By the time morning was breaking across a warm summer city, she knew she couldn’t go back to Harry’s without first getting the necklaces back. So instead she went to work the next day, tried to focus on the current acquisitions she had in progress, and sat in on two meetings about finance to which she paid little attention. For most of the morning her focus remained on the cheerful messages she was sending to Daniel, the whole show of it making her feel a bit sick. Telling him that she missed him created a hole inside her, a sort of void. Who was she now? What was real anymore? If she played nice, she hoped he might come home that night and bring the jewelry with him. But the whole process left her feeling as if she had eaten bad food, a taste in her mouth and a sense of dread in her guts. By lunchtime, when she stood at the sink to wash her hands, she couldn’t bear to look at her reflection in the mirror.
Daniel didn’t come home that night, never answered any of her messages. Tabitha waited, sitting in the chair they had recovered last year, choosing the material together. Another Band-Aid on a gaping wound that opened up on the day he first hit her. Three days passed like that without a word, barely working, calling and messaging in an attempt to find out where he was. But despite her fears for the jewelry, in Daniel’s absence her confidence surged, along with a sense of hope, and when she packed a small bag with some clothes and her passport, which she hid in the back of the linen cupboard, she felt stronger than she had in years. But most of the time she spent thinking about Harry, and about how she had failed to keep that promise she had written and stuck to the fridge before she left. How on the very day she promised him that he could trust her, she had let him down.
Friends called her but she didn’t pick up. Running at the gym killed some time, but she left without breaking a sweat. Even books seemed to hold little more than ants crawling across the pages in the place of written word. In the end she started flicking through the channels on the television, anything to while away the time. When she came across a show about bridal dresses, she settled on that. It was harmless enough, but after missing so much sleep in the previous three days, eventually she dozed off. Waking up a few hours later, a different show was playing, one that followed families who hoarded. The old man in the house was in such a poor state, crying in the arms of the visitor from the council who was trying to explain why it was unreasonable to keep fifty cats, why keeping as much stuff as he had—it was even worse than Harry’s—was so dangerous. Within moments of waking Tabitha had burst into tears. Built up emotion spilled out, for everything she had lost years before, and everything that kept her away now. But most of all she was crying for Harry, and the thought of how she had abandoned him when she promised that she would be there to help. Ten years apart had done nothing to limit what she felt for him. Shoving her feet into her shoes, she grabbed her keys, and before she could change her mind she was on the road to Harry’s place.
By the time Tabitha reached the entrance to Awkward Hill she was out of breath and hot with sweat despite the fact she had done nothing but drive. The sun had long set, but the ground was hot, heat trapped in stone. Flying through the rickety gate, smacking it into the wall, she was relieved to see a light on in the window. Paint crumbled as she banged her fist against the door. Hinges creaked as she poked her fingers through the letterbox and called his name.
“Harry,” she shouted. “Harry, open the door.” Still nothing. There were boxes blocking the hallway that weren’t there before, the route through to the kitchen almost blocked off again. He’d been bringing things back inside. Oh god, what had she done leaving him alone as she had? “Shit,” she said to herself as she scanned the ground for something that could break glass. Her fingers found a rock, small enough to handle with some dexterity, large enough to put through a window. With her hand drawn back, she was just about to strike it against the window when she saw a shadow move in the kitchen. Was that him?
“Just a minute,” she heard him call, and the relief was instant. Opening the letterbox again she saw the lower half of his body trying to shift a box, then heard the shuffle of paperwork and grunting as he hauled things out of the way. It took several minutes before the door was opened, and even then, it was only enough for a visual.
“Harry, what the hell’s going on?” He glanced at her face, surprise, confusion all fighting to work out what she was doing there. His gaze flicked to her hand, the rock; reminded of its presence by Harry’s attention, she tossed it down to the ground. “Are you going to let me in?”
“Well, it’s a bit difficult. I wasn’t expecting company.” It made her sad to think that in such a short space of time he had stopped expecting her. Or maybe that was normal, she wondered, and that it was only she who held on in desperate hope. “There’s a lot of stuff in the hallway now. I don’t have any more room to move things. This is all rubbish.”
A sense of relief and pride flooded her. For a moment she had thought everything they had done had unraveled. “What about round the back?” she suggested. “I could jump the fence.”
