ISABEL DIDN’T SLEEP.
She curled in on herself in bed, trembling in shock. What the bloody hell had just happened? And why, when she was tempted to lay the blame at his door, did she feel as though she’d done something horribly wrong?
And it wasn’t just about bringing the roses in. Though that was certainly the thing that had set it off.
It was about...nerve.
She could have said the words and borne the consequences. She could have laid herself wholly bare. She could have said, “You are everything,” which she realized now was how she felt in that moment and every moment in his presence. Words calculated to terrify any man who didn’t feel the same way. She could have said, “no one else in the world will ever again have the power to hurt me because they don’t mean to me what you do.” Whether that was truth or melodrama, it was how she felt when he was around.
All of it was a dance around that little word with huge ramifications. Four letters, starting with an “L.”
And yet he’d as good as come out and said he wasn’t good at this stuff, this “heart” stuff. In the church that day when she’d caught him in the middle of staring at her as though she were a holy vision.
So she didn’t sleep. And the night was centuries long.
* * * * *
Self-loathing was at least a novel sensation, Malcolm would allow that much. His heart felt like a smoking crater on the punishing drive to London the next morning to meet with the physicians who were interested in adding him to their practice. His eyes were sandpaper dry from a night of staring at the ceiling pondering the timeless existential question: “what the fuck did I just do?”
He couldn’t close his eyes while he was driving, but that was his impulse every time he pictured Isabel’s pale, shocked face.
Granted, his world had just taken a sharp, if not unexpected blow with the sale of the building. And he was pretty sleep-deprived from all the shagging.
But that didn’t account for why the sight of those roses had slid into him like a shiv. It had bypassed reason, bypassed sense, and sank right into some raw, undefended place he hadn’t known he possessed.
The notion that he might be something as mundane as a rebound was agony.
Which told him precisely how he felt about her.
The very molecules of his world had begun to shift to include her. He hadn’t fully realized it until he saw those damn roses.
There were no pathways laid down yet in his soul for the way he felt about Isabel; he couldn’t find his way through it on his own, the way he could through Pennyroyal Green.
What was this?
He’d asked her that. How would he have answered, if he’d hadn’t been floundering? He’d just say the words that came to mind: It was magic, and it was easy, and it was rare and it scared the crap out of him, but at its center was the most blissful peace. At its center was forever.
If it was love, how could she think of leaving?
If it was love, how could he hurt her like that?
The long road to London held no answers, but he had no choice but to travel it.
* * * * *
When it was daylight, Isabel dragged her butt out of bed feeling, if not hopeful, then resolute. Still in the clothes from the night before, she got in the car and drove to the Sneath Clinic.
When Isabel pushed the door open she saw that one chair in the waiting room was occupied by a woman with beautiful white hair twisted up into a bun on her head. She was knitting. Nearby, a pair of wriggling twin boys were climbing over their young mother and attempting to color each other with what looked like sharpies. Their mother was texting something and laughing. Finn was standing in the middle of the room, holding a clipboard.
He looked up when he saw her.
“You,” Flynn said flatly.
She imagined three quarters of the Beatles had once greeted Yoko Ono just like that.
“He’s not here,” he added, a moment later. “He went to London for a couple of days.”
Her breath left her.
The twins’ mother head shot up, and the older woman paused in her knitting. Both were obviously planning to listen to this conversation avidly. The day receptionist, Lena, had frozen mid-step on her way back to her desk, then did everything but whistle casually on her saunter back to the desk.
“A couple of days? But...I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Finn studied her at her with brilliant, merciless blue eyes.
And he must have seen something in her stricken expression. Because he sighed gustily and pivoted, beckoning her with an impatient sweep of one arm for her to follow him.
She did, through the little corridor where he and Malcolm had offices.
He motioned her into his office and closed the door.
