Chapter 13 #2
He went back to the desk and read the numbers, and that held him until the middle of the afternoon.
The framing was over budget because the crew lead had ordered the wrong grade of lumber and hadn’t caught it until it was up, which meant either eating the cost or tearing out a week’s work.
The correct decision was obvious and required a two-line email.
Garrick sat with his hands over the keys and did not type it, because a small clear voice had just floated up from the garden—
“—but why do they close up at night?”
—and every orderly thought in Garrick’s head fell down like a wall with a bad foundation. Toby.
He’d suspected the boy would be there. She had told him, that afternoon in the roses—I’m trying letting him stay with Dot’s grandmother some afternoons—and he had said, and meant, that Toby was always welcome.
He hadn’t planned to go down. He’d planned, in fact, the opposite.
A full day of business, a wall between himself and the garden, time to think.
He’d been very clear with himself about that.
He was out the terrace doors before he’d finished being clear about it.
He came around the box hedge and there they were.
Maris knelt at the edge of the bed with her hands in the soil.
Toby crouched beside her in his neat little shirt with the knees of his jeans already black with dirt, peering with enormous seriousness at a clump of some low flowering plant she’d been dividing.
Neither of them had heard him. He was good at that—too big to be quiet by rights, and quiet anyway.
He stopped a few feet off and simply watched them for a moment, the two heads bent over the same small green mystery.
And the terror he’d been feeling suddenly disappeared, revealing the desire underneath.
Not just the heat of Saturday night, but something quieter and more dangerous.
He wanted this. The two of them in his garden with the small serious voice asking why.
Toby looked up, and his face lit up. He scrambled to his feet to race over to him, then remembered his manners and came to a halt. “Mr. Garrick.”
“Toby.” Garrick walked over to join them, softening his voice to make it more suitable for a five-year-old. “You’re back.”
“Mama said I could come if I stayed out of the way of the tools.”
“You’re not in the way of the tools.”
She looked up then, sitting back on her heels, and their eyes met.
The memory of Saturday night rushed back, both the heat and the wariness.
From the look in her eyes, she was feeling it too, but it wasn’t a conversation they could have in front of the boy.
Color flooded her freckled cheeks. She looked away first, back down at her plants, and a small, rueful smile curled her lips.
“Afternoon,” she said.
“Good afternoon.”
That was all either of them managed, and it was both enough and too much. And Toby, who missed nothing, looked between the two of them with his serious little face, and thought about it.
Then he asked, “Were you on the roof yesterday?”
Garrick froze.
“On Sunday. In the afternoon.” Toby’s hazel eyes were fixed on him, earnest and direct in the way only a small child’s could be.
“When we walked past your house on the way to the café for pancakes, I looked up and there was a statue on the corner of your house that wasn’t there before. Up high. On the pointy part.”
Maris hadn’t moved either. She was watching him now, over the top of the divided plants, and there was a question in her face beneath the surprise.
She knew what he was, and she’d found him in stone once, in the garden, and had thought something had happened to him.
But she said nothing, and she let the boy ask.
“Yes,” he said. “That was me.”
Toby nodded slowly, entirely unafraid, the way he’d been unafraid the very first day, and the way his mother wasn’t afraid.
Garrick felt the same helpless thing he’d felt on the roof, the same hand closing around his chest. The boy took him as he was.
A male who turned to stone on a rooftop was simply a fact of the world to be understood, no more alarming than a plant that closed its flowers at night.
“Why?” Toby asked.
Not how. Not is it scary or does it hurt. Just why, the way he asked why the flowers closed, the way he asked why anything.
He crouched down so his eyes came nearer to level with Toby’s, and his wings settled behind him.
“It’s restful,” he said. “Kind of like sleeping.” He paused, aware of Maris watching, and aware that he was telling more of the truth than the boy had asked for. “When there’s something I need to think about, sometimes I go and be still for a while. The sun helps me be still.”
Toby considered this with the full weight of his five years. He looked up at the manor’s roofline, and the far eastern gable, small against the sky. Then he looked back at Garrick, and his brow creased, working out a problem that the grown-ups had all somehow failed to notice.
“But if the sun makes you still,” Toby said, “and you can’t move—”
Garrick waited, and the boy finished it.
“—who wakes you up?”
He didn’t answer.
The garden went on around them, bees in the roses, the river far off, Maris kneeling with a trowel forgotten in her dirty hand and her hazel eyes gone soft and stricken, watching him not answer.
And the boy stood there patient and earnest, wanting only to understand. And there was no answer he could give.