The new year arrives in a curl of Hogmanay smoke, salt on the sills and bits of holly, rowan, and mistletoe tacked to every sash in the house. Mrs. Nesbit is stolid and true to her Presbyterian roots, but there are other roots that run deeper and, like a good Presbyterian Scot, Mrs. Nesbit is practical enough to appease those gods and spirits as well. Alec admires the way she hedges her bets, but perhaps that’s to be expected in a city where pagan rites like saining the house with juniper smoke and first footing the houses of your friends with gifts of fruitcake and whisky had filled the gap left by the centuries-old half-banishment of Christmas.
Alec had not missed Christmas when he and June had first come to Scotland. The absence of Christmas and Boxing Day as holidays had been puzzling, to be sure, but it had helped as well while the two of them had made their transition into this new life, away from Fenbourne. In Fenbourne Christmas had been nearly unbearable after the war—with his aunt gone, the cottage on the sluice road had never come to feel quite the same. And all through the village there were too many ghosts, too much looking over his shoulder for the dead and gone, hearing their lost, familiar voices in the tolling of the bells. There had been no way to attend the Christmas sermons in their beloved St. Anne’s, with the remnants of the vicarage looming so close, and the new cleric no match for June’s father. And it wasn’t as though not going had felt much better, honestly. Hearing the bells across the frozen fens, the rolling notes skating along the ice and the low clouds . . . It had felt like invitation and banishment both.
In every particular, the fire festivals and ritual cleaning of Scotland’s solstice had made for a much clearer rebirth for the pair of them. Alec has liked Hogmanay since that first winter here, although he and June had only joined the torchlit masses on their trek through the cobbled streets once, early on. Once had been enough for the half-drunken, wobble-voiced chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” that marked the start of the year. The throngs had bested him—all those people crowded together and making the best of the cold, every breath punctuated by the writhing crackle of bonfires popping through the night . . . It was hardly a German barracks, but the clamor and jostle had hit too close to home. It was still too soon after his return from that vile time in Odessa and Stalag Luft I, and it had left him shuddering with revenant fears, and eager for the celebratory drams on offer across the city. And even when he couldn’t hear the fires, the inescapable smoke had reminded him of his last days in India, of Bombay, and the impossible stench of the cleansing flames that had taken his parents from him, smoke rising blackly behind the Gateway as his ship pushed out and away.
But still, despite the echoes, despite all of it, something about Hogmanay and its conflagrations appeal to him. He had tried to explain it to June, but even she, knowing him all the way through, had regarded him, perplexed by the seeming contradiction. Perhaps, in the beginnings of his mother’s Tennant blood, there is some ancient Pict or Viking swimming quietly through him, waiting to welcome the lengthening days with fire. Or perhaps the pyres that had cleansed Bombay had left an unexpected mark, a handhold of sorts—the stain of it terrible but familiar.
He feels hopeful, stepping into this new decade, although he can’t say why exactly. The household feels marginally more stable since June’s return from Oxford, although not quite as steady as he would like. Losing Ursa has created a dreadful void in his days. It would be so much easier if nobody went away, if things could just stay the same for a moment. His hand drops sometimes from the arm of his chair as it always has, but now there is that jarring sense of free fall, as if the engines have stalled out, when there is no sleek dark head to lay his palm against.
And it’s not just Ursa’s absence that leaves him feeling so unsettled. As long as he’s known her, June has withdrawn a bit when she’s trying to work something out, and although she’s back, although the family feels whole once more, there are days when June seems further away than ever. Sometimes it is a more genial distance—one he recognizes from their early days, when she would lose herself in maps and timetables—and he has no way to know what she is charting behind those ocean-glass eyes. But other times it feels different, more pressing, especially when it comes on the heels of a letter from one of her overseas friends. At Christmas, when he had a letter from Cullen and Maeve, that longing and confusion in his chest had opened up again as he’d fallen into remembering, just for an instant, how close he had felt to them, and that low hum of guilt. And this is June, for God’s sake, his lodestar.
Of course when the spring term starts, much too soon, it will gall her to have to work with Larimer again, particularly in the wake of what sounds like a grand Michaelmas term indeed at her old college. Still, she has a place at the university here, support for her research. And she’s home, the two of them finding their way back to each other after all those months of separation—when he’d come back from Canada, his head full of model airplanes and fresh-baked pasties and cakes, he’d been angry and hurt, half-choked with the feeling of having been blindsided by that letter of June’s. By the time he’d made his way from Liverpool to Edinburgh, he’d chewed so long on the idea of her going to Oxford that it had taken on the immense weight of a line in the sand, a gauntlet thrown.
