“It’s okay!” His thumb rubs the back of my hand. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you don’t need to know. Five out of five. You’re Celine Bangura. What else could it be?”
“She said I’m not a creative thinker.”
“Pfft.” Brad rolls his eyes. “What does Katharine Breakspeare know, anyway? Hey, Cel, look at that.” He nods, and I realize he’s brought me out to a long hallway with a wall of impressionist portraits showing celebrity guests who’ve stayed here. “Is that Freddie Mercury?” he asks.
I squint up at the portrait. “Can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“No way Freddie Mercury stayed here.”
“But the teeth,” Brad says reasonably. “We should Google it. Where’s your phone?” Just like that, he drip, drip, drips oil onto my squeaky tin man joints and I feel myself loosen up. A bit. A fraction. Enough. By the time we’re all finished with our meetings and heading to the dessert café, I seem perfectly fine. Thomas doesn’t show up, but the rest of us pile into a booth, and Aurora coos over the menu’s gluten-free options and Raj eats so much ice cream cake he’s almost sick, and I realize I genuinely missed them, and the distant ringing in my ears nearly goes away, and Brad holds my hand under the table all night.
Aurora gives me several sly and significant looks, but I very maturely do not engage.
By the time we call it a day and separate, I think I’m fine. The ringing is still there but it’s so faint I can almost forget it. Brad and I are still holding hands as we walk across Trinity Square toward the car park, and the streetlights everywhere make the rain-slick paving slabs gleam like silver. A group of guys barely older than us arrange shabby-looking instruments a few meters away and put out an open guitar case for tips. I don’t know how they can play when it’s this cold; my fingers would riot if Brad’s weren’t keeping me warm.
“I don’t think scores matter at this stage, anyway,” he’s saying. “That first expedition—it’s just practice. Glen Finglas is more heavily weighted. And we know our strengths and weaknesses now, so we can do even better. This is still anyone’s game.” He pauses, giving me space to respond. When I don’t, he keeps talking, cheerful as always. “I’m most looking forward to the—” He breaks off, then continues. “To finishing this whole thing. The suspense is killing me, you know?”
Except that’s not what he was going to say. I know him well enough to notice when he’s correcting himself, and it doesn’t take an expert in Brad’s interests to figure out where he was going before he hit that little catch in his voice: he’s looking forward to the ball. The Explorers’ Ball where we all celebrate and meet potential employers, including, oh yeah, my dad. I can’t believe I thought I wanted to see him, or rather, wanted him to see me. I can’t believe I thought his presence could do anything but ruin everything. I can’t believe I talked to Katharine Breakspeare and I didn’t even care, or remember everything she said, or ask her about the Harkness Oil case, or—
I don’t even want to go to the stupid ball anymore, I don’t ever want to see my dad again, I don’t—
“Celine,” Brad says, sounding so wretched, like someone out of a gothic novel, and it takes me a second to realize he sounds that way because of me. “Don’t cry,” he tells me.
I agree. Don’t cry, Celine. Seriously, please. It’s disgusting. But tears are already spilling, scalding hot, down my cheeks and off my chin at an alarming rate. Are teardrops supposed to be this huge? They’re probably steaming in the winter air. They’re probably pooling at the base of my throat like a pond. You could probably drown someone in the vicious, wavelike sobs that shudder through my chest. I press my hands to my face because I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life—I am crying, in public—but I can’t stop I can’t stop I can’t—
“Come here,” Brad says, “come on,” and puts an arm around my waist. I can’t see where we’re going, but after a few steps he pushes down on my shoulder and I sit. There’s an icy stone bench beneath me. Then Brad wraps his arms around me and I’m not cold anymore. I’m warm, but there’s still this core of ice in me with a searing, volcanic fissure right down the middle, and all kinds of terrible things are spilling out of that crack.
I take my hands away from my face and bury it in Brad’s shoulder instead. He smells like soap and curling up in bed. My fingers twist into the fabric of his coat and pull hard, too hard, but I can’t make myself be careful.
