Chapter 26 Amelia
Amelia
Amelia swung on an old love seat in the folly, drawing a weird comfort from its rhythmic metallic squeak.
She’d had a police interview, and an officer—a constable—had salvaged her belongings from the car wreck.
He’d offered her a ride to the village train station, in time to catch the late afternoon train to Bath.
By nightfall she could be back on her itinerary, escaping into a little city she’d fantasized about since she was a young teen reading Persuasion.
So why did the prospect leave her feeling … empty?
“I had a feeling I might find you here.”
Amelia started at Tom’s voice. He limped up the wide stone steps from the lawn, using an old walking stick for a crutch. His ankle was bandaged.
“Sorry, did I scare you?” he said, maneuvering around a fluted column.
“You should know by now that nothing scares me.” She grinned at the obvious lie.
The jolt of surprise at seeing him was quickly followed by a surge of relief, and, once that passed, a full-body hit of attraction.
The opposite of a jump-scare. A jump-happy-surprise, which made a nice change.
“I figured this was the best place to keep out of everyone’s way.
The sergeant said it was all a ‘right to-do,’ whatever that is.
” Over at the abbey, visible through the topiary, only a couple of cops were in view, but at least a dozen more were on site—regular police, detectives, forensics…
The paramedics had left with Connor and Duncan hours ago.
“Think that’ll hold both of us?” Tom said, looking dubiously at the love seat.
Amelia shrugged. “Risk is relative.”
“It’s only around fifty years old, so basically still under warranty.”
“It’s that or hay bales,” she said, indicating the stacks circling the rest of the folly.
“Which always sounds like a good idea until you start itching. Budge up!”
“Excuse me?”
“Shuffle over.”
She moved over, and he sat, their jeans grazing. She pulled her coat out from under his leg—a slightly musty one that had once belonged to his mother, seeing as hers was soaked with Connor’s blood.
“Well,” she said, suddenly unsure. They were alone, sober and not in danger.
That hadn’t happened since they toasted their first glass of wine, which seemed like a lifetime ago.
There was so much more to Tom now than the guy she’d met.
She couldn’t believe she’d suspected him of being a Wickham-like rogue.
And sure, no one had suspected Wickham of being a Wickham until he revealed himself to be a Wickham, but you didn’t go through something like she and Tom had without seeing the truth of a person.
He was good in a crisis, for starters. She wouldn’t need to wait six years to test that out.
Six years? She hadn’t known him six days!
“What happens now?” she said.
It was Tom’s turn to look uncertain. “I’m not sure. Hang on, you mean with the investigation?”
“Yeah.” Though she was also curious about what would happen with the two of them, if that was indeed his meaning. Should she say goodbye and accept that ride to the station?
“Connor has told the police where to find my grandfather’s body—in a deep quarry lake near the moor. The sergeant’s gone there now. She said it’d be better if I didn’t go—it could be quite an exercise to get the body out, and then they’ll need to do a postmortem.”
Amelia squeezed Tom’s hand, where it rested on his thigh.
She’d meant it as a fleeting gesture, but he wove his fingers around hers, strong and sure, so she relaxed into it.
Far be it from her to deny someone comfort when they needed it.
What even were she and Tom to each other now?
Much more than the one-night stand they were yesterday morning.
But still relative strangers. Strangers who held hands.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“Not bad. Paramedic reckons I should get an X-ray on my ankle, but it’s probably just bruised. She patched up the cut.” He paused. “You meant emotionally, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. But I did also want to know about the foot.”
He rubbed his thumb against the back of her hand.
“I don’t even know what I’m feeling. I was just thinking that I’ll be able to bury my grandfather in the family tomb at the village church, with my father.
That would have been important to him, to join his forefathers.
” Tom blew out a loud breath. “I’ve been hosting haunted house tours in a house with an actual body buried in the basement. ”
Amelia suspected that was the least of the issues he was struggling to get his head around. “No wonder we were confused. It was a perfect storm—a perfect fog. A bunch of people all frantically doing things ahead of the demolition.”
