Chapter 29

ROWAN

The last time I stood in this study, I hung my head. Now I wish I'd lifted it much sooner. I would have seen Mum smiling from a wedding photo. Tonight I focus on eyes alive with laughter, on confetti dotting her hair, and on me standing between her and someone I'd called Dad for the first time on the day they married. Tonight he looks just as surprised to hear me say it.

Surprised?

He's shocked. The hand he runs through his grey hair shakes, and the wedding band on his finger gleams, which prompts another memory of that day. "You gave me the wedding rings to look after."

"Rings?" Here's another reminder of standing on this side of his desk so often—I face a frown. The difference tonight is that I don't see a headmaster disappointed in a student. I'm pretty sure I see concern mixed with pure confusion.

He's so baffled by me. He always was. I might as well have spoken to him in Arabic or Cornish. We've never shared a wavelength, and it would be all too easy to revert to silence like after we lost Mum as our translator, only I've had Charles as a new one, haven't I? And Luke. But it's Liam who helps me translate now, after giving me so many examples of someone else who speaks via his actions. That hard hat he gave me was one, telling me I was worth taking care of. He also rescued my glasses from a rock pool. Maybe that's why I suddenly see a pair of wedding bands through clearer lenses.

"You gave me the rings to include me, didn't you?" I nod towards the photo on the wall beside him. "You asked me to look after them so I could be part of the ceremony, right?"

"Y-yes?" This man, who I couldn't make myself call Dad even once after Mum was gone, is so hesitant that I ask another question.

"I didn't exactly have a good track record, so why did you trust me with them?"

I'm surprised that his answer is so defensive. For me. "Trust you, Rowan? Why wouldn't I? And what didn't you have a good track record with?"

"With listening to anything that wasn't music." That's how I used to be. How I am still, to be truthful. Only lately? All of my best music has been a group effort.

He's still baffled, so I try harder to find the right words for what time in Cornwall has made clearer. "I didn't have a great track record with behaving normally, did I? I was such a?—"

I picture a blackboard, still not sure what colour chalk would describe me as a student, but I don't have to choose one. My stepdad interjects with much kinder labels than I ever gave myself when I didn't fit in here.

"Exceptionally gifted? Sensitive and creative?"

I don't expect this from him either.

"You were made from exactly the same magic as your mother."

I wish Liam was with me. He'd help me stay upright at what my stepdad adds next.

"Getting to make a family with you as well as Lizzie? That felt like catching lightning in a bottle not once but twice." He glances at the wedding photo. "Of course I wanted you to be part of the happiest day of my life." He clears his throat and changes the subject, his grip on the desk a reminder of the last time I hung my head here with a graphic kiss-and-tell between us. "Rowan, did you come back because you want my permission for that production company to film here?"

The sudden switch in his tone to disgust is another reminder. Only… perhaps disgust is the wrong word. Today I have the strength to look up instead of focussing on his white knuckles, and I see something different.

He's devastated.

Almost desperate.

Torn, and tonight I have the headspace to hear why.

"I'm sorry but I can't give it. I don't want you to have anything to do with them ever again because…" He turns to that happy photo, and I get to see another version of a granite profile. He's bleak and so is this. "Because I didn't just marry your mother. I signed up to be your father. I've been responsible for so many children, I should have known how to do that. How to be that for you." He touches that photo frame before facing me again. "I didn't. I still don't. But if I thought you wanted to hear a father's advice, I'd tell you not to film with them ever again." He leans forward. "Don't reply to them, Rowan. Don't accept any of their offers. Not after what the last time cost me."

"Cost you?"

Here's another surprise glimpse of Liam. He knows how to make buildings crumple. I almost do the same when my stepdad says, "Because I lost both of you, didn't I? The moment your mother was gone, I couldn't reach you. Or help you. I couldn't connect with you at all. Music was your only solace. Then you were gone."

He's silent for a long, thin moment, and this admission stabs like a knife to my chest.

"For a while, I thought that was for the best."

He tells me why, and the sting fades.

"Because I got to see you smile again via livestream. Maybe I should have seen that as me being a failure as a father, but there was all of that bottled lightning again, so I told myself to accept that I could never be a replacement parent. Then something shifted. Week after week, your smile faded." He points at that wedding photo where I beam. "It was nothing like this one. I didn't recognise you, and I couldn't watch you struggle, so I?—"

"Came to save me."

He lets out a small, surprised sound, but that's what happened. I can see it now that Cornish breezes have blown away hazy cobwebs.

"That night, when I couldn't make myself sing, you were right there in the audience. You came backstage and said Mum would want me to come home. That was the only reason I could make it through to the end of the show. And later, you made that story go away, which must have cost you thousands." I've never thanked him for stepping into Mum's shoes, for navigating the maze I got lost in, for setting me free from a snare that I can't let Teo get trapped in. I thank him for all of that now. I also admit, "But I didn't come back to ask for your permission to let them film here. I came back because I need your help with a student."