And yet. When he’d come up the front walk last summer, and Penny had run down the steps to fling herself upon him, he had looked up at the front door and seen June standing there, that small smile gilding her face, and his heart had leapt despite the hurt. He had been so relieved to see his girls again. The next weeks had been hard, to be sure. His confusion and resentment hadn’t gone away, and there had been days in her absence when the anger had come back, when he had missed her so much his skin had hurt, when he had taken Penny to the zoo or Loch Lomond and it had felt as though the world was just the pair of them. But his future should have June woven through it, shouldn’t it? In the tapestry of his life, she is the golden thread that runs through everything, fundament and fabric at once. Without her, the center cannot hold, and the warp of the loom has nothing to weave.
But today, on a cold Twelfth Night afternoon with a sky the color of newsprint, Alec can almost believe that the bewilderment is behind them. Almost. He hovers in the foyer, feeling rather at loose ends. Livingstone & Gray are closed for the Christmas holidays, and he’s anxious to get back into the traces there, continuing the work in Leith that he’d begun with Armand in Halifax.
He moves into the drawing room and fiddles with the wireless, but the Home Service offerings today seem either excessively choral—reasonable for the Feast of the Epiphany, but not what he wants—or melodramatic narratives about nurses and soldiers. This is such a disorienting day, not least because he can remember how Twelfth Night felt at the vicarage when he was a boy, he and June each hoping to find the lucky bean in the special crumbly fruitcake Cook had baked each year. It had always seemed like such a triumph to find the bean and wear the crown, to spend the day with his aunt and the Attwells, and now and again Uncle Roger too, to sit next to June in the front pew of St. Anne’s and listen to her father’s Epiphany sermon. The church had always had a glossy, gray smell to it despite the incense and smoky, melting candles, as if the Fens had come to listen, too. In the winter there had been the smell of dogs and wet wool as well, and the peat smoke from the fires that warmed so many of the area’s homes. It could not be more different here on Shakespeare Close, where today the whole house smells of the scones Mrs. Nesbit is making, a farthing concealed in one to give luck to the finder.
He gives up on the wireless and goes to the sofa with the newest issue of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. It’s never too early to plan spring planting, and he likes the RHS’s tone, which, in addition to avoiding the overbred sound of so many other garden magazines, lauds the gardens as much as the gardeners.
Alec is basking in the scents of Mrs. Nesbit’s work and thumbing through the journal’s pages when Penny skips into the drawing room with her stuffed bear, humming a tune he doesn’t recognize.
“Daddy,” she says, stopping and laying a palm against the wireless, “I want to listen to Jim Starling.”
Alec lowers the magazine and regards her affectionately. The Jim Starling series is not at all the kind of thing he would have expected a little girl to love, centered as it is on the adventures of a working-class lad and his group of friends in the north of England, but one of Sanjay’s boys had showed her the first book, and she’d been off to the races. And now that the BBC have added a six-part Jim Starling radio show to its afternoon programming this week, she’s fallen into that, as well. He glances at his watch. “Children’s Hour comes on at five. What if I read to you while we wait?”
Penny weighs this carefully. She’s already a strong reader, and sometimes the independence asserts itself as a somewhat stubborn pride, even while she is still a little girl who likes to hear a story. She’s considering his offer when June comes downstairs.
“I have something for you, Penny,” she says, holding out a sheet of graph paper and a worn copy of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Penny goes to her mother and takes the book and the paper, regarding them curiously. June continues. “I thought I would make you a puzzle.”
Penny settles herself onto the sofa beside Alec. “This is my favorite book.”
“Yes, that’s why I chose it,” June says. “I thought it might be rather a lark if we had a way to talk to each other. Our own secret language, if you will.”
Alec smiles at her over Penny’s head, pleased by the endeavor. It’s true that Penny is in many ways very much her father’s daughter, but her intellect comes from June. Marvelous, then, that June is looking to build this connection.
Penny regards her doubtfully. “Like a code?”
“More or less,” June says. “A code is slightly different, though. This is a cipher.”
Hoping to be helpful, Alec says, “How are they different?”
June smiles at him. “A cipher uses one symbol for another,” she says. “In this, for example, there’s a key word in the book, and once you know that, you can use that word to find out which letter is substituted for which. In a code, it’s more . . . conceptual. The word ‘osprey’ might be a warning that something is going to happen.”
