenched with anxiety.
There were only two more booster injections to go before the transplant.
Two more days I had to stay alive.