The Last Days of Summer

An author writes to leave a legacy, a mark on the world. The stories we leave behind are our way of showing the insides of our heads – our thoughts, our beliefs, our loves. Never mind what truth there is in our words, what we send out into the world is greater than truth, and longer lasting. Stories, after all, survive far longer than facts.

From the notebooks of Nathaniel Drury

The door to Nathaniel’s study had been locked since I came home again, but now, as I crept down the long hallway towards it, I could see the door was ajar. I stared straight ahead as I passed the place where I’d hidden, the night of the Golden Wedding, and pretended I couldn’t still hear my grandparents arguing in my head. What was the point? Nothing I – or Isabelle – did could change those last moments now.

It occurred to me that Edward had probably commandeered one of the bedrooms at this end of the building – he seemed like the sort to want to be near his work. And that meant he had easy access to the study at all times. I wondered how much time he’d spent there over the last couple of days, without Isabelle noticing.

The study door opened in one smooth sweep. As I’d predicted, Edward was already there. Not in the seat behind the desk, Nathaniel’s chair, but in a hard wooden seat to the side of the desk, one I imagined he must have used throughout the long months of working with my grandfather.

I bit the inside of my cheek as I looked around. Somehow, the whole room felt different than I remembered. Emptier, despite the floor being covered in boxes and journals. Paler, somehow, like the lights had faded when Nathaniel did.

I stared at the chair behind the desk, empty except for an orange fisherman’s jumper draped over the back. That was where Edward had found him. Where he’d died.

Knowing Nathaniel, I supposed he’d probably say it was the second best place to go. The best, I imagined, was probably next to the drinks cabinet.

I took a deep breath. I had to keep moving. Keep living. The moment I got lost in my memories, I worried I’d never find my way back to the surface again.

“We should probably lock this door,” I said, shutting it softly behind me. “Someone’s bound to notice we’re missing eventually.”

Edward looked up from the papers he was reading with a start, but relaxed quickly once he realised it was only me. I liked that he could feel relaxed around me. “Maybe they’ll think I’m seducing you in an attic, or something.”

“Unlikely.” I grabbed a chair from the corner of the room, one covered in shabby red velvet that I remembered curling up on as a child as I watched Nathaniel work, and pulled it closer to the desk. “They’ll all immediately jump to the conclusion that we’re up here working on the memoirs.” I took a deep breath. “Which it looks like we might be so, seriously, lock the damn door.”

The look he gave me was long and assessing, but he did at least get to his feet and move towards the door. As the key turned in the lock, I heard the tumblers fall into place and wondered just what in hell I was doing.

“Are you sure about this?” Edward leant against the closed door and kept on giving me his ‘concerned and caring look.’ It left me with the impression that he was slightly afraid that I might lose it at any second.

“Not even a little bit,” I said with a sigh. “But I know that I can’t make a decision on whether to publish or not until I know what we’re talking about. There’s obviously something Isabelle doesn’t want included, and I don’t know whether that’s the same thing everyone else doesn’t want written about or something else, and until I do…I just don’t know. So I need to look at what Nathaniel left behind.”

Edward nodded. “Makes sense.” He crossed the room and settled back into his chair, shuffling the papers that were piled on the desk in front of him before selecting a clip-bound paper stack and passing it over to me. “This is what we’d got agreed so far.”

What they had so far, from my brief look through, was Nathaniel’s childhood and existence up until the point where he met Isabelle.

“‘I saw her, and my world changed,’” I read. “That was the last thing he wrote?” It was almost a direct quote from Biding Time.

“Yep. Think it will make Isabelle feel any better disposed towards the project?” Edward tipped his chair back a little, his face lit by the faint remaining evening light forcing its way in through the window.

“Probably not.” I clipped the pages back together. “I’ll read through this properly tonight, but then I promised Therese she could take a look at it too.”

Edward’s face was unreadable. “What if she remembers their childhood differently?” he asked, making me wonder exactly what Nathaniel had said about growing up poor in Shropshire.

“Okay, then.” Edward let the front two chair legs crash to the ground. “So the question then is, what happened next?”

“Yep.” I put the partial manuscript to one side, and gave Edward my full attention. “So, what do we have?”

“Mostly?” Edward stood up and crossed the study, pausing by a pile of file boxes, stacked haphazardly upon each other and looking frighteningly precarious. “What we have is this,” he said, gesturing at the boxes.

We made it through the first two boxes that night, sorting through Nathaniel’s notes, journals, photos, clippings and miscellany. I wasn’t sure I’d figured out the logic to the storage of the notes yet, but I hoped that Edward, who’d been working with them longer, would have a far better idea than I did.

Eventually, after I yawned for the eighteenth time in half an hour, Edward closed the lid of the box I was looking through and took the journal I was reading from my hands.

At his words, a strange warmth flowed through me. “You seem to be saying that to me a lot lately.” I meant when he put me for a nap, like a small child, that morning. But as soon as the words were out I was transported back to that night in the attic in my mind.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, his gaze sliding away from mine. “You’re tired.”

