Chapter 10

ROWAN

The entrance to these gardens is a blast from the past. One that is flanked not only by roses, but by the same statues I remember from video clips of a contest rival visiting his family.

This is where one of my opponents grew up and where he fell in love with someone else I bad-mouthed in front of millions. Neither of them could have known why, and I won't blame them if they don't want to hear what I know will sound like weak excuses. And that's how I feel at the entrance kiosk—weak—especially now that I face someone who has to know Ed Britten and his partner, Pasha. Only…

Only I have to wipe this stain from my soul and conscience.

I have to.

It turns out that I won't get to.

"You want to see Ed and Pasha?" The woman at the entrance kiosk shakes her head. She also studies my face like Charles did, and I wonder if she recognises me from back when the men she mentions and I were portrayed as enemies.

Portrayed? I acted like a real one. I fought them both, and I fought so dirty.

My hair isn't bottle-blond these days. I'm wearing glasses, not bright blue contacts, and I'm nowhere near young enough to be a boy band member. Perhaps that's why she doesn't make that years-old connection, thank fuck. She can't do—her smile is sweetly apologetic. "Sorry, love. You've come to the right place, only they won't be back for a while."

"You mean, not until later today?" I could wait for them after this meeting. Not that I'll look forward to it, but I've lived with guilt for too many years to want to hold on to it for even a minute longer.

"No, they're away for a few weeks." She touches a pile of maps for this garden. "Will you still want one of these?"

I don't know why I feel crushed. It should be a relief to avoid this confrontation. But I can't keep on reliving that awful time over and over. Can't keep rehashing what happened and hating myself for it. Lately, that vicious circle is a snake biting its own tail and I don't know why, not when I've had years to put it all behind me.

I settle for nodding, and she hands a map over and makes an easy offer. "Here." She pushes a pad of paper across the counter along with a pen. "Why not write them a note while you're here? I'll make sure to get it to them."

A cowardly part of me cheers at getting to make excuses for being a dick on paper instead of face-to-face. The part of me who can almost still feel a brave-boy sticker on the back of a lanyard says, "I should really speak to them myself." I still take the pen and notepad. At least clutching them gives me something to do with my hands while waiting for a man I last saw on the far side of a sandpit.

I'm reminded of Luke Lawson's son as I explore the garden. It's full of bridges—ornamental ones that lead to walled sections of garden that burst with colour. With sound too, from blackbirds. I whistle, echoing their own song back to them, then I say sorry to someone I've almost walked into.

I'm apologising to a statue.

I almost laugh at my mistake before registering who must have been this statue's model, and I'm back in that loop of wishing I could get an apology over with once and for all because this is Pasha just as I remember from when I last saw him.

Someone skilled has caught the cheeky grin that won him more votes than his singing—a grin he used to toss my way at the start of the contest until I listened to the wrong orders. "Sorry," I say again and mean it. "I'm really, really sorry."

"What for?"

Luke Lawson has arrived without me hearing.

"Oh, uh…nothing." Fantastic. Another great first impression. I clutch my borrowed pad and pen with one hand and offer another. "Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Lawson."

He has to juggle his own handful of paperwork to shake with me. "Luke, please. And this is Jamila." A toddler with the same dark eyes as her brother hides behind his legs. She's only shy for a moment. I'm quieter for longer because of course this is a perfect time for my voice to die, right when I should launch my best pick-me sales pitch.

Or maybe I don't have to.

It sounds as if someone else has already made that sales pitch for me.

Luke starts with a high point. "Charles said you were very good with his children. A natural."

I've been called a lot of things in the past. I don't expect these labels.

"He said you were on their wavelength. That you were intuitive and creative." He sits on a bench near one of those little bridges and pulls the lanyard I'd left at the school from his pocket, cradling it while his little girl gets busy collecting fallen petals.

I already know what is on the lanyard's underside, although it isn't a sticker that he points out. It's that third line I filled in. "Why music therapy, Rowan?"

This flows out easily. "Because I lost my music once and it was the worst."

"When was that?"

If he's spoken with Charles, I guess he must already know this answer, but I tell him everything. Or almost. "After I lost a TV singing contest. Until then, music was all I had left. My escape."

"From?"

That's harder to answer. I guess he must see my silent struggle. I know the right words exist, lyrics I should be able to string together to explain why my life turned silent. I still haven't found them by the time he asks another question.