He shook his head. “Garden’s full of brambles, remember? It would be a disaster.” She was starting to wonder whether it was just an excuse, but then he said, “You could try the window to the living room. I’ll go and open that if you like.”
An overgrown rosebush formed the only remaining obstacle in her way, but as Harry drew back the curtains and pushed open the window, she saw he had a plan. Flakes of rotten wood showered away as he threw an old blanket toward the bush, covering it for the most part with a protective layer of material.
“Do you think you can pull yourself over it?” he asked.
Tabitha nodded. “Just get ready to pull me in.” With one foot braced against the sill, she reached up to the edge of the frame, hoping the rotting wood would hold. With a one, two, and three for momentum, she pulled herself forward, levering her weight on her foot. Two hands reached for her shoulders, and with a bit of effort and ungraceful clamoring she fell forward into Harry’s arms. The sense of relief of being back inside that house was so overwhelming she could feel it like water rushing all over her skin. Like she’d broken through the surface and could finally take a breath. Breathing in, she caught a scent from many years ago. The essence of Harry, unchanged.
“You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?” he asked as they came to a stop.
“No,” she said, still holding on to him. His body felt the same too, and she wasn’t keen to let go. Then she got a thought about the lost jewelry, so stepped away and brushed herself down while Harry closed the window and drew the curtain on the rest of the world.
As she looked up, she took in the changes that had taken place in Nook Cottage. Gone were the orderly boxes and neat corners. The columns that once seemed as strong as the Parthenon had been all but destroyed, as if Christian raiders had taken umbrage to the icons and had wrecked them as an affront to an ancient religion. From where she was standing, she could no longer see the sitting chairs, or the route to the kitchen. There was only one small space on the floor where it seemed Harry might have taken to sleeping if the rolled-up quilt was anything to go by.
“What happened?” she asked. Despite the honesty of her question it seemed to her an entirely obvious answer.
“Mr. Lewisham called,” he told her, without realizing she had no idea who that was. “The auction has been brought forward, and now there’s a definite date. The house is going to be sold, repossessed if I don’t cover the debts. I have to sign the papers. After that the house will be gone and I’ll be homeless.” He raised his arms in exasperation and then let his hands slap against his thighs. “He says he thinks it will fetch a good price, and that these sorts of places sell well at auction. I was banking on the mess putting people off, but it would seem that’s not the case.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I have to find that box, Tabitha, and time’s running out.”
“Well, to be quite honest, it looks like things have gone from bad to worse,” she said, while avoiding having to explain where she had been. Thinking of that beautiful jewelry lost to Daniel, she felt so guilty. And what if he did come looking for her? Would she be putting Harry at risk just by being here? Always quick to temper and handy with his fists when jealousy stirred, what would Daniel do if he found her with Harry? Focusing on the most pertinent task was a way of ignoring her own failings and the risk of Daniel for now, so that’s exactly what she did. “I’m going to assume you didn’t find the box so far.”
He shook his head. “No, but I found this. Take a look.”
Handing her a crumpled old newspaper, it was a copy of Le Monde. “I don’t see what you mean. What am I looking for?”
“Page eight. I saw it by chance.” Waiting, he gave her the chance to locate the article. “It says that the Klinkosch box was sighted in Munich, but then lost again. And later in the story there’s a mention about some art thief from France, and that maybe he took it. Look, there’s a picture of it from before the war.”
“I never knew you could speak French,” she said, skimming the article.
“I can’t.” Reaching to his back pocket, he pulled out his telephone. “Translating it took me close to an hour.”
“When is this from?” she asked, turning to the front page.
“Nineteen eighty-five,” he said. “Doesn’t help us much, I suppose. The picture Mum had was from nineteen eighty-one.”
“No, but your mother kept a newspaper with a story about it. That has to mean something, even if only that she was following the story. And if she did have it since nineteen eighty-one, then this story was false. It could never have been in Munich four years later.”
“Exactly. So, who started the false story?”
