Chapter 23

23

HAYDEN

I sleep right through the night with Rae beside me.

He’s gone when I wake to flickering daylight and the scent of cooking. The smell of mushrooms frying is a strong reminder of so many autumn mornings, only unless he’s become an overnight foraging expert, he could well be about to serve us poison for our breakfast.

I can’t help being tickled that he’s tried to recreate what helped to rebuild me. How I came here a shattered soccer hopeful and left a complete woodsman. A skilled le?nik, like Novacs going back for generations in Poland. I saw myself differently for my stay here, and isn’t that the same process Rae has recreated since the summer? I got the second shot I needed to see myself as skilled and successful every single time he drew me.

That giant?

He can face whatever is coming. He’s got roots to hold him steady and wings to lift him higher. I might need those in the long term. In the short term, stopping Rae from dying of mushroom poisoning is a more urgent mission. I drag on my boxers to go and make that save, only the daylight is dazzling. I blink, and by the time I can see clearly, it isn’t Rae who looks back at me.

Man, I’ve missed Aleksander’s gruff morning greetings.

Rae is with him. He turns to me, still sleep-creased but smiling. “I’ve got no idea what he just said to you.”

Translating for him is so easy. “He wants to know what the fuck time I call this. He’s been up for hours already.”

I’m interrupted by more Polish, and I can’t help laughing, booming as loudly as Mitch, which feels brand new—and needed—like I’ve taken my first deep breath since finding Rae on my doorstep.

Rae is confused. “He sounds pissed off. What’s so funny?”

“He says he’s old, not stupid enough to leave anything he cares about unprotected.” I point at the cabin. “There’s a camera. Motion activated. He saw us coming.”

Rae quietly murmurs, “I fucking hope not. Good thing we slept in the tent.”

Aleksander chooses that moment to let Rae know there’s nothing wrong with his hearing or with his English. “You better believe I turned the camera off in a hurry when the snogging started.” He makes a kissy face at me, but offers Rae a handshake. “Aleksander Wo?niak. Good to meet any friend of Hayden’s.”

He doesn’t extend a hand to me. He envelops me in a tight hug, which sets the tone for the morning. Rae gets a ringside seat, even if he can’t understand half of our conversation, although I guess he can figure out the subjects we catch up with. Rae’s hand lands on my thigh when my head hangs for a moment. Then he leaves us to it by going to get a sketchbook from the Land Rover. I can see him leaning in to look for his portfolio as Aleksander asks where I’ve been working since we last caught up at Christmas.

I tell him, and man, I wish I’d done that sooner.

I have to settle for dashing after Rae, and I’m still in my boxers so my bare chest plasters his back when I reach him.

“Steady,” he jokes. “Only one free show per old man.”

“Your portfolio.” I grasp the strap. “He needs to see it. Right now.”

So much for not knowing which image will be Rae’s last one.

He’d said he needed a real banger. Something to make readers turn back to the first page the moment they finished. He’d know it when he saw it.

Aleksander gives it to him by having nothing but empathy in his expression as he scans drawings of a child washed up by recent warfare. He also gives Rae what he needs by smiling at the giant version of me who holds hands with her. Then he blinks at the same giant offering a football to a Polish schoolboy with Glynn Harber in the background.

He flips pages faster then, seeing a pool of silver water. An otter and an owl. The tall chimneys of the school that is, and always will be, a haven for children who need a place of safety.

Now both journeys come full circle with me as the link between them. I’m in a clearing making the same mark with a hammer and nails as a Polish boy once did on the front of a diary.

“Olek W.”

Rae digs in his portfolio for a photocopy, and Aleksander touches childish handwriting with wonder. With recognition, I realise. With a fingertip that traces over the shortened version of his own name he once printed.

Aleksander says, “This is mine,” and Rae doesn’t only know a perfect final image when he sees it.

He goes ahead and draws it.

He spends days and days adding to his final drawing in this forest while I translate each time Aleksander gets emotional. His voice thickens often. Roughens. It’s good to return the favour by being here for him when memories are a combination of sweet to recall and tough to deal with.

“Yes,” Rae tells him. “The camp is still right there. Hayden cut a path into it for me. It’s pretty derelict now.”

I nod. “I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. That Dad hadn’t ever shown me where it was hidden.”

Aleksander has a potential reason for that. “Maybe because his father had a bad time. Was injured here.” He touches his temple. “He stayed isolated. Integrating wasn’t easy. Still wasn’t for me, even though I was born there. My world stopped at the camp gates. Not because it was a prison. Because we weren’t always welcome. Until…”

He next touches the edge of a mosaic Rae copied from one all three of us have stood on.

“He didn’t have the help to learn English that I did. The chances to make friends outside the camp.” Old eyes meet mine, but this comes out sounding almost childlike. “They really found the time capsule?” Worry comes next. “It was buried in a foundation. The headmaster said he would plant it there like a seed. That we could set down roots there. Has the building been demolished?” He seems resigned to this. “It was already old when I was there. I heard there was a fire.”

“No, it’s still there.” Rae finds the school website on his phone and shows it to him. “Look. They just built a new library. Renovated the art building too. I think the sports hall is next.” He pauses over a photo of the school pitch, then scrolls again only to stop dead.

“What is it?” I lean closer to see why Rae’s finger takes a turn to shake. “That’s my clearing.” I read out the heading. “‘Welcome to our new Forest School.’”