“It’s not fair.” The words rip out of me in a sob.
“I know,” he says.
He doesn’t. He can’t. But I don’t envy him for it, the way I used to. Instead, I am so, so glad, because I don’t want this for anyone.
“I shouldn’t feel like this. No one should be able to make me feel like this.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I hate this.”
“I’m sorry.”
The buskers start playing a jaunty cover of “Hotline Bling.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Brad mutters, “read the room.”
Somehow, I giggle. Very wetly. With snot. “Read the square,” I suggest.
His shoulder moves under my cheek as he huffs, a smile in his voice. “Nice. You’re being pedantic. I was worried about you for a second.”
I laugh and cry and snort and generally make a mess of myself. I can’t believe I’m sobbing on his shoulder in the middle of Nottingham. “Shoot me now.” I lift my head, clumsily wipe my cheeks with both hands, avoiding his gaze—
“Hey. Stop.” Brad puts a gentle hand on my jaw, pushes my chin up until our eyes meet. His are warm and soft and focused as he produces a tissue from God-knows-where and dabs carefully around my face.
I sniff loudly and sit there being cleaned up like a child. “This is the worst.”
“You’re welcome.” He gives me another tissue. “Blow.”
I do as I am told.
“Put that in here.” He has yet another, clean tissue—clearly he stays prepared, and why am I surprised?—spread open in his hand. I pop mine on top of it, and he wraps the whole thing up in a little parcel and puts it in his pocket. Then he pulls hand sanitizer out from his other pocket and squirts a healthy amount into my palm, and two colossal realizations hit me at once, which is deeply unfair, because lightning’s not supposed to strike twice.
I love Bradley Graeme. As in, would give him a kidney, would wash his socks, would turn into a supervillain if he died. I love him so much I almost want to say it out loud, a dangerous and horrifying prospect I am not remotely equipped to deal with right now. Luckily, I have something else to distract me.
Giselle was right.
“What if everything about me is just a reaction to him?” I whisper. The band has moved on to “Despacito.” I am convinced they’re doing this on purpose.
Brad puts a hand on my knee and squeezes. “Are you listening to me?”
I blink. “Yes?”
“Your dad is just something that happened to you,” he says. “Like that time you were sick and you ate a tub of Phish Food and all your vomit tasted like chocolate ice cream, so you don’t eat it anymore.”
I grimace. “Brad. Ew.”
“What? It’s an example. Your entire personality is not because of Phish Food,” Brad says seriously, “and it’s not because of your dad, either.”
He makes it sound so simple, but believing it is much harder. “That’s just ice cream. This is—” My whole life plan. “My Steps to Success board says—”
“Change it.”
“But that’s not the point! The point is, how many things have I done or wanted to do just to…to show someone who is never going to care and never going to change? How pathetic does that make me?” It feels like everything is slightly twisted, like my vision doesn’t align with the angle of the world around me. I thought I was someone strong. I might be the opposite.
“You know what you said to me before?” Brad asks, his voice low, his eyes pinned to mine. “You said it’s not fair. Because you, Celine, are the kind of person who cares about fairness. You’re the kind of person who wants justice, and that’s not him—that’s the opposite of him. It’s all you. So you’ve been doing the most to balance the scales. So what? That doesn’t make you pathetic. It makes you yourself. You just needed to figure out on your own that…that fairness is about you being happy, not him being punished.”
A stubborn part of me wants to insist that he’s wrong, that I’m still fucked up and this is the end of the world, but the thing is, he’s making sense. And I like sense. I can follow his logic step-by-step and I think he’s right.
I want things to be just. I want things to be good. I want harm to be made up for—the same things Katharine Breakspeare fights for when she takes on these human rights cases. That’s what I care about. That’s who I am. And maybe I’ve let that shape my choices in a way that does me no good, but choices can change. I have control over that. I have control over myself.