“Your mother?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but I think I’m starting to understand it’s importance. People really were looking for it, weren’t they?” She nodded. “It’s amazing to think that Mum might have had it. And now, seeing this in her house certainly makes me want to believe it could be here, among all this rubbish, of which I can assure you there’s a lot. I must have found a copy of every National Geographic magazine ever printed. Kerrang too.” Picking one up, he handed it to her as proof. “Why did she keep all this stuff? Why did she even have it in the first place? I just really wish I could understand her, and what made her live like this.”
“I guess we might never know the answer to that one,” she said, setting the newspaper and magazine down. “I don’t know how you managed to live like this.”
“Honestly, I’ve no idea. I tried at first to put things right, but I suppose I got overwhelmed by it too.” Relief flooded him when she nodded to show her understanding. “I tried to focus on helping her, but that wasn’t altogether easy either.”
“I can imagine. Well, maybe it’s not our purpose to question, but instead to find just one thing.” In a grand show of readiness, she pushed up her sleeves. “Let’s start in this room and get everything that we don’t want out into the hall. Tomorrow morning I’ll head to the museum and pick up the van and we can start clearing stuff out.”
He was quiet for a moment. “There’s still the stuff in the garden too.”
It was unavoidable. Her disappearance was the elephant in the room, and the truth was there was no space for anything else. “I said I’d come back, didn’t I?” He nodded, and she thought of those items Daniel had taken from her. From Harry. Could she tell him the truth? No, she decided. It was too big a risk, even the thought that he might ask her to go was too much. That this kindling fire of friendship between them could be stifled and snuffed out by her terrible mistake of judgment in going home. She hated Daniel then perhaps more than she ever had. How was she ever going to be able to confess that she had lost them? “I’m so sorry. I let you down. A few thing’s came up, and I was waiting on the valuation for that jewelry.” The lie was out before she could stop herself. “Still hasn’t come back.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” he said, digging into another box. “These things take time,” he said, pulling out another National Geographic magazine. “I think I might have read that one as a child,” he said, gazing at the cover. He tossed it to the floor and turned to her. “How could you think that you’d let me down? You can’t be here all the time helping me. I’ve heard you on the phone, talking about your work. You have an important job.” Harry seemed to get embarrassed then too for a moment, opening his mouth a few times without any sounds coming out. Eventually he found his voice. “And anyway, I found your note.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think when you read it?” she asked, her heart pounding, wondering how long it had taken him to find what she had written. She had really meant those words, as scary as it was to admit. Realizing she still had feelings for him despite her marriage and a decade spent apart was as confusing as it was complicated.
Without glancing up, he struggled to stifle a smile. Or perhaps the smile stifled him, made it impossible to say what he truly wanted. “We better keep working, Tabitha.” With that he picked up a box and took it into the hallway.
That evening they managed to remove at least fifty percent of the mess from the living room. They ended up with five bags of baby clothes, twenty framed prints of naval ships, and several different editions of children’s encyclopedias. They stumbled across more of his mother’s inventories, but after close to an hour working through them, they still found no mention of the box. Hidden in the corner of the room underneath a molding inflatable mattress they also found a small box of handwritten letters, all in French.
“They’re addressed to your mother,” Tabitha said, handing him an envelope. It had been ripped open, torn with haste, and the paper was brown, the ink faded.
“When’s the postmark from?”
“Not sure. The ink is all rubbed away.”
Harry reached into the box to retrieve another letter. “This one looks like nineteen eighty. She’d have been what, like fifteen or sixteen then?”
“Who do you think they’re from?”
Harry was already into the third letter. It was all in French so he couldn’t understand, but each letter was signed in the same way. “There’s no name.”
Leaning over his shoulder, Tabitha gazed at the letter. “It’s signed B. Is that family?” Tabitha asked, trying to decipher what was written. Relying on her high school French, she tried to translate some of the sentences. “I think this bit says, ‘I’ve been to the marketplace again and the shop is . . .’” She paused, squinting. “Oh, I’m not sure.” In places the cursive handwriting was almost indecipherable, with too many sweeping loops and deep tails. “Let’s try another one.”
“I’ll go and make us some tea,” Harry said. Returning with two mugs, he resumed his position on the floor. As he sat, he looked around at the space they had created in the room, realizing that it almost looked like a normal lounge. Almost. “There you go,” he said, handing her a mug, a faded letter still in her other hand. “Any luck with that one?”