Rae meets my eyes. “It says they need a teacher.”

He has sounded certain about a lot in the last two days. Certain about us, and how we don’t need a deadline for finding a way to link our futures. He is also sure enough about this to jab a finger at me.

“They’ve already got a teacher. I’m looking right at him. All you have to do is tell Luke you want it.” Then he’s understanding. “I get why you felt like you couldn’t commit.”

Dad didn’t get a whole lot of seasons after his diagnosis. I wasn’t sure I would either.

Rae is understanding with Kirsty too when she brings the girls to camp with us one evening. He gives us space to read reports from specialists confirming how unlikely it is I’ll follow in Dad’s footsteps. Rae keeps the girls distracted while she and I talk through possibilities, and I repeat what has been on my mind since my laugh boomed out like Mitch’s. “Did you know heading the ball on purpose has been banned in competition for kids?”

She nods.

“Do you know why?” She didn’t, so I list how repeated concussive events can accumulate only to show up later. How no one can turn back the clock on early damage forming, but it can be mitigated.

“What with?”

“Lifestyle adjustments.”

“Like?”

“Like reducing stress and getting more rest. And by having plenty of peace and quiet.” That describes the opposite of my noisy, stressful, feast-or-famine workload lately, most of which was self-inflicted. “I felt like I had to do as much as I could just in case…”

I can’t pretend to be a doctor, but my hands haven’t shaken since I let go of a shit ton of worry and slept like a log for days out here. The only shaky thing left is her smile. “We’ll find out the reason, love.” She sniffs. “We’ll face whatever it is together.”

Like sunflowers.

And like one of those giant blooms Dad used to plant, I seek my own sun by finding Rae in the cabin. He is wedged between my sisters on a sagging sofa with a book on his lap, and I don’t need to see the cover to know it will be star-filled. Isla turns a page to show a kid with skinny arms holding back a huge boulder.

For a first time, I get to see how this story pans out, and how, many pages later, this kid is joined by a father he thought he’d lost to addiction.

Ava interprets. “He got his daddy back?”

Rae meets my eye before nodding. “Took a while, but yeah. It doesn’t always happen, which is what these pages in between were all about.” He flicks back to the beginning, then meets my eyes. His are dark with compassion. “We don’t always get the things we hope for, do we? The things we’d give anything in the world for.”

I nod, and he continues.

“This kid’s boulder was made of hope, and hope can be the heaviest thing to hold on to.”

Page after page shows how he wasn’t alone—other people take turns to hold his boulder for him, and I thank fuck Rae got to see this example when his own arms were shaking.

He tells my sisters, “Even if he didn’t get what he hoped for, he found out that he didn’t have to get crushed. That getting on with having a good life would only make him stronger. Strong enough to take a turn at holding on to hope for other people.”

I hold on to some hope of my own on Friday.

Hold on to it?

There’s no fucking way I’ll drop this ball for Rae. I keep a death grip on it the whole way to London.

We take the train past fields empty of wheat, and that evidence of the farming cycle should pull at me—would leave me worried about finding work this winter if I didn’t have a text message on my phone from someone else who has been hoping.

For me.

Luke Lawson: Yes, I can get you a place on that course.

Luke Lawson: Find me after school starts again on Monday. We’ll talk.

For once, I don’t dread a conversation about the future. I’m looking forward even as Rae looks back before entering that publisher’s office.

His eyes don’t dance.

They are laser-focussed, and I love to see it. I love that he isn’t alone either. He has a lord beside him, and a mentor who made a transatlantic flight to help Rae get the answer he needs to keep his project going.

And when he leaves that office later?

Rae runs. Launches himself like a missile. At me.

I catch him, and fuck anyone who looks twice at a moment of triumph so bright it has to be visible from Cornwall. Or from France, which is his next destination.

We sit in the back of a cab next with London passing. I don’t see any of it. I only see him and I listen. “I have to do this. Buy supplies and get them to where they’re needed. But I’ve had an idea.”

“About?”

“About sharing the work.” He echoes what he must have heard Kirsty tell me. “It doesn’t all have to be down to me. And I think I know a way to?—”

“Give your arms a rest?”

Rae nods. “I’ll find a way to do it, and then I’ll come back. We can figure out how to make this work then.”

That’s what we both want.

He still rakes a lip with his teeth. “I don’t know how long it will take.”

“Then I’ll come to see you.”

Rae blinks. “You’d come to France?” He shakes his head at himself just as quickly and says, “Of course you would,” and we kiss for so long that I only break off when the cab reaches St. Pancras.

I walk with him as far as I can into the station.

We both stop, other Eurostar travellers parting around us like water while Rae asks, “You’ll let me know what happens?” He slides closer. Touches my forehead with his. “Tell me everything about your tests, Hayden. Pass or fail. Good news or bad. Easy or hard decisions. I want to hear it all.”

“You will.” I’m done with holding anything in. I’m also done with holding anything back. “I’ll call you every night, yeah. Tell you a bedtime story. So fucking proud yours is going to be printed.” I also repeat what Sol told me. “The miles don’t have to matter.”

His hand holds mine. Our fingers thread. He says, “Love you,” and then he’s gone, washed along by a current that carries him away from me, but that’s okay.

I’ve waded through water for him before, haven’t I?

When it comes to Rae, nothing can stop this giant.