Was that an excuse? A reason not to address whatever the hell this was between us? Or an easy let down. A way to let me know that the spark didn’t matter, not any more.

I pulled back, hurrying to my feet, wanting to get out of there, fast. “You’re right. And I need to call Duncan, before I go to bed.”

“I left a voicemail, explaining what had happened. About Nathaniel, I mean. I needed to let him know I wouldn’t be at work for a few days.”

Was I? I wasn’t sure. “I’ll have to, at some point. I have a job. A flat. All my stuff is there.” And besides, was there really a place for me at Rosewood? Especially without Nathaniel there to stand in my corner.

Edward’s head bobbed in a jerky nod. “Of course. We’ll carry on here tomorrow though?”

I gazed around the room at the endless unopened boxes. “I think we have to.” What other way was there for me to figure out what happened next?

“So when will you be back?” he asked, impatiently. I wondered if I’d interrupted some sports event or another, or if he’d always been this grumpy outside of a bed and I just hadn’t noticed.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We don’t have a date for the funeral yet, and even then, there’s a project he’s left to me to finish…”

Wasn’t that the million-dollar question? I thought of Edward, head bent over a fifty-year-old journal, soaking in every moment of my family’s history. “I think it might be.”

“I see.” He sighed. “Well, take all the time you need. You can’t rush grief. But, Sas…I can’t hold your job indefinitely. Not even for you.”

Not even for me. Speaking of which, there was something else I needed to talk to Duncan about. And if not now when?

Duncan laughed. “Don’t tell me. Your grandmother has set you up with a date for the funeral, you’ve fallen madly in love and it’s all over between us.”

I sighed. “It’s not a date. Just like whatever was between us wasn’t, I don’t know, a relationship.”

“It was the closest thing either of us had had in a while,” Duncan pointed out, which was truer than I’d like. “And it’s over now, right?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “It is. I just… I think I’m looking for something more than that.”

“You think a relationship will make you happy?” He made the idea sound ludicrous.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve never really had one, not as an adult. I think it might be time to give it a try.”

It didn’t change anything, not really. But somehow I felt lighter after I hung up the phone.

The house seemed empty when I made it downstairs, so I assumed everyone else was having a lie in. Deciding to enjoy the peace, I picked up the paper from the doormat and took it into the kitchen to read with my coffee. But as I flicked open the pages, I forgot all about my caffeine fix.

I skipped the headline, my gaze locking directly onto the photo of Nathaniel next to it. He looked just as he had the last day I’d seen him, dressed in his white dinner jacket. It must have been taken at the Golden Wedding, I realised, running a finger across his face as my eyes filled. I blinked the tears away.

I needed to know what they were saying – about the family, about the memoirs. About everything.

For all that he was almost seventy-six, there was no warning of his demise. There was no long struggle with illness, no public decline, no reports of ill health even. Quite the contrary, in fact – just the day before his death Drury had announced, at his own Golden Wedding Anniversary party at his home in Rosewood, his intention to write his memoirs – something the gossips and scandal mongers of the aforementioned literary world have been waiting for impatiently for many years.

Whether the work will now be completed remains to be seen, but if they are published, we can all be assured of one hell of a story.

Well that, I supposed, was a given. I read on, through a brief recap of Nathaniel’s early life and rise to fame – with the obligatory reference to Biding Time being a love story to Isabelle. She’d like that bit, anyway.

I met Drury only once, in London in 2013, at the Blackfriars pub – a personal favourite of his. I was supposed to be interviewing him about his latest book, The Tithing. Instead, I found myself drawn into a conversation about one of his granddaughters, and her burgeoning career as a journalist.

I sucked in a breath, then let it out fast. If I couldn’t handle a passing reference to myself in the paper, how would I cope with my story being told in the memoirs?

“Do you think she will follow in your footsteps?” I asked, over a mouthful of game pie.

“I think she will do anything she sets her mind to,” he said. “Just as I did.”

I didn’t bother trying to stop the tears, this time. I couldn’t ignore all the ways I’d let Nathaniel down, not lived up to what he wanted for me. Greg was only the start of it.

It had to be different from now on. I had to be different. That much, I was sure of.

The obituary finished with another line about the memoirs. If Nathaniel Drury really wanted to publish his memoirs, perhaps it is presumptive to assume that he would allow even his death to stop him. Perhaps, somewhere in Rosewood, there is a manuscript box, all ready to be delivered to his publishers…

I smiled. If only that were the case. It would be a lot easier…but it would rob me of the chance to work with Edward on them. To make the project my own.

“What are they saying?” Isabelle’s voice came sharp from the doorway. “I bet it’s all gossip.”

“It’s a nice piece, actually,” I said, holding the paper out to her. She ignored it. “You should read it.”

Isabelle’s lips were pursed tight, the lines around them suddenly obvious in a way I’d never noticed before. She looked old all of a sudden.