Harry was surprised to feel such disappointment when she shook her head. “I’m struggling to make out some of the letters. Your mother could obviously speak French well enough, though.”
“I guess so, yes. I didn’t know that about her. She must have known what was written in that newspaper article too.”
“I would say so. Because, Harry, although there’s a lot I don’t understand, I think these are love letters.”
He moved closer, gazed over her shoulder as if he could understand what was written and needed a closer look. “Love letters? In French?”
“Yes. Could your father be from France?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know if she ever went there.”
“Based on what’s written here, I’d say she did. And look at what we know so far: the Klinkosch box was from France, there was the article in the French newspaper, and now these letters. Harry, none of this can be a coincidence. The answers are all here somewhere. We’re getting closer, I can feel it.”
Earlier that evening they had found a couple of suitcases filled with old coats, and so in need of a chair they opened them out and sat inside. They weren’t very comfortable, but they were good enough for two people otherwise engaged and with nowhere else they would rather have been. The actual armchairs were stacked with paper. Rhythmical ticking from a clock drew his attention, and when his eyes glanced at the hands, he couldn’t believe what he saw. “Oh gosh, I hate to tell you, but it is two a.m.”
The deepening of night on the other side of the flimsy curtain hadn’t escaped Tabitha’s notice. Daniel might have been home by now, would have dropped his bag by the door and after pulling a beer from the fridge he would be wondering once again where she was. Would he search for her? She had parked out of sight, most of the vehicle hidden behind a bush. Would he spot it, if he drove past? What would happen if she were to go home now? Would she stay, settle back into that life, waiting for the next time he found fault in something she had done? Would she get the jewelry back? Years of trying, and still she couldn’t quite predict the course his behavior would take. The only thing she could ever be certain about was the demise. It would always come, she just didn’t know when.
“I guess time flies when you’re having fun. I think we’ve done a pretty good job,” she said, pushing thoughts of Daniel and his threats aside as she looked up to the piles of bin bags and the space created. “This room is almost clear.”
“Except for those skateboards.” There were six of different sizes stacked up in the far corner, a tripping hazard they decided was best left far out of the way. “I used to skate when I was a teenager. I wasn’t very good, but I was fast.”
“So many things I don’t know about you, Harry.”
“No, there aren’t that many things, not really.”
Something was on his mind, evident in a hint of melancholy. All it took was a look, a slight tremor in his voice, and she could sense the basic rudiments of his emotion. Ten years apart and there had been no deterioration in her ability to read him. There was no hiding from a person who loved you, and Tabitha did love him. Whether she wanted to or not, and perhaps even more now than she had while they were together. Ten years apart could whittle away at a life, at confidence, integrity, or conviction, but it couldn’t touch love. It was as boundless as the infinitude of the universe, an emotion beyond the realm of time.
“What is it?” she asked.
Without the hint of a wheeze, he took a deep breath, and she thought for the first time that night how the dust hadn’t bothered his asthma once. “It’s just, we’ve cleared this whole room essentially, and we haven’t found it yet.”
“The Klinkosch box?”
“Yes.” He set his tea aside. “I’ve barely slept these past few days and . . .” He paused, fiddling with a button on one of the coats beneath him. “Without you here to keep me motivated I get sidetracked by the things I find, wondering if they might be important. Thinking about who my mother was, and who my father might have been. What life would have been like with them. And . . .”
“And what?”
“Well, you’ll have to go again soon. It’s already the early hours of the morning, and tomorrow I’ll be all over the place again.”
“You know,” Tabitha said, speaking slowly, unsure even in the moment what she was going to say. “I don’t have to go to work tomorrow. I could stay to help you.”
He shook his head. “That’s kind, but there’s always the next day, and the day after that. All the days lead to selling this house and having no idea where to go.” He thought of the note still stuck to the fridge and wondered if she really meant what she had written. “You can’t just stay here with me, can you.”
“Who says I can’t?” A tremor in her voice betrayed her nerves. “What about if I stay until this is done? I said I’d stick around before, but I hadn’t really meant continuously. But I could, if you wanted me to. I could stay here,” she said, swallowing. “With you.”
“You mean, stay here, stay here? Like not leave at all?”