Penny says, “What if we called Daddy another name so people wouldn’t know who we meant?”
“Yes,” June says, beaming at her. “That is a very good example of a code.”
Penny’s face lights up. June’s praise is hard to come by. “I bet Jim Starling and his friends have a code.”
“So the key word . . .” Alec trails off.
June raises an eyebrow. “That’s half the fun, finding that.”
“Oh,” Penny says. “That sounds hard.”
“Not at all,” June says. “Here.” She sits on Penny’s other side, taking the book in one hand while she points at the paper with her other. “This one is fairly simple—the key word is the same number of letters as this block here, you see? And you see, here, how the block of letters in our cipher has a letter repeated? So one thing you can do is look through the book and find a word with repeated letters in the same spots.”
“Spots,” Alec repeats. “Funny, in a book about Dalmatians.”
June smiles at him before turning back to Penny, the two of them falling into the puzzle together. Alec sits back and watches them gladly before returning to his newspaper.
When he hears the rattle of the post being delivered, Alec gets to his feet and goes to collect it—bills, mostly, and a circular announcing a flashy new department store opening in Tollcross in the spring, but in with the rest a thick, creamy envelope embossed with the government’s golden lion and unicorn, addressed to June. And, in nearly illegible print above the lion’s head, a single word: Corbett. Alec regards it unhappily.
“Letter for you,” he says, taking it in and handing it to June. She takes it, her brow furrowed; he’s heartened when she looks as puzzled and wary as he feels. “From Corbett, I gather.”
June nods, turning the letter over in her hands. “Yes, he’s been in Vienna for some time, I told you that. Cultural attaché at the embassy, something like that.”
“I remember,” he says, although that’s only partway true. He remembers her telling him that Corbett had gone off to do something on the Continent—he’d been glad the man would be farther away than usual—but hadn’t really paid enough attention to the details, such as they were. “Couldn’t pay me to live in Vienna.”
She looks up again. “Whyever not?”
“Live among . . .” He pauses; Penny is paying attention again. “Be hard to adjust to the new language,” he says, instead of saying what he’d started with, about living with the enemy. Even thinking of it makes him feel like the walls are closing in, and for just an instant his mind freezes like a broken reel of film on Smasher’s last minutes, the soldier yelling at him with those bloody harsh consonants. No. Thank God he’s free of all that, and here instead.
Penny says, “Where’s Vienna?”
“On the Continent,” June says. “It’s the capital of Austria.”
“Oh,” Penny says. “Daddy, is Jim Starling on yet?”
He forces himself to smile. “It will be very soon, darling.”
“Okay,” she says. She lays the cipher and her book neatly on the end table. “What do you think will happen to Jim and the gang today?”
Alec beams with delight. “I suppose we’ll have to wait and find out.” He sits beside her, listening while she reminds her bear what had happened in the previous episode. The wireless warms up, and then the familiar notes of the Children’s Hour sound.
June stands. “I may go lie down a bit before supper. Penny, love, will you tell me what happened with Jim, later?”
Penny nods, already engrossed in her radio show, and Alec follows June into the hallway. “Everything all right?”
“Can’t seem to shake this headache,” June says, her face drawn. She glances down at the unopened envelope. “It could be such an adventure, living abroad. Imagine the opportunities.”
Appalled, Alec stares at her. “A bloody adventure?”
June’s brow furrows. “But, Alec—”
“No,” he says, frustrated and upset, and struggling to keep his voice low so Penny won’t hear. “Imagine—those people carrying on in German all the time?”
There’s a beat of silence, and then the flash of comprehension in her eyes. “Of course,” she says quietly then. She puts a hand to her forehead for a moment. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
As winter fades and the days lengthen, Alec’s worry gives way to hope. Whatever June has been gnawing at in her solitary way seems to have resolved, and he feels the determination of her return like the bright gleam of clouds opening after a storm. It has been a long time since she felt so present. And as he feels closer to June, the blur of Halifax recedes into memory, and Alec’s horizon clears for the first time in ages, as if the stars are guiding him true again at last.
With spring, the city explodes into bloom. Sometimes, to his surprise, Alec misses the marsh flowers and willows of the Fenlands, but that small ache is soothed when he walks through the city with Penny, who has never known any home but Shakespeare Close. She and Alec are in the habit of meandering over to Blackford Pond and looking for the foxes they have sometimes glimpsed in the filigree of thickets or climbing all the way up the hill to the ancient fort that sits at the summit. Alec is glad to have had the winter to get used to being without Ursa.