"You found a safer place where your music came back to you?"

This is easier to acknowledge. "Yes. Or at least, my stepdad found somewhere for me." It's still weird to link him to the one good outcome from that whole shit show. "After the contest was over, I tried going back to school but—" I almost choke before I try again. "He sent me home not long after."

"Sent you? You weren't at home already?"

Home used to be anywhere Mum was. A person, not a building. A van full of laughter. Campfires and so many mugs of hot chocolate. "No. I mean he sent me to where he grew up in Ireland. Near Tralee." About as far west as it gets. "I stayed on his brother's family farm."

He frowns.

I'm making a real hash of this, so I clarify by winding the clock further back, even though that snake with its clenched jaw fights me until this finally tumbles out in a hurry. "My mother passed away only a few months after she married. It was very sudden." I parrot what my stepdad promised. "She wouldn't have felt a thing."

"Rowan, I'm so sorry." Most people would back off from this subject. He surprises me by asking more. In fact, he's the first person to ask, "And that's where you wanted to go? To stay with your stepfather's family for a while?"

Unclenching my jaw again takes even longer.

"Take your time," he murmurs, and it does take time. Long seconds pass while a little girl gathers petals in a reminder of my little Irish cousins. They were the only good part of that shit situation, and maybe that's why I tell him, "There wasn't anywhere else for me." I eventually add, "Or anyone else. Mum was an only, like me. I don't know my real father."

I lift my chin in case he judges. He doesn't, so I continue.

"She didn't have any other family. I don't either, so it was just me and her new husband, and he didn't know what to do with me." Nerves mean I chuff out a laugh. "And I didn't know what to do with him either. That's how I ended up in a boarding school until the contest. Not one like yours." Glynn Harber couldn't be further from it. I mention the name of a school where people pay a fortune to buy their kids high grades and connections.

His eyebrows rise. "I know it. That's a top-performing Supernus Group school. Ultra-academic. Very?—"

"Strict?" There's no way I could ever chuff out laughter in that school's headmaster's study like I do now. "I couldn't wait to get out."

"And that's why you entered the contest?"

I nod. Across the pathway, Jamila nods as well, only she does it along with bobbing daisies, as if she's dancing to the kind of internal music that fills my head twenty-four seven. Seeing her bobbing to that beat helps. I talk in time with it. "I never expected I'd have to go back there with my tail between my legs. If I didn't fit in before I all but ran away to audition, it was so much worse after they all saw?—"

I don't mention the photo that made each day torture.

I can't.

I settle for saying, "I couldn't face it. I failed my exams." Failed? I locked myself into a practice room instead of sitting any. "I couldn't make myself sing, but I could bang away on a drum kit to drown out…" Everything. "That's when my stepdad sent me away."

Luke Lawson lets out a soft hum, his eyes lowered, and it takes me a moment to realise he's focused on the pen I borrowed and that I now use to tap an agitated rhythm on my borrowed pad of paper.

I'm fucking this up so badly.

I force myself to stop that worried drumming. I also drag in a slow breath, not as deep as the kind I felt rumble through Liam last night, but it helps. "Anyway," I say brightly. "The past is the past. What matters is that I've got some classroom experience and I'm actually a grade eight pianist and flautist but I can play pretty much anything."

"I saw all of that on your application. And I saw it in action in the outdoor classroom, with Charles."

That's all he says, his gaze now fixed on his daughter, who toddles between banks of daisies, and that switch of focus is better. His silence isn't. It demands that I fill this vacuum, and not with a sales pitch, so I tell him the bare bones of how I reclaimed some of what I lost.

"Getting to know my little cousins was the best part. And volunteering at the village school. I did retake my exams and got good enough grades for teacher training." I rub my sweaty palms dry on my trousers right where he can see me do it, no doubt making another great first impression.

You've got true grit.

I close my eyes, seeing who said that to me as if he believed it.

Dig deep for some more of it.

I finally open my eyes to a view of flowers and the sea glinting in the distance. The shush of the waves is rhythmic. Soft. So is this headmaster's next question, which has nothing to do with my exam grades.

"You say you got to know them. Your little Irish cousins. You didn't before living with them?"

