You call this fate?

Chapter 46

At that moment, like a perfect movie scene, the elevator dinged.

I lifted my head, then climbed to my feet. The elevator door was opening. Clara got up beside me, her face calm and tranquil and glowing with a smile—almost as if she hadn’t just told me her son was a murderer. She wrapped a hand around my arm, feeling me stagger.

Tasha stepped off the car first, already ripping off the scarf around her neck with one hand and wriggling out of her coat with the other. “What a time I had,” she declared, throwing her effects over the kitchen counter and working on her heals. “He cried twice.”

A grunt. I focused on the elevator again.

Ella was energetically employed in pushing Mr. Rodwell’s wheelchair over the threshold, Hannah’s tentative hand on the right handle to register her own feeble—unsolicited, as far as Ella was concerned—contribution. This surprised me since, I noticed, the chair had buttons on the arms and was obviously power propelled. Christopher walked behind them, keeping a restraining hand on each girl’s shoulder, probably fearing they were prone to indulge in a wild dash of Grand Theft Auto now that they had something with wheels.

Alexander Rodwell—the blanket of bruises on his face reduced to a mild discolouration on the edges, his broken foot bound up thick and secure and the edges of a bandage peeking from the open collar of his shirt—was glaring at Tasha as he bumped over the threshold. “I did not,” he said, digging his nails into the padded arms of the wheelchair as Ella saw it necessary to make a tight ninety degrees turn and park him in front of the kitchen counter.

Tasha, by now having discarded her shoes and moved on to ruffling her hair, gave him a mischievous smile. “I was there, love. I was right there.”

Clara had been silent from the moment Alex had entered the room—much like myself, I might add—but the moment he spoke, she let go of my arm and stepped forward. “My darling boy,” she whispered. She didn’t sound like she might cry anytime soon but something hitched in her throat, something that would have made the strongest person blink.

Alex turned his head to look at his mother. And me.

He might have looked tired and maybe a little too pale, but he made an effort to smile. Something took flight in my chest.

Clara rushed to him, side-stepping the couch and hopping over Tasha’s discarded shoes, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, mindful of the still healing wound as she dropped to her knees and buried her face in his chest. “Welcome home,” she said, her voice impregnated with barely controlled emotion.

He lifted a hand and placed it on her back. “Thank you, mother,” he said. He closed his eyes briefly, dark circles protruding, only to open them again and gaze at me once more. There was an expectant smile on his face. The bastard.

I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling that a welcome home party—the idea of which had been shot down by Alexander himself—would have been way better than this. At least then I would have had something to say, I imagined. One feels giddy during a party, what with everybody screaming and cheering, and can rattle off words of welcome as easily as breathing, perhaps since they lost weight with all that the others have to say.

But now everybody was watching me, Tasha going so far as to lean back on a stool and bat her eyelashes.

I swallowed, steeling myself with some effort. There is no need to feel uncomfortable. Everything is okay. Everything is normal.

I smiled, heartened to realise that it wasn’t forced. Even now, knowing something of his past that wasn’t exactly rainbows and cherries, I couldn’t bring myself to be repulsed by him, to be scared of him. Instead, I felt even more comfortable than I had before, now that the shock of the revelation had passed. I felt closer to understanding him, and perhaps could now reconcile myself to the feeling that he could understand me too. Perhaps.