"A student? You are teaching?" He bites his lip. "Only I heard that you pulled out of your training." And yet none of those messages on my phone were about that second failure, were they? Each text only reminded me of the code to open this school's locked gates.

So I'd always be able to come back.

I sink onto a chair then, but keep going. "I did pull out, but I've been working in a different school as an assistant." I make myself meet eyes I used to avoid. Were they always this warm and worried? "One of their students needs access to a studio. The production company has offered him access to a professional setup." My stepdad flinches in the same way I did in the playground. "Would you let him record here instead?"

He nods quickly, and that's it—mission accomplished. At least it is on the surface, but that flinch is why I still have more help to ask for. I text Luke first, hoping he can convince Teo that I'm on his side, not against him.

My second request risks disturbing ashes that might hide hot coals. I don't want to burn either of us, but if anyone can fill my hazy gap, it's this man.

I don't want to ask this. I'd rather hurl myself from a cliff, but I stand on its edge because Charles says I have good instincts, and because a different headmaster said he'd keep me in a heartbeat if I can face my past to help kids face their futures. Besides, I love a soldier who thinks I'm fearless, so here goes nothing.

I sit in a headmaster's study.

This still feels like taking a run up and leaping.

"Dad, I've got this gap." I place the roll of paper and workbook between us. "Help me bridge it?"

We endup in the hallway outside his study where I kneel and use the workbook to hold down one end of the roll of paper. My stepdad joins me, crouching, and there isn't anyone here to overhear his question, but he still speaks quietly.

"What's this for, Rowan?" He flips the workbook open, a finger tracing a list of subjects Luke once read out to me.

"It's what I need to work through if I want to stay at Glynn Harber. And I do want to stay, but a lot of the students there have had tough starts, so I need to be prepared to hear about this." I point at a PTSD heading but I picture little Hadi. "Or about any of these." My finger skims subjects that aren't only abstract topics. They're students I can't risk failing. "I'll need to know how to react so that I?—"

"Don't make things worse for them?"

I nod. He does too. This easy agreement is so different to all those times I couldn't answer his what happened questions, a contrast that means I now volunteer more information. "I don't want children to ever feel like I did."

"Which was?"

"Lost." His next nod feels like permission to keep going. "And confused about where I'd ended up. I can't be someone who kids can rely on if I can't rely on what I remember about myself, can I?" I tell him what Luke mentioned, and for a first time, I apply a word to myself that I can't keep avoiding. "Trauma blurs perception." I push my glasses up my nose. "I can't help kids through their own if my lenses stay smudged forever."

"And you need my help to clean them?"

I nod again. "So I have to go back to when things went wrong for me, and you're the only other person who saw what happened from start to finish." I pull some pens from my pocket. "I've made a start." I push the roll of paper, which unravels. So does something tightly wound inside me the moment he touches some of the earliest memories I've documented on this life path.

He murmurs, "Being in the van with Mum, and singing." This line is a bright orange ribbon threading through our travels. "Spilled peas and homemade shakers." His wedding ring gleams softly. So do his eyes when they meet mine, and I don't even try to dodge them. "You were so like her when I first met you. A true free spirit, until…"

His tracing finger reaches a smudge of stormy purple, and he gets up as if wanting distance from it.

I want distance as well, but that's only more avoidance, and I've already avoided confronting this for too long, so I join him at a window. It overlooks the school car park, the night sky above a similar stormy colour, and here's where I get honest. "I haven't been free since that contest, but I was already struggling before that."

He nods but says nothing. Maybe it's his turn to be voiceless like I was so often. Tonight I fill his silence, hoping this doesn't sound like blame. "My whole world ended with her." I picture Charles adding his own colour to a spectrum that I'm not sure I have a place on. I do tap my temple like he did while telling me that my music dial was turned up to full volume. "If I've got wiring up here for grief, I blew that circuit."

He nods again. He also clears his throat, and I've lost count of how many times I've been reminded of Liam, but here's another—he's so gritty. "Your grieving was understandable. You weren't the first student in my care to lose a parent." Here's some raw honesty from him. "But I hadn't ever grieved at the same time. Not before then. I'd go to work every morning, but I'd always stop here first." He points to the car park below us.

"Why?"

"Because this is where I saw her for the first time. Or rather, it's where I first heard you and her singing together. Lizzie was the only peripatetic tutor who brought a child along to sessions. We had words about it. She told me where I could stick my opinions about your education, and it wasn't in my pipe to smoke them."

I snort. That fierceness was pure Mum.

"She told me you were unique. That a classroom would only cage you. That you were gifted, and you went ahead and proved it."