At midsummer, they take a weeklong holiday at an old croft cottage at the base of the Cairngorms in Scotland’s wild north. The cottage is gray and white stone, two rustic bedrooms and a kitchen warmed by an elderly stove that reminds Alec of the cottage in Fenbourne, and an old oaken table where he sits and writes postcards for Maeve and Cullen, Roger, and Sanjay. It’s not quite a hundred yards up the hill from the shores of Loch Morlich, and in the mornings Alec and June take their coffee sitting on the narrow slate terrace and watch the high summer clouds scud across the clear surface of the loch. The cottage is surrounded by trees, juniper and oak and ash teeming with wildlife; on their second day, Penny spots a badger trundling through the blackthorn scrub and a pair of otters frolicking in the loch’s shallows. At night, Alec lies next to June with the skein of stars visible through the window, listening to her breathe. The aurora comes once, gleaming waterfalls of blue and gold and green parading the night sky. That night, Alec turns on his side to find June awake too, and when he lays his fingers along the tender bones of her wrist, she smiles and puts her palm to his belly, smiling when he trembles.
It has been a warmer summer than usual, even this far north, the long twilight stretching out past ten, which means more time on the loch. Alec had nearly forgotten how well June swims, and he watches her slice through the water, mesmerized. Sometimes he sits with Penny in the golden sand and builds elaborate castles with walls that crumble away as fast as he can make them, the sand hissing against itself. Penny laughs and shores up the walls with stones. He watches them both, replete with all the ways one man can love.
At the end of the week, sun-pinkened and happily exhausted, they pack up the Zephyr and head south for the three-hour drive back to Edinburgh. Penny, in the back seat, is quieter than usual, and Alec thinks she’s fallen asleep until she erupts into noise just outside Kincraig.
“Daddy! Look!” She points out the window at the broad sweep of field and hillock alongside the road, where an elderly shepherd and his pair of farm collies are working the sheep. For a moment he’s puzzled—they’ve seen more sheep than he can count during their holiday—but then he realizes she’s focused on the dogs just uphill from the road when she cries out, “I want to see!”
Alec glances at June, who shrugs, her face crinkling into a smile. “Very well,” he says, and pulls over, careful not to park too close to the crumbling stone wall that borders the field. Penny piles out of the car and peers over the wall, and Alec lifts her up and sets her atop it, where she can sit and he can keep a grip on her.
“I love them,” Penny says, regarding the dogs adoringly. The dogs are impressive indeed, responding either to their own instincts or cues from the shepherd that Alec can’t identify, and before long the sheep are gathered in a pen at the far side of the field. His business done, the shepherd turns and lifts his cap to Alec, June, and Penny. Penny claps, and after a moment the shepherd whistles to the dogs and leads them across the green, pointing at a gate not far from where Alec’s parked.
Alec lifts her down from the wall, and they walk over to the gate to meet the shepherd. Up close, Alec is startled by the intensity of the dogs’ eyes, and wonders for an instant if they somehow hypnotize the sheep. Penny bends to pet them, gently tangling her hands into their soft, slightly shaggy black-and-white coats.
“They’re good lads,” the shepherd says in his thick Highland accent.
“Amazing to watch,” Alec says. The tiny whorls of cowlick at the larger dog’s withers remind him of Ursa, and he’s afraid that if he reaches out to pet this dog it will just make him sad. Penny, though, seems almost starved for that contact.
June says, “It hardly seems as if you’re giving them commands at all.”
“Some,” the shepherd says. “Most of it’s sign and whistle, rather than words.”
“Our dog went to heaven,” Penny says morosely.
The old man’s face softens. “Terrible thing.”
“She was old,” June says softly, laying her fingers across Penny’s shoulder. “Such a good dog, though.”
Penny nods and bends to hug one of the sheepdogs around the neck, and he wags his tail.
“That’s Tip,” the shepherd says. “Got another back to the barn with a litter by Tom, there.” He gestures with his walking stick at the second sheepdog.
“I can’t get over how clever they are,” June says, her eyes roaming the dogs. “Thank you so much for letting us say hello to them.”
The shepherd, his eyes twinkling, says, “Aye. Be a treat for the lassie to come see the pups, I reckon.”
Penny lets out a delighted squeal, and Alec exchanges a glance with June. “No harm in looking, I suppose.”
