Chapter 16
Adriel
The house looked smaller than he remembered.
It always did, when he came back. Some trick of growing up, of the world expanding around you until the places that once felt enormous, cavernous, inescapable, revealed themselves to be ordinary-sized.
A semi-detached on a quiet street. Cream render, dark trim, a garden his mother kept immaculate. Nothing remarkable about it. Nothing that should make his stomach tighten the way it did when he turned the corner and saw it sitting there in the grey afternoon light.
He rang the bell anyway.
His mother answered in under a minute, dressed as if she'd been expecting a photographer rather than her son. Blouse pressed. Hair set. A single strand of pearls at her throat that she'd owned for as long as Adriel could remember.
"Darling." She kissed the air beside his cheek and stepped back. Her eyes moved over him in that quick, practiced way, top to bottom, a single sweep, and something flickered there before she smiled. "Come in. I've just put the kettle on."
The hall smelled the same. That specific, unchanging smell of her house; lavender polish, dried flowers, something faintly chemical underneath. A whole childhood compressed into a scent.
"You can head up to your room," she said, already moving toward the kitchen. "I've left the boxes in there. I need you to go through everything and tell me what you want kept. The rest goes to the charity shop or the trash." A pause. "I'm thinking of converting it into a study."
"Right," Adriel said.
"Tea?"
"Sure."
He climbed the stairs alone.
The door to his old room was slightly ajar, the way it always had been; his mother had never liked closed doors. He pushed it open.
Smaller, of course. The single bed still against the wall, the same faded duvet cover in navy blue that he'd had since he was fourteen because he'd refused to let her replace it and she'd eventually stopped trying.
The desk stood under the window, still scarred from years of use and one regrettable incident involving a compass. The shelves above it were still full.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
There he was. Every version of himself he'd ever tried to outrun, preserved in this room like an insect in amber.
The shelf of paperbacks, cracked spines and dog-eared pages; the ones he'd read under the covers with a torch when sleep wouldn't come.
The stack of notebooks on the desk, filled with the handwriting of a boy who'd had more feelings than he knew what to do with and no one to give them to.
A photograph tucked into the corner of the mirror, himself and Jenna at about thirteen, squinting into the sun outside the public library, both of them laughing at something neither of them could probably remember now.
He crossed to the photograph. Touched the corner of it.
He'd been happy that day. He remembered that much.
He turned and looked at the boxes his mother had left, stacked neatly by the wardrobe. Empty, waiting. He picked one up and began, slowly, to go through the shelves.
Some things were easy. Old textbooks, a broken alarm clock, a box of pens that had long since dried out.
Trash. Some things were harder; a birthday card from his father, written in that cramped, familiar hand; a certificate from a school reading competition that he'd been so proud of he'd stuck it to the wall with blu-tac that had since left a faint mark on the plaster.
He held the certificate for a moment. Then put it in the keep box.
He was halfway through the books when his mother appeared in the doorway.
"I thought I might paint it grey," she said. "Benjamin Moore, do a lovely shade. Very clean."
"Sure," Adriel said.
She came further into the room. Picked up a small glass ornament from the windowsill; a whale he'd bought at a seaside gift shop when he was nine, saved up for with his own pocket money. She turned it over in her hands.
"Do you want this?"
He did. Inexplicably, stupidly, he did. "Yes."
She set it down with a faint air of resignation, as if sentiment were a mild personality flaw she'd long since accepted in him. Then she settled herself on the edge of his old desk chair and looked at him.
"You know," she said, "I've been thinking about meal prepping.
A colleague at the gallery swears by it; she lost nearly 50 pounds just from being more organized about what she eats during the week.
" A pause. "I thought I might send you some recipes.
" Her eyes moved to him briefly, that same quick sweep as before.
"It's so easy to fall into bad habits when you're busy.
Eating at your desk, skipping proper meals, grabbing whatever's convenient. "
Adriel put a book in the box.
"You'd feel so much better, I think, if you were a bit more intentional about it. You always did carry your stress in your body." she added.
He kept packing.
"How is the job?" she said. "You haven't told me much about it."
