Chapter Twenty-Five

When I woke up I was in my own bedroom. There were three duvets piled up on the bed, so it was a little like being buried alive, but otherwise everything seemed normal. My chest hurt a bit and cautious examination told me that I had scrapes and scratches all over me. I groaned and tried to turn over under the immense weight of wadding.

‘Oh, hello.’ Almost shyly, Phinn came through the narrow door. ‘How are you? I mean, you’re obviously better because you’re not, you know, unconscious or anything.’

He looked amazing. Okay, he was wearing a weird amalgamation of what looked like Link and Caro’s clothes, and his hair had dried into a combination of dreadlocks and quiffs, like Bob Marley doing an Elvis impression, but his smile was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

‘You saved my life,’ I said, almost wonderingly. ‘You rode my horse into the water and saved my life.’

Another grin. ‘I hear that if I can overcome another phobia within the next twenty-four hours I get some kind of medal,’ he said and came over and sat on the side of the bed. ‘Duke of Edinburgh or something.’

I rubbed the back of my hand over my eyes. ‘Probably not that one.’ I coughed. My chest hurt and my brain felt as though I was thinking through treacle. ‘Why are you here?’

He looked wild. Gorgeous, but wild, as if he’d been up for days, unshaven and the collar of what looked like one of Link’s rugby shirts was sticking out from under an old hunting jacket on one side. ‘Reasons,’ he said.

We stared at one another for a moment or two.

‘I missed you,’ I said quietly, at last.

He inclined his head slowly.

‘You never really gave me a chance to say anything. Before you went.’ I spoke very fast, as though the words had been dammed up behind my heart for too long and were now falling over one another to get out. ‘And you’d just made love to me like no one has ever done before, like I’ve never given anyone the chance to before, and I’d just found out about my mother being ill and then you left me, Phinn. You left me.’

‘I know. And I came back to talk to you, because I wanted to make it right. I had an idea that I could try. But I still thought I was a fake, that night, I thought it was fake, and that I was jealous of Tim because he was more of a man than I could be. But really …’ He took half a step back and slowly uncurled a hand that I saw he had clenched. And if the bluey-grey colour of his knuckles was anything to go by, it had been clenched a long, long time. ‘I came back,’ he said carefully, ‘because of this.’

At first all I could see were the indentations in his palm, but then my eyes focused on a small, white piece of plastic sitting astride his lifeline. The thing he’d tried to show me on the bridge.

‘Lego? You came back because of Lego?’

‘Lego and lights and your mad horse, and Link … is there any word for “horse” that begins with L? Seems a shame to ruin alliterative moments on that monster. Love.’

Love. The word hung.

‘I thought you’d gone for good this time.’

‘I thought I had. But then there was this.’ He juggled the Lego brick from hand to hand. ‘A little boy telling me I was his hero like he meant it, and I realised that I didn’t have to be a Death Star when I really wanted to be Diagon Alley. Not any more.’ He caught hold of my hand and stood, all in one fluid movement. ‘I didn’t think I deserved you, Molly. I didn’t think I deserved anything.’

He bent down, put his face close to mine. ‘Suze and my parents and everything … I’ve worked all my life to be good enough for other people.’ So close now I could feel the heat of his skin. ‘But yesterday I realised I don’t have to be good enough for other people.’ A gentle, almost trembling hand pushed my hair away from my face, while those brilliant, dark eyes held me, deeper than space. His lips touched mine for a second, then he was away again. ‘And then Link told me … well, something that showed me I could be whatever I wanted. If I let myself. And I realised I’d really just been making excuses all this time, that I didn’t have to conform to whatever I thought I had to be, I just need to be good enough for myself … Oh, and you, obviously, I need to be good enough for you. Am I, Molly? Can I ever be good enough for you?’

I looked at him before I spoke. A pat, quick-returned reply would sound insincere, but also I really just wanted to look at him. Lean and dark, those sharp eyes softened by glasses but their quick gaze still as bright, still as full of that fierce intelligence. And I didn’t see a soft man, a man who should have been more manly. I didn’t see someone so far down the alphabet that he couldn’t touch alpha with a pole. I saw a man who overcame his fears, for me. A man I loved.

‘You don’t have to be good, Phinn.’ Now it was my turn to lean in, to move my lips to his cheek and whisper in his ear. ‘You only have to be you.’

He kicked his feet up and lay on the bed next to me, shoving several hundredweight of duvet out of the way so that we could touch. We kissed, a long, deep kiss and I closed my eyes to appreciate the taste of him, the salty smell of his skin and the feel of his body’s angles and planes resting against me. Eventually he moved, rocking his weight away from me although I stayed with my head nestled into the collar of his shirt and his hand still raked into my hair.

‘While you were gone, I read something,’ I said slowly. I didn’t know whether this was the right place to introduce it or not. ‘In the folklore book. About the lights.’

‘What the Alice lights?’ Phinn looked down at me. His whole face was relaxed, his eyes huge, sparkling with lights of their own. He’d got his boots up on the bed, but I didn’t have the heart to reprimand him, not when he looked like he was modelling for a soft furnishing warehouse.

‘Yep. This is Yorkshire,’ I said.

‘Um, yes.’ He held up a hand. ‘Been here a while now, think I’d have spotted it being Cornwall.’

‘Alice, Phinn.’ I coughed again. ‘We’ve been hearing it as A.L.I.C.E, because we’re not from round here. But it’s not.’

His eyes flickered, he was doing that thing he did, where he slotted ideas in, made connections. Link was right, it was phenomenal to watch him. ‘Allus,’ he said, after a moment. ‘They’re called the Allus Lights. As in …?’

‘As in “always”, Phinn. Dialect.’

A serious look. ‘Always is a long time, Molly,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’ve been promised “always” before.’

‘But never backed up by UAPs, though.’ I reached out a hand from under the covers and touched his face. ‘And I’m pretty sure the universe knows what it’s talking about.’