“Yes.” Had she overstepped a boundary? Part of her wondered if she should retract her offer, say it was silly. But that thought seemed so wrong to her that she pushed on, committed. “That’s what I wrote on the note, isn’t it?”
From his pocket, he pulled her note loose, handed it to her. Noticing her handwriting, she read the words: Turns out we really were inseparable after all. It was a thing they shared, something he used to say to her every night. In the moments before sleep he would whisper in her ear, “We’re inseparable, you and me. That’s how you make me feel.”
“You kept it,” she said, and he nodded. “I always believed you when you used to say that,” she said. “I think part of me always knew I’d see you again one day.”
“It was just the way I always felt. Like we belonged together, and that we always would.” He was pleased to see her nodding. Was it to show that she remembered, felt the same, or something else? Whatever it was, he thought that probably it was something good. “Well, if you were to stay, I don’t know where you’d sleep.”
Pointing to the folded quilt, to the spot alongside where it seemed he had bedded down the night before, she said, “I can sleep there.”
“But that’s where I have been sleeping.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve slept with each other.” Almost choking, he spat out some of his tea. “I mean in the same bed, Harry. Alongside each other. And, to be honest with you, I’m exhausted. Why don’t we get some sleep before we start again in the morning?”
Watching as she stood up without even waiting for his answer, straightening the quilts and coats into some sort of order, he wondered if it was really possible that she was just going to stay. Whether they really were inseparable. With her here, it was possible to believe that they were.
So when she beckoned him to join her, he did. Settling down in the makeshift bed, she smiled at him before turning out the little lamp he had been using at the side.
“Night then,” he said.
“Night, Harry. Sweet dreams.” It was the same whispered wish she always used to offer him before sleep, and it made him feel as if she was still in some way his. And he found himself hoping desperately for that to be true. Because he knew now, realized the fact as if it was a physical part of him that had surpassed all possibility of denial, that being without Tabitha was a situation even more terrifying than being alone.
It didn’t take long before she heard the gentle whistle of his breathing. It was strange to share a quilt with Harry again, to sleep in her clothes, and yet she felt calmer than she had in months. Years, even, there alongside a man who wasn’t her husband but who was at one time the man she had intended to marry. The mattress of coats wasn’t as uncomfortable as she thought it might have been, but knowing that she didn’t have to go home came as an even bigger relief than she’d expected. There was no way Daniel could find her here. Just no way.
Eventually she sat up and reached to the box of letters they had unearthed deep in the living room detritus. Pulling a random envelope from the pile, she opened the folded paper, brown at the edge and with a smell that wasn’t unpleasant. Using her fingers to open up the envelope, she peeped inside to find a single stem of dry lavender, the tail end of its aroma lingering after all those years. Slipping from their ersatz bed, she settled back into one of the suitcases and used her phone to illuminate the page. Most of the text remained elusive. But there was one short passage that she could understand. She read it over and over.
I fell in love with you for your kindness, the goodness of your soul, even though I was not a person deserving of such love. All I can think about is the warmth of your touch, and the way you fit so perfectly, wrapped in my arms. No two people who fit together so well could ever be considered wrong. Don’t you think?
She looked at Harry and thought perhaps he wasn’t so different from his mother. He was kind. He was good. Sitting there, watching him sleep, she knew it was entirely possible to fall in love with those qualities. To remain in love perhaps, even when you told yourself you weren’t.
Comforted by his proximity, she watched him sleeping until her eyes began to tire. Then, without too much thought for the consequences, she let her body move until it was positioned against his. Warmth flooded her as she inched closer and closer, radiating from his form as she let her arm drape across his chest. He was always too warm where she was forever cold, and even in summer she used to press up against him, their temperature together balanced in a way they never were when alone. They fit together, complemented each other, like his mother had with this B signatory.
“We still fit together, Harry, just like we always used to,” she whispered, but it was more for herself than it was for him. “We’ve always been inseparable.” Why had she come back here? For herself, for him, or was it possible that she was here for them both? Did she know that this was how it was always supposed to be? When her eyes fluttered shut no more than a few moments later, she slipped into a deep and restful sleep, knowing without doubt that Harry would never harm her. Those instinctive feelings she had learned over the last decade had no place here. For the first time in years, she felt absolutely and unquestionably safe.