Chapter 25 #2
Eris grudgingly grabbed a biscuit and stuffed it whole into her mouth, raising her eyebrows at Denny as she chewed. Happy now?
“Thank you.”
“How long have you two been together?”
Denny joined Micah on the couch. He handed her a cup of tea.
It was hard to believe he was the same seething rogue who used to come home with new bruises and a bleeding nose every other day.
His mannerisms had changed: soft-spoken, attentive, gentlemanly.
He wore his battle scars way more graciously than Eris herself.
Whatever he had been through in these fifteen years, it had changed him for the better.
“We met at the end of August,” said Denny, pursing her lips at Micah’s widening eyes.
“Really? I thought it’d been years.”
“That’s how it feels to us.” Denny’s gaze flitted to Eris. A smile lit up her beautiful face. “I guess we were meant to find each other.”
Micah took a sip of tea, elbows on his knees, spread wide open. Dressed like a gentleman, but not acting the part. Perhaps he hadn’t changed that much, after all.
“You’re exactly how I’d imagined you from the photos.”
Denny frowned. “What photos?”
Micah hung his head with tight lips. He swept a look at Eris.
“I hired a private eye to find you. I hired three, to be honest. Only one of them managed to track you down in Croydon. I presume it was about the same period you met Denny.” He kept his eyes on her as he spoke, even though she was twenty feet away and barely showing any sign she was listening.
“I couldn't believe it when he found you. I was afraid―” He trailed off, but Eris knew what was stuck on his tongue.
She was glad she hadn’t given in to the dark impulses that she had been fostering since a horrifyingly young age, because that would’ve meant Mikey would’ve had to walk up to a grave rather than into a flower shop today.
“He followed you for a few weeks on my behalf. I didn’t want to spy on you... I needed something while I worked out what to do. Getting time off at work alone…”
Eris was staring ahead, almost completely zoned out but hooked by a thin thread to the emotional strain in Micah’s voice.
Denny piped up: “Can I ask… Why didn’t you look for her sooner?”
A pause. A sigh.
“Money. Or lack of it.”
Eris followed a private eye on TikTok: an average one made in one hour what she used to earn in one day of hard work. She didn’t want to imagine how much it had cost Micah to have her monitored for weeks.
He intertwined his fingers around the cup, thumbs tapping against the ceramic.
“I was on and off the streets for two years. I had the odd jobs to keep me going and I did a fair bit of shoplifting, but… You know, money’s never enough in London.
One of Dad’s old mates reached out, offered me a few hundred quid to do deliveries for him. ”
“By your Dad’s ‘mate’, you mean…”
“Drugs. It went well, until it didn’t.” Micah’s head hung low between his shoulders. “I got caught, tried to flee. I was sentenced to seven years in prison for intent to sell and GBH.”
“You must’ve been like… twenty?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Oh my god.”
A pang of sympathy pierced through Eris.
Even so far apart, they’d walked on parallel paths for most of their lives. Financial instability, violence, questionable choices… It was tough to escape that kind of loop when you were born into it.
“It was the best thing that could happen to me.”
The room fell unnaturally silent.
Micah blew out a small laugh through his nose. “The PES provides charity-funded scholarships for the inmates.”
“PES?”
“Prison Education System. Turns out I was never a bad student: I was just ‘lacking support and a healthy environment’.”
“Healthy environment? A prison?” Denny exclaimed.
Eris snorted. She stuffed a biscuit into her mouth and washed it down with some tea. It wasn’t hard to believe that jail could be better than the dysfunctional home she and Micah had grown up in, but she couldn’t expect Denny to understand.
“For five years my mantra was: ‘Work hard, get out, find Eris.’ I got out two years early for good behaviour with a degree in Computer Sciences. Can you believe it?” Micah beamed at Eris.
The pride squaring his shoulders moved her.
No one in their family had gone to university: too poor, and too problematic for scholarships.
Ironic that the one who’d broken the cycle had done it from behind prison bars. Kind of iconic, too.
“The dissertation supervisor recommended me for a job―a decent one, too.” Micah didn’t sound as happy as he should have. “I got my shit together, found a flat in a nice area… As soon as I was settled, I went looking for you.” Blue eyes full of sorrow bore into Eris’. “But you were gone.”
The quilt was beginning to feel too heavy, and so was the distance between Eris and Micah. She wanted to run to him, hug him, tell him how much she’d missed him, but she was terrified that this insane new reality would shatter if she so much as dared to believe it was real.
