WALES 2022
THE NEXT DAY WAS agonizing – in more ways than one.
When I told Arden the news about the emergency appointment, he allowed himself the smallest glint of relief, of hope, before switching straight back into detached mode.
His anger from the bookshop cooled and hardened. I got the sense his hostile introversion was driven by shame – at the way he’d had to threaten me all over again, the crassness of it so at odds with who he really was. Quills and inkwells, soft parchment and warm jumpers, vials of sugar water and twangy folk music, carefully pressed flower petals between tissue paper.
In any case, he barely looked at me as we repaired fences and trundled around the fields. A few times I tried to start conversation – asking questions about what he was doing with the crops, voicing some fears over the impending marrow harvest – but I was greeted with grunts and one-word answers.
Usually I was cuffed to the bed each night with a grimace and an apology, but the apology now dropped off entirely.
That night, as he was about to manacle me anew, I had the desperate urge to cup his jaw, to force him to look at me. Really, really look at me. But truth be told, I was livid.
There were so many small humiliations tucked inside my fate. Death threats in front of a crowd, the cuff around my wrist as I slept, lying to the people I loved most in the world. It reminded me so acutely of those weeks and months spent in a rusted cage in the asylum hallway, shivering uncontrollably, arms strapped to my waist, dozens of pitying eyes observing me like a rare creature in a squalid city zoo.
And then there was the not remembering where it had started.
It was infuriating, knowing that our origin story was buried just beyond reach, and yet no matter how hard I dug at the earth, dirt crusted beneath my desperate fingernails, I could never quite grasp it. It was innately unfair, this power Arden had over me, a knowledge he chose time and time again not to share. Just to remind me who was in control. Who was winning.
Was that a fair accusation? Maybe not.
Did Arden ever wonder if I had forgotten because I just didn’t care enough? It must have felt that way, sometimes, in the darkest moments.
Such a casual wound: I remember, and they do not.
I felt it every time my sister shrugged when I recounted a childhood story that meant so much to me, but of which she had no memory. I felt it every time I thought of my ancestors, who had likely also been reincarnated and yet did not remember me at all. I remembered them, my parents, my siblings, my kin. Not every detail, every story, but their texture, their feel.
Despite the utter exhaustion burning at my eyelids, I lay awake in the cottage bedroom for hours, stewing in silence. From the lack of screaming, I guessed Arden was doing the same, only his back was turned and he stared unmovingly at the wall.
Frustration cast a long shadow over me. I knew the Arden who’d changed his mind about killing me in Siberia had to be in there somewhere, but I had no idea how to reach him. After all, he’d had thirty-six years to rebuild his walls since then. The cut-throat execution attempt in El Salvador had proved he’d done just that. Now his fortress was harder to breach than ever.
Yet maybe I would not have to breach it to survive.
After the altercation in the bookshop, I had sent Ceri the secret video. The camera showed only the dark swirled wood of the counter, but the audio was crisp enough to make out what was being said: a clear death threat. Cowering in the bathroom of Arden’s cottage under the guise of a long shower, steam billowing around me, I typed out the accompanying message to Ceri:
If you really want to help me, please take this video to the police – but not yet. The bone marrow harvest is set for Friday at 4.45 p.m. at a private practice called Verdant Park, and it should be wrapped up by 6 p.m. If they want to arrest Dylan, they should do it then. That way, if it goes wrong and he kills me before they can cuff him, at least I’ve saved my sister. Again, I am so sorry for everything. Bran x
I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of crying. Not the ragged, raw screams of the nightmare, but something hollower, more devastating. It was soft, muffled with attempts to silence it, but there was no mistaking the hitch in Arden’s breath, the sniffing of his nose, the uneven rise and fall of his shoulders.
Everything in me softened. The soul I loved was still in there. He was not as unfeeling as he pretended to be. The walls he had built around himself only kept the emotions gated inside – it didn’t stop them from existing altogether.
‘Arden,’ I whispered, but even that sounded too loud in the still of the night.
He quietened as best he could, but there was still a tremble to his outline, an unnatural lack of breathing.
‘Arden, come here. Please.’
Still no response. The air in the small bedroom was cool, taut, almost rippling with tension.
Frustration reared in my chest, but I tried to bridle it into something more productive. I didn’t want to add any anger or heat to this conversation. I wanted to scale the walls of Arden’s emotions, not build them higher with my bullishness.
I shuffled on to my side so that I faced him properly, ignoring the yank in my shoulder from where my wrist was cuffed. ‘Do you remember on the Western Front, when –’
‘I’ll remember the Western Front until the end of time,’ he muttered, a subtle shudder to the words. ‘Sometimes I think I’d give anything to forget.’
I closed my eyes briefly, picturing damp rats and crooked shell sculptures and rolling fields of poppies. ‘Back then you said, “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.” What happened to the future tense? What changed? Why have you closed yourself off to me?’
A stiff beat. Then: ‘You were right. Siberia hurt too much.’
There it was. Something real at last. My arms yearned to hold him. To share this mutual pain.