"I did?" I don't remember this meeting.

"You can't have been any more than six or seven, but a blackbird sang, and you played its song back on your whistle. Could play almost every bird I named. We looked some up on my phone."

I do remember that.

"The next time she tutored one of my students, I tried to keep her here for longer by luring her with instruments to add to her collection. With castanets and sleigh bells. With tambourines. Never managed to keep her long term." His snort is so soft. "I used to be married to my work until I fell under her spell. With her unique take on what learning could look like, with her magic. And with the music you two made together. I watched and listened for years before I got a chance to keep you both."

It isn't lightning that zips across the night sky outside. Maybe it's a small star falling. We both watch a bright arc that abruptly blinks out before he describes another.

"We were only married for a few months. She crammed more life into them than I had into the previous fifty-five years. Couldn't believe she finally fell for me too. I've wondered…" His swallow is audible. "I've wondered since if she was subconsciously aware of what was coming. That she was only a few more headaches away from an aneurysm. Her last words were about you. I promised her that you'd be safe with me."

I picture the practice rooms I still have a key to. The codes he's sent so often. A one-way trip he arranged to an Irish place of safety, and the heart of his family that he wrapped me in far away from trouble. "I didn't know that."

"No reason you would. But again, in hindsight, the life you had before was the one that suited you best."

"Because it had no rules?"

He has a different answer, and at some point tonight, I'll stop being surprised by him. I'm not there yet.

"Because it had no limits." He crouches next to my roll of paper, touching where I started getting into trouble. Where I started failing. Where each lesson in this school lasted forever when all I wanted was to drum away my feelings. Again he has a different reason for my distraction. "How could you ever fit into a timetabled life? It was like pinning a butterfly's wings and expecting it not to struggle." He moves on to where a gap breaks my life path in two, and asks another surprising question. "Have you performed since?"

"Have I sung? Once." This truth is as gritty his voice was. "It was good."

I'm not prepared for this transformation. For this smile that feels like a first real one from him when I know that isn't true after tonight's wedding-photo reminder. Something shifts then. An old gap between us narrows enough that I can tell him, "You did exactly what she asked. You gave me what I needed."

His lips press tight together until he blows out a sharp breath and touches that gap on my roll of paper. "It didn't feel that way when this happened." His lips compress again before he blurts, "Can I talk to you about this?"

That's why I'm here, so I follow him along the hallway to another room I used to avoid. "The common room?" It used to be filled with students who didn't get me, although in hindsight, Teo didn't have more than one friend either until he started to open up. Grief had slammed my door shut. What my stepdad shows me on this common room notice board is what turned a key and locked it.

He touches the edge of a poster. "My vision of success used to involve every student getting high grades. But after the contest? After what happened to you? I couldn't avoid this gap in their curriculum." The poster shares a heading from my workbook, one beginning with the letter R that he says is now part of every student's learning.

"Relationships should always be two-way. Respectful." He reads some more from this poster before his gaze meets mine, eye contact almost impossible to maintain when he murmurs, "Should always be consensual, not coercive."

Tonight, his gaze is a different kind of spotlight, one I don't have to find my voice under.

He speaks for me.

"You changed right in front of my eyes on that livestream, Rowan. I heard you say things I knew you normally wouldn't. Saw what that did to you in private. How it silenced you, little by little, and yet you kept going."

Until I couldn't.

"That photo…" He clears his throat. "It was published the day after I brought you home. It was… it was taken much earlier."

He isn't asking me a question. I don't have to say, "I don't know" or "I can't remember." He fills every gap for me.

"They knew about it and about the story and held it in reserve to… encourage your compliance." He must mentally count back from each dire boy-band performance, calculating when I'd been ordered to sing with them but had refused to. "They had both the photo and story for months, and threatened to share them if you didn't follow orders?"

Nodding has never been harder. This is even more difficult to acknowledge. "I didn't know what to do." This is a lot easier to grit out. "I just wanted to come home."

"But you felt like you didn't have one?"

Just like that, I'm back in a garden with Luke listing another kid's trauma. I'm also back with Charles scratching a C into damp sand before four other initials. And I'm back in a library with a padre and a small boy who needed respite before his pain could come out.

"Rowan," my stepdad asks so quietly, so gently, so full of apprehension. "Do you remember anything at all about when that photo was taken?"

When I shake my head, he shifts slightly, lifting a hand, which shakes again like when I marched into his study without knocking or waiting.

This time, he's the one of us who keeps marching forward. He touches another word on a poster designed to help students navigate a world where some people are born to sing and others are born to take advantage. It gives simple how-to-stay-safe guidance, like keeping drinks covered in nightclubs and at parties.

It also gives a name for my own R-word suspicions.

Rohypnol.