When Eris had walked out of her parents’ house with a pathetically small suitcase and a backpack, no one had questioned that. Micah had been gone for over eight years―it hadn’t even crossed her mind that he might return. But he had, and he hadn’t found her.
And yet he hadn’t given up on hope. He hadn’t stopped looking for her.
He’d found her.
Denny had her soft heart pinned to her sleeve, reflected in shimmering eyes and a wobbly chin. She sniffled, wiping the corner of an eye with the cuff of her jumper. “Is it okay if I tell him what happened to you?” she asked in a thin, brittle voice.
Eris lifted her cup in agreement.
Denny began from that late August night that would forever mark the line between before and after for the both of them.
The recount was, not unexpectedly, rich in detail and trivial digressions. Micah ate up every word with child-like wonder, as if listening to an exciting fairytale. As Denny spoke, the sorrow in his expression faded enough to allow a poignant smile to tug at his lips.
“I failed you, didn’t I?” he said meekly. “I show up when you don’t need me any more.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “All this time, you must’ve thought I abandoned you just like that...”
The quilt slipped off Eris’ shoulders. She didn’t want to hear any of that. He had found her. She would’ve never been able, would’ve never had the means, to find him.
She went to him, put a hand on top of his head.
He cowered at the contact. Eris stroked his hair, sensing every bit of his guilt in his rigid posture.
She pried the cup out of his hands to thrust her phone into them face-down.
The small square of paper under the transparent case may be frayed and faded, but it still had Micah’s hurried handwriting on it, black ink carved deeply into the paper.
He stared at it for a long while. Perhaps it’d been too long. He’d been through too much shit to remember something so unimportant.
A quiet tear fell on the case. Micah swiped his thumb over it, as if smoothing down the note underneath. He sniffed as a clipped laugh burst through his lips.
“You’ve kept it all these years.”
Eris sat down beside him. Not only had she kept it: it’d been the only good thing worth keeping.
She’d moved, packed and unpacked countless times.
The one sacred item that had stuck with her through all the changes and transitions she’d endured had been a scrap of paper she’d been clinging to since the age of eight.
That, and a knife that reminded her to stay spiteful and grind on.
Her hand moved down to Micah’s cheek. He had a scar there, along the jawline, pale and jagged like Eris’. It hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen him.
“I never blamed you.”
He exhaled something that could’ve been a laugh, had it not sounded so wet and broken. Eris wrapped her arms around him, pressed her forehead to his. “Thank you for not giving up on me.”
“Do you still have issues with hugs?”
“Yeah. But you’re one of the two people with a free pass.”
And when Micah finally hugged her, he did it so fiercely she feared for her ribs. But Eris didn’t care: they had fifteen years worth of distance to make up for.
She peered at Denny from over Micah’s shoulder. “You alright, Sunshine?”
Denny gave her two thumbs-up, radiant under glistening streaks of tears.
Eris wasn’t crying. She didn’t even feel like it. And yet she was happy, unspeakably so. She didn’t know why her body didn’t feel it the way it happened to everyone else, why the only emotion that seemed to shine through her effortlessly was anger.
Micah cupped his hands around her neck to examine her closely.
He’d grown into a handsome man. Like Eris, he had acne scars dotted along his jawline and crooked teeth that had never been graced by much needed braces.
Despite the sharp features, he also looked softer, a stray that no longer lived on scraps, watching his back all the time.
“I’d forgotten how bad this scar was.”
Eris shrugged. She’d never cared much about it.
It had gotten her some disconcerted looks and mean comments at school, but none of it had affected her.
She’d always been the solitary kid who didn’t know how to interact with her peers.
Too quiet, too unyieldingly introverted, too fond of her own inner world.
With or without the scar, she would’ve never fit in.
She’d tried to blend with them and it hadn’t worked.
A crow could never pass as a butterfly, no matter how gracefully it learned to flap its wings.
“Could’ve been worse,” she said.
“Yeah, you could’ve died.’
“No one dies for taking a bump from a swing.”
Micah frowned. “What swing?”
Eris frowned, too. She had no memory of that day―she’d been so little―, but he was eight years older... He couldn’t have forgotten.
“The swing that cut my face. I was playing at the park.”
Micah paled. “You don’t remember.”
The shock in his tone caused Eris to falter. She met Denny’s gaze and found her equally puzzled.
“Mum said―”