‘Please, come here.’ A gust of wind rattled the window. ‘I feel like I’ll implode if I don’t get to hold you.’
‘I can’t,’ he said, but the words had more give than they usually did.
A tear slid down my cheek unbidden. I couldn’t remember it forming, couldn’t remember the point at which my body had decided to cry. ‘I miss you so much.’
He rolled over on to his back, sniffing and facing the ceiling. ‘I’m right here.’
‘You’re not, though, are you? Not really.’ One of his poems came back to me, forming a shape from smoke and shadow. ‘“My heart is a haunted house surrounded by a moat of my own digging, kept empty of warmth so that I will not miss it come winter.” It’s beautiful, Arden. All of it. But that part broke me. You don’t have to do this to yourself. You are allowed to feel warmth.’
‘I can’t,’ he whispered again.
‘Arden, if you don’t come to me right this second, I swear to god I will yank on this cuff until my wrist bleeds. I will gnaw my actual hand off. Do you really want to see me go full beaver on myself?’
Despite the raw emotion of the situation, Arden spluttered with shocked laughter. ‘ Full beaver? ’
‘I said what I said.’
The crude joke was what finally broke the stand-off. He climbed into bed, shivering, his bare upper body flecked with goosepimples. Heart tugging in my chest, I rested my face on my cuffed arm, and let my other hand go to his cheek. It was rough with stubble and wet with tears.
‘Talk to me. Why all this?’ I wiped a tear from his cheek, but it was immediately replaced by another. The sight of him so sad was like having my ribs cracked open one by one.
The inches between our two bodies felt like miles, and I longed to close the gap, but I knew I had to do this slowly, steadily. I couldn’t scare him away just when he was finally lowering a drawbridge.
He pressed his eyes closed. ‘We got married, once. Do you remember?’
I almost said no , but then it came back to me, the memory gossamer-thin.
‘There were waves, somewhere,’ I recalled. ‘And … and the scents of pine resin and sage. Woodsmoke.’
His lips twisted into a grimace, loose hair falling into his face. ‘Something went wrong, and I had to kill you in front of all our loved ones. I have never felt so monstrous in all my days. I still see your throat opening like a bleeding mouth whenever I try to fall asleep. I am haunted, Evelyn. I am haunted .’
‘So why do you do it?’ I asked, out of habit more than anything.
The drawbridge pulled up a little in response. ‘Please, don’t ask. Please. Please, let’s just … talk.’
I nodded.
A fraught breath shook itself loose. ‘To you, I’m always changing – changing faces, bodies, strategies. But I’m always just me . And it breaks me to see the change on your face when you realize the truth … even when some part of you knows already. There’s always the tipping point. The moment we can’t come back from. When you know , and I know, and it has to happen. But it ruins me. The second your joyful face changes ruins me.’
Hurt cleaved through me like a hot knife. I had never really thought about it from his point of view.
I wrapped a hand around the back of his neck. The feeling of his skin against mine sent a shiver down my back, my legs. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry before, other than in Siberia.’
He scoffed, sniffed, wiped away another errant tear. ‘That seems unlikely.’
‘No, really. Not in the trenches, not in the asylum. You’re far too good at guarding your heart. El Salvador absolutely terrified me. How you could just shut off centuries’ worth of love and emotion and keep your distance. I could never do that.’
‘I did write some particularly angst-filled poetry in those years. But keeping my distance is not just to protect myself. It’s to protect you too. That night in the trenches, when I told you I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life. This is me doing that. You deserve to live the fullest eighteen years you can in every incarnation without the complication of loving me. You deserve a quick and painless death, not devastating poison in a frozen grave.’ A ragged breath. ‘If that means swallowing my emotions, so be it.’
‘And I’m asking you not to do that. Come back to me, Arden. Please. Come back to me.’
At last, I closed the inches between our bodies, lying flush against his bare chest, nuzzling my face into his throat. Though his skin was cold, his body was warm, and having it pressed against me after nearly four decades apart felt like coming home. I wanted to lie there forever in his arms. I wanted to forget that we had ever stabbed or strangled or impaled each other on jutting coral.
I wanted to make pancakes with him on a Sunday morning, his folk music playing in the background, the window cracked open to let in the fresh scent of the moors.
I wanted us to be ordinary.
Was that so much to ask?
‘I love you,’ he moaned, as though it was the most painful thing he had ever said, and it was. He pressed his forehead to mine, and pure, raw emotion surged through me. His breath was on my lips, his red-rimmed eyes searching mine in plea, or prayer, or something altogether more devastating. ‘And I will always be yours. But I gave up the right to call you mine a long time ago.’
He brushed his lips over my tear-salted cheek, lingering for a few beautiful, wrenching seconds. My heart leaped against my ribs, pulse fluttering wildly, hope and longing curling through me.
But then he was gone, out of the bed, out of his own heart.
‘Arden,’ I pleaded, barely able to see through my sobs. I had him. I had him. He was in my grasp, in the notches between my ribs. ‘Come back. Come back .’
But he didn’t. He laid his body once more on the hard, unforgiving floor, his bare back facing me, his wracked shoulders finally stilled.