Not twenty minutes later Alec finds himself crouching by the flat stone stoop of the farmhouse, puppies clambering over his shoes. Their dam lounges watchfully nearby while Tom and Tip drink thirstily from a trough at the side of the house. Two of the puppies have glossy black-and-white coats like the larger dogs, but the third is a rich blue merle, swirls and gobbets of black mixed through the silver, one sharp eye nearly copper in the sunlight and the other a pale blue.
“Daddy,” Penny says breathlessly, “look at his eyes. And his ears.”
“They’re all akimbo,” June says.
Alec laughs, and the puppy tilts his head, watching the three of them intently, one ear tipped brightly skyward, the other flopping rakishly down toward the patch over his blue eye.
“He’s so little,” Penny says, dropping to sit on the ground. She takes the puppy’s paw and shakes, her face serious. The puppy regards her hand, pawing at her knee when she lets his paw go, and she giggles.
A silver-and-white tomcat creeps out of the barn, pausing when he sees them all, and all three puppies lunge toward him, barking madly.
June smiles at Alec, her eyes bright. “They’re awfully silly, aren’t they?”
Alec nods. The two black-and-white puppies are barking at the cat as if they’re trying to tree him, but the tom, nearly as tall as they are, ignores them as he sits and pointedly washes his forepaws. Alec gestures at the small silvery pup, who has crouched low and is staring at the cat the way the older dogs had stared at the sheep, stalking ever closer. The cat turns to regard him and puts his ears back before retreating back into the barn.
The shepherd points at the merle. “Canny, that’n.”
“I wish I had sheep,” Penny says. The shepherd laughs.
“I think sheep might be more bother than we probably need at home,” Alec says. June chuckles.
Penny eyes them both reproachfully. “But I love him.”
“I know,” June says, “but he’s got a job to do when he’s older. He’s not really a city dog.”
“He’s special,” the shepherd says. “Runt of the litter, and sickly to boot. Weren’t certain he’d come through.”
“But he’s the best one,” Penny says. “He’s the prettiest and the best.”
“I really do love his color,” June says. She kneels and claps her hands, and all three puppies gallop back to her, all paws and noses and tiny pinprick teeth. She glances at Alec. “Penny, perhaps we should say hello to the puppies’ mother, don’t you think? We’ve talked to all the dogs but her.” When Penny scrambles to her feet and darts off to the adult dogs, June turns to Alec. “You had such fun training Ursa,” she says, quietly enough that Penny won’t hear. “Think what you could do with a dog like this, or what Penny could do.”
“God, yes,” Alec says, wondering if the shepherd might be willing to part with the puppy. “But you said it yourself. These are working dogs.”
“Yes, they are. But, Alec? If you want to do this . . . I should think it’s time.”
He looks down at the swirl of puppies, warmed by this sudden swell of possibility. Nothing could be less practical than getting a puppy on impulse, from a farm in the middle of nowhere, three hours from home, but what a thundering great joy it would be, having a dog in the house again. He glances at Penny, now crouched on the ground with all three puppies and their dam, listening to his daughter’s delighted giggles as the merle puppy licks her nose. He is so unlike Ursa, except for those whorls and feathers, but Penny’s right—he is far and away the best of the litter, runt or not.
When he turns back to June, she is smiling broadly at him. Alec turns to the shepherd, trying to organize his thoughts around the pleasure moving through him like breath. “So. Any chance?”
By the time they reach Shakespeare Close, Penny has named the pup Lucky, after her favorite of the 101 Dalmatians, and taught him to shake hands with her. He has proven to be remarkably steady in the car, and back at home Alec finds him extraordinarily responsive to training. Lucky is deaf in one ear, and so Alec works him with visual cues, the way he’d seen the shepherd do with the other dogs. Mrs. Nesbit regards Lucky suspiciously at first, until he learns to stop messing the floors, and when Penny teaches him to greet her by sitting and offering his paw, the housekeeper is as charmed as the rest of them.
Alec hasn’t felt so close to June in years, as if she had hidden behind her crossword puzzles and mathematics and the chores of academia. He feels her presence differently now that she doesn’t seem to be listening for something else. Whatever has distracted her from him—from them—has been let go. They talk more now, like they used to. And even when they’re not talking, they spend more time close together, Alec’s head in June’s lap while they read on the sofa, her hand flat against his chest or curling through his hair. The world outside Shakespeare Close is full of confusion, but for the first time in a very long while, Alec’s world feels whole.
A few days into August, Alec and June sit down at the kitchen table for a Sunday night game of cribbage. He takes his time readying the board and the deck of cards while June pours them each a cup of tea. He shuffles twice, and as he’s laying the deck facedown to wait for June to cut for dealer, her hand jerks away from her, and the tea spills across the table.