He nodded. “Duncan and Connor moving the body, Xanthe searching for documents, the Pritchards looking for the diamond, you falling down my stairs, the two of us drinking the crazy juice… Not the escape you were looking for, was it? How are you holding up?”
“Weirdly, I’m not reacting as emotionally as I thought I would, now that it’s over.
Maybe because this is what I expect to happen now?
I expect bad things to happen, and I’m pleasantly surprised if they don’t.
It’ll hit me at some point, but right now I have that feeling of having been under a lot of pressure and then it’s suddenly released, and you feel like you could float away. ”
“When it does hit you, I’m here, okay? We’re in this together. That is, I know you’re supposed to be going home soon but…”
Supposed to be? She very much wanted him to finish that sentence, but he didn’t. “I’m glad you got some answers, Tom.”
“It’s a relief—at least, I think it will be, when it sinks in. Not having the answers is awful. Not having that closure. I’m not sure I realized quite how awful until now.”
“It really is.”
He looked down at their hands. “I wish you could get some answers with your own situation.”
She smiled sadly. “Gotta say, I’m getting a little tired of the holding pattern.”
Tom extracted his hand from hers. Her disappointment was immediately relieved when he instead put his arm around her and drew her close.
She leaned in, sliding a palm under his overcoat—some old thing he’d found in the antechamber—to rest on his sweater.
She felt so secure that for a second she couldn’t breathe.
Which, yes, was a strange reaction, but her reactions these days often made no sense.
She needed to soak up the physical connection while she could.
It might have to last her quite some time.
“You know,” she said, “you’re going to have a shit-ton to process. The calm after the storm.”
“We both will. A lot of people will. Duncan looked so old and defeated, sitting handcuffed in the back of that ambulance. He wouldn’t look at me. Even after everything, I felt so sad for him. Which is loopy, yeah? He killed my grandfather. He tried to kill us!”
“Not at all loopy.” It was another indication of the kind of person Tom was. The lesson his grandfather taught him about grace and forgiveness might have been inadvertent, but it had sunk in.
“This place has been his entire life. And Connor is as broken as he was after the crash, which—God—wasn’t his fault. All this guilt he’s carried, for so long. I honestly don’t know whether to feel angry or sad or what.”
“Maybe it’s okay to feel both. Feel a bunch of different things, even if they contradict.”
“Connor’s the closest thing I’ve had to a brother since the… And so many of my good memories involve Duncan.”
“And you get to keep them. You don’t need to recalibrate the past. You don’t want to get to the point that the bad things cancel out the good until there are no memories left that you can bear to think about.”
“Hang on, are we talking about you or me here?”
“Why, you, of course. But yes, I’m giving advice I haven’t actually taken.”
“Good advice though.”
“And easier said than done. Like that first afternoon we had together, our first evening. It was perfect. But I can’t help looking back at our happy, carefree selves and thinking how na?ve we were, given the bomb that was about to blow up under us.
Which is silly, I know. I want to box up that afternoon and remember it out of context of everything else. ”
“Maybe you could, somehow?”
“I definitely don’t want to cancel it out.
It would be so nice to trust in life again.
Trust the world. Enjoy those moments without fearing what will come next to ruin it all.
Buy the damn cushion.” Sitting here beside him, feeling his thigh against hers, his arm around her, she wanted much, much more than a damn cushion, but she wasn’t about to articulate those thoughts.
She had to sift through them herself first.
“Good for you.”
“I’m just not sure how to start.”
He gave her a little squeeze. “I know you’re about to go home,” he began, and once more she got a hopeful little kick in her belly, “but we can still be there for each other, even from an ocean away.”
“We can.” She would miss his hugs though. Even now, while he was actually hugging her, she felt a hollow ache at the thought of an existence without Tom’s hugs. Amazing how quickly you could get used to physical affection.
So they were choosing slow-death-by-social-media?
Even after their first night together, she’d been convinced that it was, well, not love at first sight, but certainly something special.
And every minute she spent with him she understood more and more where that thought had come from.
Could love really be this simple—two people finding each other, being equally attracted, and figuring out the rest as they went along?
Had she been overthinking it this whole time?