"No." I rub my forehead, a headache threatening like Mum's used to increasingly often. "I didn't know any of them. My mum and stepdad got married quite fast. Had a tiny wedding." Just the three of us. "I hadn't met his family. And I didn't speak Gaeilge like they did at home."

"And now you're back in England and up to full speed?"

"Instrumentally?" At last, I can speak confidently. "Yes. Once I started to play for my cousins and picked up enough Gaeilge to help with reading and writing at the school, it…" I don't know how to describe what working with kids did for me. Not in a single sentence.

"It opened a locked door for you?"

"Yes." That's it exactly. "I could access everything…"

"That trauma cost you?"

"Trauma?"

That's not me.

He starts to say more, but I lurch to my feet, spotting another accident about to happen, only it isn't a lamb too close to an edge this time. It's a little girl toddling towards water.

Her father holds up a hand before I can grab her. "Jamila's okay," he promises. "Watch."

I sit again and do that, uneasy until I see what he's already noticed. There aren't any gaps in the little bridge she heads for. She toddles safely across it, her footsteps thumping against wood. Then she toddles back over, stamping harder. It's another beat I can't help but follow, tapping it out louder with my borrowed pen on the bench. She wheels around, interested, and we have a little dance party—a game of lead and follow—right when I should be selling myself rather than admitting what pops out while my hands and brain are busy.

"I still can't sing. I mean, I can do it enough to help kids stay in tune, but that's why I left my last teacher-training placement. I couldn't perform in assessments." This comes out so weakly. "Getting that spot was pretty much the only time my stepdad's ever been happy with me. Can't say I'm looking forward to telling him I walked out."

I still haven't answered a message I knew would be from him last night. It can stay unanswered.

Luke changes the subject, or that's what I think he does when he gestures at the bridge and mentions his son's own performance issue. "Hadi can't do what Jamila is doing right now. Show him a bridge and his response is fear. He freezes."

I nod. I saw it happen and recognised his silent panic, didn't I? Now I sit in sunshine but I rub my arms, listening to the reason for it.

"Apart from Jamila, Hadi's entire family was wiped out when a bridge was shelled near Aleppo. He watched that bridge blow up and take his mother and father with it. His older siblings and the rest of his family, all gone in split seconds with no warning. Jamila's the only other survivor, and she's too young to really remember."

He touches his temple.

"It will all still be up here. Because that's what trauma does. It sticks, sometimes in a closed compartment. Sometimes in compartments that leak poison across a lifetime, saying you're not safe. Being one of her adoptive parents means I need to bear that in mind in the future. Hadi was a few years older. He can verbalise parts of what he witnessed. The quicker we give him the language and skills to help him work through it, the faster he'll be able to manage life without staying frozen."

That makes me freezing in front of a row judges or in university assessments seem pathetic until he continues.

"Hadi's trauma response is entirely natural. It's designed to keep him alive and kicking. That's what any trauma response does. They all flood our endocrine systems with fight-or-flight juice. Or freeze-and-fawn juice."

"Fawn?"

"People-pleasing. Doing whatever it takes to avoid conflict." He taps what rests on his own lap—a workbook, I think, which is confirmed when he flips a few pages. "Here's another classic response."

Freezing.

He gives more detail. "Ever wonder why people stay in terrible situations?" He watches his daughter while saying, "Helping children break out of those frozen holding patterns is a large part of our work at Glynn Harber."

There's no reason for ice to spread inside me, but I freeze in bright spring sunshine when this little girl's thumping footsteps are a sudden reminder of the door of a recording studio thudding closed with me trapped inside.

Luke Lawson can't notice my reaction. He flips more pages. "Leaving children to fawn, freeze, fight, or flee after adverse childhood experiences can limit their life chances. It's that simple and that complex." He tilts that workbook my way, showing me another heading.

"Trauma-informed training?"

He nods. "It's vital to our practice. Not all of our children need it, but some of them have been through ordeals to reach us." He repeats what the padre told me. "We have to meet them exactly where they are to walk them through each reoccurrence. Being that person for them takes understanding because they'll test us. These aren't snowflakes. They're survivors with rock-hard defences. Defences it takes real experience to chip through."

Experience?

I've hardly any.

My heart falls until he adds, "Like yours."

"Mine?"