“Bloody hell,” she says, her face tight, as Alec lunges to his feet and takes the teapot from her, setting it on the counter. He grabs a cloth and turns to sop up the spilled tea, but June is still standing, watching her hand shake. “I can’t make it stop. This happened last week, but only for a moment.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Alec throws the wet cloth into the sink and steps closer, taking her hand in his. The shaking slows, but her fingers are still trembling like a sparrow in his palm.
“It was only a moment,” she repeats.
“Has it happened before that? Anything like this?”
“Not exactly this, no. The shaking . . . Every now and again, I suppose? But last week was the only other . . .” She frowns. “I suppose you’d call it a convulsion of sorts?”
“Perhaps,” Alec says. “We should get you to the doctor, June.”
June sighs. “Yes, you’re right. I’ll ring the surgery tomorrow.”
Alec nods. The small animal of June’s hand seems so separate from her, and he closes his own hand around it as well as he can and leans close to her, touching his forehead gently to hers, as he used to do when they were much younger. Sweet June. He tries to put on a brave smile for her. Whatever this is, they’ll suss it out and make it right.
The next morning Alec, against his better judgment, lets June send him off to work. June’s hand is open again, and the quiver has gone; she promises him she’ll ring the doctor and make an appointment, that she’s fine, that he’ll miss nothing. He makes his fretful way to Leith, the roads and buses half-empty with so many people off on holiday, and at the shipyard he sits with Sanjay, talking about the racing sloop that’s finally starting to come together after a year of planning since Halifax. The day creeps on until, using the summer holidays as an excuse, Alec leaves Livingstone & Gray as early as he can and heads back to the house. He knows he could have picked up the telephone and rung June for an update; he knows as well that if she had had something to tell him she would have called. But he feels sure that there is a fine line between asking her to make an appointment and doing anything that she might consider hounding her about it. Somehow, arriving home early feels less pushy.
But when he gets home, he finds that June has gone out. Lucky and Penny are in the garden, and Mrs. Nesbit takes him aside. “Mrs. Oswin tried to ring you, but you’d started home already.” She pulls a folded note from her apron pocket. “She left this for you.”
Alec thanks her and takes the note—June has gone to see a doctor whose name he doesn’t recognize at the hospital pavilion up the road. Alec frowns down at June’s careful printing, seeing shakes in the lines of letters where perhaps there are none. Why hasn’t she gone to the family’s GP? He folds the note into his pocket, hugs Penny, and tells Mrs. Nesbit he’ll be back as soon as he can, then sets off.
At the hospital, he makes his way through the maze of corridors in the new wing, looking for the right suite of rooms. His steps slow as he realizes that the hallway he’s in connects to the old military pavilion, where he used to come for his appointments with Captain Carnaby. Why is June here? His heart is beating too fast; nothing makes sense, and the sounds and bustle of the hospital are increasingly distracting with their glaze of memory. When he finally finds the right office number, he pushes the door open.
The receptionist, an older woman with steel-colored hair, looks up at him with a brisk smile. “May I help you?”
“I’m here for my wife,” Alec says, trying to keep his voice even. “June Oswin.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” she says, her tone softening just a bit. “If you’ll take a seat. I will let Captain Grayson know you’re here.” The receptionist nods and picks up the phone. After a short pause she tells the doctor that Alec’s waiting, then hangs up. “He’ll be with you as soon as he can.”
“Thank you,” Alec says, resigning himself to what he hopes is a short wait. He stares around the room—the clock is ticking too loudly, and the blinds have settled crookedly against the windowsill. All of it serves to make him more on edge, and as the clock’s hands jerk from second to second, he can’t help turning his focus back to the receptionist.
As if she feels his eyes on her, she looks up, meeting his gaze placidly. “It shouldn’t be much longer,” she says. He can’t tell if it’s meant to be soothing or an admonishment.
Her phone rings, and Alec looks up hopefully.
“Captain Grayson’s office,” she says into the phone, and pauses. “Very well, please hold.” She pushes buttons on the phone, and after another short pause says, “Captain? I have Alistair Corbett on the line for Mrs. Oswin.”
Alec’s head comes up hawk-sharp, his whole attention on the receptionist. Floss? Why is June taking a call here, of all places? Confusion avalanches over Alec as he processes the rest of what the receptionist has said. Why is Corbett calling June, and how can he possibly know to ring her here?