53
Three weeks later, Anna walks into the kitchen and stands beside me as she begins loading plates into the dishwasher, pretending she is not about to launch a small interrogation.
She has been circling the subject since the day Elias and I arrived.
The woman has survived enough badly concealed lies to recognise when one is sitting at the table with her, but she also knows what it costs to force open a door someone is holding shut.
So she waits until the end of the lunch, which is plenty of time for every wrong idea imaginable to put down roots.
The kitchen belongs only to us girls in this moment, with Conall cooling off over a glass of wine in the sitting room, and Elias upstairs.
In my bedroom.
Anna scrapes a piece of roasted potato into the bin and watches it fall. ‘You’re not telling me anything about Norway.’
I lower another plate into the slot of the dishwasher, careful not to knock against the others.
‘A lot happened.’ It comes out on a sigh. A heavy one.
‘That clears everything up then,’ she rumbles sardonically and sets her plate inside the machine.
‘Glad to help.’
Giving me a sidelong glance our mother perfected and both of us unwillingly inherited, she leans her hip against the counter and crosses her arms.
Big sister stance.
She is serious.
I could tell her. About the airport. The cabin, the chains and the blizzard. The choices he stole and the choices he eventually placed back into my hands.
But none of them feel like the truth.
I worry at my lip as I attempt to remould the past few months into something that won’t make her eyes fall out.
Punishment was an ugly story Elias understood well enough to hold on to. Protection required believing there was something in him capable of saving rather than ruining. It required hope, and such a thing has always frightened him more than the alternative.
He had known I was being watched when not even I did.
Telling her all that makes the beginning wrong, though it doesn’t erase what it cost us.
But those things no longer belong to nightmares. They belong to Elias and me, to the long, unpleasant work of separating fear from devotion and protection from possession.
And in the end, he had come back to finish things and make sure Cromwell could never reach me again, even if the price of my peace was his life.
That is the truth that matters more than the lies our beginning is wrapped in.
The dishwasher creaks as I push it closed.
‘It was difficult,’ I say. ‘But I’m alright. Learnt a lot of new things. Found myself, I think.’
Anna dries her hands on a tea towel, eyes remaining on me. ‘Conall says it was a gruesome fight.’
My mind stumbles over that but then rebounds when I realise she means the court proceedings.
‘I suppose.’
Her mouth sets stubbornly. ‘That sounds suspiciously like something a woman says right before she begins to make excuses for a man. Familiar song?’
I chuckle low. ‘No excuses needed.’
‘Then what are you doing?’
‘Waiting for him to properly ask me to marry him.’
Her lips part. The tea towel stops moving between her hands.
She studies me for another long moment before releasing a breath through her nose.
‘I see’ is what comes out of her. Then she looks at the cloth hanging from her now-crossed arms. ‘Fine. I reserve the right to remain deeply suspicious.’
I scoff. ‘I would be alarmed if you weren’t.’
She flicks the tea towel at my thigh, but thanks to Elias, my reflexes snap to attention, and I step away just in time.
‘When’s the flight?’ she asks.
‘Two days.’
Her face falls so quickly that guilt lands hard in my gut before she speaks.
‘That soon?’
‘We’ve already stayed too long because of the court bollocks, and the company transfer… things.’ And making sure Cromwell’s minions were all properly detained.
‘Three weeks is not long when you vanished for months and barely called.’
‘I didn’t vanish,’ I chuckle nervously as I step away and lean against the archway.
‘You moved into a cabin past the edge of civilisation with a man who answers questions using dead philosophers.’
I laugh aloud, knowing precisely how ticked off she gets when he does that.
‘I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes he uses living Norwegians.’
She does not share in my amusement, simply folds the tea towel into a neat rectangle, then immediately unfolds it because the women in our family need their hands occupied when emotion becomes inconvenient.
‘I don’t like that you weren’t coming back more often.’
It’s a quiet reprimand, but it echoes nonetheless.
‘I know.’
The anger in her face is thin, grief stark behind it – far more difficult to defend against.
The distance was necessary, and Conall supplied plenty of false evidence for it.
But I can’t tell her the northern winters did not care about sisterly obligation.
That I liked the idea that Anna had Conall, the house and a life finally beginning to resemble her own.
I wanted her to have that privacy to reclaim herself.
But excuses remain excuses even when they wear sensible shoes.
‘I’m sorry.’
She exhales heavily. ‘I just want to see you a little more often.’
‘You just like having access to my wardrobe.’
I grin. She squares her shoulders and starts rolling the towel again.
‘More than once a year,’ I promise. ‘And you’re the bridesmaid. Not taking no for an answer.’
She sucks in a deep breath. ‘Really?’
I’m already running away before she launches into questions, leaving her with the leftovers – and a very tired Irishman waiting in the sitting room.
We had spent nearly two hours around the table with him translating the legal updates. Elias sat beside me, one large hand wrapped around a wine glass he never drank from.
As my foot lands on the first stair, the sound eerily reminds me of the gavel. My mind flips to Cromwell.
The charges have multiplied as the seized records have been examined. His palette of crimes had been rich in colour, ranging from fraud, conspiracy, trafficking and enough connected offences for Conall to develop a nervous twitch whenever anyone says the words additional disclosure.
The case against Elias over Isak and Melody’s deaths came to its conclusion after Cromwell’s associates were taken into custody and blamed one another while admitting involvement in the fire and other illegal things.
That removed what little doubt remained about who committed the murders and set fire to the estate, at least.
It was almost sad when Elias confessed he was glad it was over, but ashamed that he felt no grief for the people he had lost. I wish I could blame him, but Arthur had spent a lifetime destroying him, Isak had chosen Cromwell over him, and whatever Melody once represented in his life died beneath everything she had done to him.
There truly was nothing left to mourn except the people they might have been.
And there is another matter to add to the list: Elias is the sole shareholder of Crane Logs a life that is mine even while it remains tangled with his.