"Yes." Luke Lawson can't have read the headmaster handbook. He doesn't know that his stern mask slips each time he mentions his children. "Hadi is old enough to remember being bereaved with zero warning and then displaced. He was sent to live with virtual strangers, surrounded by a different language than the one that used to spell safety and comfort to him. What would you call that, Rowan?"

There's something in my throat.

I can't say the word traumatic around it, not when I could also say familiar.

I make myself verbalise this. "No one blew up a bridge in front of me." He shouldn't compare us, not when I still have a stepparent, even if I don't really know or understand him. "My mother's husband made sure I had a place at one of the best schools in the country. That's hardly the same as me surviving warfare, is it?"

"Her husband? Not someone you consider a father?"

Mum loved it if I called him Dad. I'd started to, before… I close my eyes again, remembering the few times it slipped out. She'd been so fucking happy. I open them to another blurred view, and what the fuck is up with my eyes lately? I clear my throat and force this out. "He gave me access to a school with plenty of instruments and a professional studio setup. He even gave me permission to take a break from studying to follow my dream. That's hardly traumatic, is it?"

He doesn't answer. He only steeples his fingers before saying, "Educators who understand themselves bring the most to teaching. That's why we'll gather all of our new teachers and support staff for trauma-informed training before the new school year starts in September. That training involves this workbook."

He flicks to a contents page and, unlike the topics he traces with his finger, his voice is soft.

"Substance abuse and self-harm. Consent issues and coercion. Eating disorders and dysphoria. Autism and masking. You don't need to be an expert on any of these subjects, Rowan. We have those on hand. Counsellors like Reece Trelawney, who helps everyone at Glynn Harber. But mapping out our own life paths with him is a compulsory first stage for new staff because being a rock for anyone else means knowing yourself and your limits. You could make a start however you like. Write a letter, a song—as long as it helps you know yourself better."

Luke tilts his head in the direction of his daughter, who stops collecting petals to listen to a blackbird singing high above her. "Doing that is nonnegotiable for good reason. When we understand what we unconsciously bring to the classroom? When we're able to cross our own scary bridges? That's when our children really flourish."

That use of our and we pushes against a stiff door just hard enough that something dark slithers into Cornish daylight.

"You advertised for a music teacher. What if I can't ever make myself perform in public?" It's wild that all of my freedom plans used to hang on reaching the finale of a singing contest. I froze under a spotlight before the world got to hear the first song I'd ever written. Now a second chance at winning seems even further from me.

Luke Lawson throws me a lifeline, only shaped like a promise instead of a rope.

"You can sing with children?"

I nod.

"Then that's all I'd ask of you, but knowing yourself first before training to teach with us in September is still crucial."

That's another Liam reminder.

Save yourself first.

Luke Lawson stands. I do as well, and I'd thought my legs had been weak while on the side of that cliff. That's nothing compared to trying to stay upright when he says, "Yesterday, you were on that bridge every step of the way with Hadi. I'd like to return the favour."

"You mean, I can come back in September?"

Luke Lawson's gaze meets mine, and maintaining eye contact this unwavering is hard. So is hearing what sounds like a final answer.

"No."

I slump.

"Not because you aren't ready here, Rowan." He touches his own chest, and my heart clenches. "You're almost the full package. Observant, attuned, musically gifted? You'd be a very welcome trainee teacher in September. But it's here that I need to be sure of." He touches his temple. "Because children are the absolute best, but they're also the absolute worst. They'll find wherever you're bruised and poke it hard if that deflects attention from where they're hurting. Charles says that one of your bruises is public. Very public, to anyone with the right information."

I slump even further as he tells me what that means.

"Some of our more challenging students could use it to confront you. It would be wrong to let you face that without strategies to manage those moments. My staff can't be in survival mode, Rowan. There's no fawning or freezing possible in a classroom. Fight or flight can't ever be an option. Not when vulnerable students need us to be their rocks to lean on. Dependable. Steady. Self-aware. That's what they need and why I don't want you to come back in September."

Above us, that blackbird sings again. Its repeat tune is a bittersweet reminder, because second songs really aren't for me, are they? Nor are second chances. I had one and lost it in front of TV viewers. Now I lose another in a Cornish sculpture garden.

At least, that's what I think until Luke Lawson gives me a lanyard complete with a hidden sticker.

"Rowan, I want you back much sooner."