“What’s happened?”
Danny told her everything. About Colton, India, his father. By the time he finished, his voice was low and flat, as though all his emotions had leaked out of him like air from a tire.
Cassie had raised a hand to her throat, but now she reached out to touch his arm. “Dan, I’m so sorry.”
“I couldn’t even stay to pack my things. Most of my stuff’s in Enfield anyway, but”— he cleared his throat—“I couldn’t stay.”
Cassie’s blue eyes were fixed on one of his waistcoat buttons. “You’re really going to India, then?”
“I’ll be safe. People travel from England to India and back all the time.”
“I know.” She bit her lower lip, and Danny knew he owed her this moment. She’d never used to worry so much, but ever since her older brother, William, got into a fatal auto accident, her world had been tinted a little darker and a little more dangerous.
“There will be soldiers,” Danny added.
“Oh. Well, that’s good, at least.” Still, her next breath was strained. “You’ll have to tell me all about it when you come home,” she said, thumping a fist against his chest.
He thought again of that mysterious letter, lying crumpled in the drawer in his bedroom. We’ll be watching.
“Cassie, just in case something happens—”
“No,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that! You will come back.”
“Cassie, listen.” He took her wrist. “Just in case, you have to make sure Colton will be all right. Check on him for me. Make sure he’s safe. And if anything happens to me, or if I come back and they exile me from Enfield … Please promise you’ll talk to him.” Colton liked Cassie. He would listen to her.
She grimaced, and he shook her arm.
“Cassie.”
“Yes, all right. I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you.”
They stood together another minute, Danny listening to the autos passing up and down the street, the nearby whistle of a bird on a telephone wire. London seemed too familiar to leave. When he returned from India, he wondered if it would be the same: the autos coming and going, the birds singing. He wondered if his father would change his mind.
“I should be go—”
Cassie threw her arms around his neck, choking off his words. “Can’t I at least see you off, when you go?”
“Yes. I’ll be back in London on Monday.”
She kissed his cheek. “Drive safely.”
As he started up the auto, she leaned in through the open window. “I’ll talk to your dad when you’re gone. If it’ll help.”
“I don’t think it will.”
“I can always use this,” she said, pulling a wrench from her pocket.
To his amazement, a weak laugh escaped him. “Cass …” There was no way to tell her how much she meant to him. That she was the only person who could coax that laugh out of him when his world was on the brink of collapse. “Thank you.”
She backed away and he drove down the street, toward Enfield.
“You have to close your eyes,” Danny insisted.
Colton rolled them instead. “I already know what it is.”
“If you keep mouthing off, I won’t give it to you.”
Colton shut his eyes at once, and Danny grinned. It felt odd to smile after his father’s anger the previous day. But after telling Colton about the assignment and the argument, some of the weight had lifted, mostly because Colton’s reaction to the whole situation had been so simple.
“I may be similar to Evaline, but I’m not her. I won’t hurt myself while you’re gone.”
“I know you won’t, but my father—”
“Should come here.”
“What?”
“Here, to my tower. I’d like to speak with him.”
The idea seemed absurd at first, but his father would be more likely to understand if he spoke to Colton. Strangely, the conversation had made him feel better. Perhaps he’d been overreacting to something that had an easy solution.
Still, he had no idea what he would find when he returned from India.
Now, standing in the clock room, Danny watched Colton waiting, his blond eyelashes quivering impatiently against his cheeks. Danny’s chest tightened with the urge to say so many things—things that went beyond language, things that felt the way the shape of Colton’s name felt. But every other word remained cramped and messy inside his head.
He took Colton’s hand and placed the object on his palm. Colton’s eyes shot open and widened in delight. It was a photograph of Danny from the shoulders up, taken with a camera box Danny had borrowed from a friend of his mother’s. In the photo, Danny was looking at the camera, barely smiling. His hair had actually been somewhat tame that day.
“I hope you like it, because that’s the best one of the lot,” Danny said. Cassie had wanted to take more, but Danny had been exhausted after an hour of posing.
“I love it. Although I wish you were truly smiling. You look so nice when you smile and it shows in your eyes.”
Danny blushed. “It was the best I could do.”
Colton examined the photo for a while, then put it carefully in his pocket. “What about the one you took of me?”
“It didn’t come out,” Danny sighed. “I didn’t expect it would. It was all blurry and out of focus.” He took his sketchbook and a pencil from his bag. “Since the photograph didn’t work, I’d like to draw you. If … If that’s all right.”
Colton, always fond of watching Danny sketch, nodded eagerly.
Danny directed Colton to sit on a box near the clock face—Danny had cleared most of them from the room, but had left a few to use as seats—and positioned him just so. Thankfully, clock spirits could sit still for a long time, so Danny didn’t have to bark at him about moving around. The clock tower bells rang four o’clock as he sketched. He tossed away the first attempt and focused more on the second, but it was difficult to concentrate when those amber eyes were taking in Danny just as thoroughly as he was taking in Colton.
Danny carefully penciled in the tiny nuances of Colton’s face, the way his hair fell in a clockwise whorl, the small shadow of his nose against his cheek. Colton’s gaze never strayed from his own. Danny tried to capture those eyes, innocent and old and warm, but couldn’t quite manage it. He struggled to find the source behind what made those eyes so special.
It’s the way he looks at me, he realized. Like nothing the world had to offer could compare to what sat before him in that moment.
Each tiny stroke with his pencil was a plea. Don’t forget me. Don’t change the way you look at me. Please be here when I return.
When he was finished, he showed the sketch to Colton. The clock spirit examined his own face and smiled softly.
“Is that really what I look like?”
“Yes.” In my eyes.
They sat in the fading sunlight. Danny leaned beside Colton’s box, putting his head on the spirit’s thigh; he smelled of sunshine and winter mornings. Colton threaded his fingers through Danny’s hair.
“I’ll miss you.”
Neither was sure who said it first.