"It's good."
"Good." She nodded slowly. "And the people? Your colleagues?"
"They're good too."
"There's no one..." She let the sentence hang. "You know. You work such long hours. It would be nice if you had someone to…"
"I'm fine, Mum."
She looked at him. Those dark eyes, patient and thorough.
"Adriel." Her voice shifted. Softer now, which was always worse, because soft meant sincere, and sincere meant the thing she said next would be the kind of thing that echoed for weeks.
"I'm not trying to push. I just worry. You've always been so...
" She searched for it. "So in your head.
So convinced that you're somehow less. That you don't deserve…
" She stopped. Started again. "I think sometimes you make it harder than it needs to be. For people to get close to you."
He went still.
"The way you hold yourself back," she said.
"The way you assume things won't work out.
It becomes self-fulfilling. You understand that, don't you?
People can sense when someone doesn't believe in themselves.
It puts them off." She paused. "I've always thought if you just carried yourself a little differently.
Took a little more care of yourself. In all the ways. "
She said it with genuine love. He knew that. Had always known it. The love was real, it was just that the love and the damage arrived in the same sentence, wrapped around each other so tightly you couldn't separate one from the other without losing both.
"Maybe," he said. His voice came out flat.
She watched him for a moment longer. Then stood, smoothed her blouse, and said, "Tea is ready when you are done," and left him alone in the room.
Adriel stood very still.
He looked at the shelf. At the books he'd loved. At the photograph of himself and Jenna, both of them laughing in the sun. At the small glass whale.
He picked up the whale. Put it carefully in the keep box.
Then he packed everything else he wanted in silence, taped the box shut, and carried it downstairs.
They drank tea at the kitchen table. His mother talked about the renovation, about a friend's holiday, about a gallery opening she was attending on Thursday.
Adriel listened and nodded and said the right things at the right intervals, and when a reasonable amount of time had passed he stood, kissed her cheek, picked up his box, and said goodbye.
The door closed behind him.
He stood on the sidewalk with the box under his arm and breathed the cold air in, long and slow, and waited for the tightness in his chest to ease.
∞∞∞
The pub was called The Anchor and it had no business being as warm as it was.
Low ceilings, sticky floors, a jukebox in the corner currently playing something that had been a hit about fifteen years ago and showed no signs of stopping.
It smelled of spilled beer and fried food and the particular brand of cheerful noise that came from a room full of people who'd decided the week was over regardless of what day it was.
Adriel loved it unreasonably.
He spotted Jenna at a table near the back, her hand raised before he'd even made it through the door.
Beside her, a man with sandy hair and the build of someone who'd played rugby in his twenties; Chris, her boyfriend of three years, who had introduced himself the first time they'd met by handing Adriel a pint and saying Jenna talks about you constantly, mate, it's actually a problem.
Adriel threaded his way through the after-work crowd and dropped into the seat across from them.
"You look terrible," Jenna said warmly.
"Thank you."
"Fun day with mother dearest?" Chris said.
"Oh yeah."
Chris winced with the sympathy. He pushed a pint across the table without being asked. "Drink that."
Adriel drank.
For a few minutes they talked about nothing; Chris's work, a film they'd all watched separately and needed to compare notes on, a mutual friend's engagement that had apparently surprised everyone except Jenna, who had seen it coming for two years and was insufferably pleased with herself about it.
The noise of the bar pressed in around them, warm and impersonal, and Adriel felt his shoulders drop by slow degrees.
"Okay," Jenna said eventually. She had her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, which meant she was preparing to attack. "How was it? Really?"
Adriel wrapped both hands around his glass. "She's converting my room into a study."
"Of course."
"She spent ten minutes telling me about meal prepping." He stared at the table. "Sent me some recipes. Said it was about energy and clarity." A pause. "Said I carry my stress in my body."
Jenna's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"And then," Adriel continued, "she told me I push people away. That people can sense when someone doesn't believe in themselves. That if I just carried myself differently…" He stopped. "Took a little more care of myself. In all the ways."
"In all the ways," Chris repeated.
"In all the ways."