It was also the only tidy room in the house. The rest were in more of a crumpled state, where perhaps the boys had rushed home to change clothes or grab belongings before heading off to school, work, or the hospital. Regardless, Sherlock wasn’t there, so I pocketed the key and went back downstairs.
I checked my phone for the time. Four in the morning meant there were more places he couldn’t be than could. The school was locked up. Technically, the park was closed too, though that didn’t mean he wasn’t there, or one of any number of places that were important to him and I wouldn’t know about. There was also the very real possibility that he was going nowhere. Wandering around London like I would, taking trains or buses just to be moving, but with no real destination in mind.
Out of desperation, I thought to go back home, hoping to find him at our kitchen table with a cup of tea and a hovering Alice. But as I stepped out onto the landing of Sherlock’s stoop, the headlights of an oncoming car revealed a silhouette moving toward me, a recognizable shadow man, made ever more defined by the orange glow of his cigarette.
It hit me, then, the level of his despair. It wafted off him with every step. Or perhaps I was transferring onto him how I’d felt on a similar night, pressing my swollen face to the cool wrought iron fencing of his stoop.
Lock didn’t see me until he was standing on the bottom step, and when he did, he immediately looked away.
“Didn’t bring my keys and the spare is missing.” He took one last, long drag and then ground out the embers and tossed the dark brown butt down into the rocks. “Seems I left my bag at the . . .” He paused and then never finished what he was going to say. “I can’t get into my own house.”
I moved down a couple of steps and held out the key as an offering, but he only stared at it for a moment before fixating on my shoes.
“You rushed out tonight,” he said. “Your laces are undone.” His gaze slowly drifted up to my face, and then away as he stepped up until he was on the stair below mine. He grasped my wrist, as though he thought I might get away if he didn’t hang on to me, and he turned to face me, eye to eye, pulling me to the left until I was leaning against the wrought iron. I didn’t realize why until his fingers came up to my cheek, never quite touching my skin. “Are those tears for me?”
The street lamp. He needed light to be able to see my face. I wanted to wipe at my cheeks, bat his hand away, but I couldn’t move for the pain in his eyes. I could feel it, like it was happening again to me, only the ache was different, compounded somehow.
A few of his own tears fell just as his thumb came up to brush mine away. “I don’t like to see you cry.”
I composed myself as best I could and wiped the rest of the moisture from my cheeks with my shirtsleeve. “Then I will not.”
He took my face in his hands and shook his head, staring into my eyes. “No. Don’t hide from me. Will you . . . ?” His eyes pleaded with mine, and his voice sounded almost as broken as we both felt. “Will you tell me something true?”
I nodded, and then couldn’t think of a thing to say. Was my life so much a lie that I no longer knew truth? Or was it that I didn’t trust anything I knew to be the truth?
He waited with expectation, and I could only gaze blankly back, my mind a scattered mess. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me your last thought.”
“Your pain hurts me more than my own.” His eyes widened in a way I could only see because of our closeness. “And it scares me.”
“Why does it frighten you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t stop the pain.” I blinked away a few more tears, which he smeared with his thumbs. “I can’t make her come back and I know what that means. I can’t make it better.”
He was still for a long time. Another tear dripped from his eye to his cheek, and before I could lift a hand to dry it, he pulled me into him, wrapped his arms around me as tightly as they would go. I stood frozen in his embrace for a few seconds before I lifted my hands to hold him, tracing them up his back to his shoulders.
“You do,” he gasped in my ear when he could find his voice again. “You do make it better. Even when you shadow yourself. Just knowing you are there in the world makes it better.”
I felt something tear inside me, a gaping, open thing that left me out of breath and out of restraint, out of everything that held me together. More concerning, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to fix it.
? ? ?