“He’s had some invitations to join other practices. As have I. That’s why he’s in London. The Falconbridge Trust voted to sell. I thought you would have known. I figured he would have told you last night. They have a few potential buyers lined up already and they’re going to move on it pretty fast.”
It was a gut punch.
“Oh, God. He didn’t tell me...he would have told me...why didn’t he..something happened last night and it kind of went off the rails so he never got around to it.”
Finn was listening to this stammering as closely she were rattling off symptoms.
“Yeah. That was pretty obvious. Saw him before he left,” Finn said grimly.
In spite of herself, she loved how much Finn obviously cared about Malcolm. The measure of a man was in his friends.
“That might be why it went off the rails,” she said, almost to herself. “The clinic.”
A one-two punch for Malcolm: Losing his home and the clinic.
Losing her.
Was that it? Could that be behind it? Dared she hope she factored?
God. She thought about that mother of lively boys sitting out in the waiting room, and the elderly woman, and to all of the other people in this region who relied on them. Finn and Malcolm would leave a crater behind if they left.
“I’m so sorry, Finn.” Her voice was raw. “I really am.”
He just sighed.
Why hadn’t Malcolm told her? He probably would have. If not for the roses.
“Malcolm...can be surprisingly unyielding when he decides to be,” Finn said suddenly.
She didn’t know what this was. Conciliatory? A warning? Helpful advice?
“You don’t say,” she said.
And even though Finn was clearly disinclined to like her given how, as far as he was concerned, she’d apparently broken his partner, his mouth tipped at the corner.
They stood in silence.
“Isabel...if you tell him I said this I’ll deny it, but I’ve never seen him like this with any other woman.”
He put his hand on the knob and opened the door.
“Like what?”
He paused to consider.
“Undone,” he said, after a moment.
The word knocked the breath from her.
And her heart, like Olivia’s must have on the day she’d almost married another man, stirred and began to raise from the dead. She could feel a sort of light surging through her.
Finn opened the door, her cue to leave. He was busy, and alone here with patients.
“Thanks, Doctor.”
“You’re welcome, Miss Redmond,” he said, striding back into the exam rooms.
Isabel took a huge draught of Pennyroyal Green air when she emerged from the Sneath building. She wished she could take it home with her as a souvenir. Daylight stung her eyes. The air nearly hurt her skin. All of her senses seemed raw and amplified.
Undone.
It was a glorious word. A gift of a word. And yet just as she had that day they’d argued about Jemima, she found she couldn’t bear the idea of Malcolm suffering at all. Even over her. His peace, and his home, had been hard-won.
She climbed into her rental car and sat for a moment in the silence and looked back at the building and way of life that would be sold out from under him, and she ached. She closed her eyes.
Funny how being an ocean away from him and all this overwhelming emotion had seemed like a viable option yesterday.
Had Lyon been driven away by a broken heart? Is that why he’d gone?
But he’d returned. And Olivia’s diary was mostly a chronicle of their life after the legend was already made. The laughter. The children. The neighbors.
The snoring.
Isabel could feel tears pressing again. She would freaking love to hear Malcolm snore again.
“Don’t take this personally, Olivia, but I don’t think I have it in me to wait as long as you did,” she said out loud. “It might just end me.”
She started the engine. Then she and switched on the car radio, and gave a start at the volume.
“....broke tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmeeee.....”
“No effing way,” she breathed.
“And that was of course Heliotrope’s ‘Your Kiss Broke Time’, from the Give AID show at Wembley,” A gravelly-voiced DJ said.
Spangles rushed over her arms. A fitting accompaniment to an epiphany.
She understood that in the end, the singer in that song might feel everything at once—rapturous, terrified, despairing, grateful.
But what he didn’t sound was sorry.
And the net result of the whole damn thing was beautiful.
All at once she knew what to do.
Malcolm had been brave in his life over and over. He’d been brave for her. He was scared now, that much was clear, and it was because of her. It was up to her to be brave for him now, braver than she’d ever been, and then let the chips fall where they may.