“I don’t want to read what they have to say about me. About my husband,” she corrected herself, and I frowned. What was it Isabelle thought they were going to say? “He’s barely cold and they’re already digging. Already looking for scandal and lies. It’ll only get worse, you mark my words.”

With that, she wandered back out again, towards the Orangery. I stared after her in confusion.

“I think we all need to get out of here for a few hours,” Dad said, as he warmed croissants in the oven. “Especially Caro. The atmosphere around here is no good for a young girl.”

He was right, I knew. So even though all I really wanted to do was curl up in Nathaniel’s study with Edward and keep going through all the documents and photos he’d left behind, I said, “That sounds lovely. Who else fancies it? Edward?”

Edward raised his eyebrows at me across the kitchen counter, but I ignored him. He’d been stuck up in that study for too long already. Some fresh air would probably do him good, too.

And actually, it was lovely. Isabelle, when I took her coffee in the Orangery and explained the plan, insisted on staying at home in case of condolence callers, of which she expected there to be many, and to call the funeral directors. Mum and Ellie decided they’d best stay with her so, in the end, it was only Caro, Dad, Edward and I who ventured out, Dad with the picnic rucksack on his back.

Edward and Caro set off at a faster pace than the rest of us, and I could hear Caroline explaining about all the different creatures that lived in the woods – mice and owls and squirrels and fairies and even the occasional unicorn, apparently. Edward, to his credit, was not only listening attentively, but asking insightful questions into the housing issues faced by fairies in today’s disappearing woodlands.

“Well, we certainly know where that one got her imagination from,” Dad said, stooping to pick up a long and sturdy stick, as if it would make him any more of a natural walker.

“He used to love her stories.” Dad gazed ahead at where Caroline had dived into a pile of cut grass, and Edward was trying to pull her out. “She’d sit up in his study with him and Edward, pretending to help them work.” He linked his arm through mine and tugged me close. “He used to say she reminded him of you.”

I always knew that my grandfather loved me. I even had some inkling, even as a child, that I might be something of a favourite. But I’m not sure I realised exactly how much he trusted and respected me until he died.

On the one hand, leaving me his notes and plans for his memoirs, and entrusting me to get them published, was always guaranteed to get me into hot water with the rest of the family. But what I hadn’t really stopped to consider, until I got out of the house and away from the others, was that I was the only family member he chose to give this responsibility to. There was no one else, except his assistant, an outsider, and even then, I had the final decision on what happened.

We’d barely even started going through the boxes the night before, but I already knew it was going to be a hard slog. Nathaniel had, at least, managed to package things vaguely into decade-orientated boxes, but within those boxes nothing was really in order, and there was certainly no handy index to the life and times of Nathaniel Drury. Just figuring out what was in there, and what events each document corresponded to, was going to be a challenge. I hoped that the majority of the older documents were dated accurately, or we didn’t stand a chance.

“Couldn’t you have persuaded him to be a little more thorough in his archiving?” I’d asked Edward, as I pawed through what appeared to be a recent box. It included, amongst other things, my very first byline – something not even I had kept a copy of.

For the first time I wondered how much of my past was in these boxes, beyond what I’d done to Ellie. And would I like it when I found it?

We returned to Rosewood in the early afternoon, stuffed full of coronation chicken sandwiches and feeling virtuous anyway for walking at least a few miles. In our absence, it appeared that most of Cheshire had stopped by with flowers and, while I was subjected to a detailed tour of our new floral arrangements, along with pointed comments from Isabelle about who was simply being ostentatious and who would probably sob all through the funeral, even though they’d only met Nathaniel twice, Edward escaped upstairs without even taking off his boots, leaving grass-stained footprints all the way to Nathaniel’s study.

The funeral, Isabelle announced, was to be held in three days’ time. Apparently she’d had a secret meeting with the funeral director, Mrs Dawkins, yet another old friend of the family, while we were out, and Mrs Dawkins had agreed to hurry things along. We’d established that Nathaniel definitely hadn’t left any firm instructions for how his funeral should be handled in his will which, given Isabelle’s tendency towards extremes, seemed a bit of an oversight to me.

I followed Edward up to the study once I’d fully admired all the flowers, and found him already elbow deep in paperwork. I shut the door behind me, then snapped my fingers at Edward. It took him a moment, but he eventually figured out what I wanted and tossed me the key.

Safely locked in, I felt comfortable enough to get stuck into my family history once again.

I wasn’t sure if the family were just ignoring our absence, or honestly hadn’t realised what we were up to. Given their ongoing complaints about the memoirs, I suspected they were just hoping we’d come to our senses and drop the whole thing.

As I took my seat, ready to pick up where I’d left off the night before, Edward spoke.

I froze, halfway through reaching for Nathaniel’s journal. Somehow, just picturing Edward standing up there, talking about my grandfather, made the whole thing seem real all over again. Like, while we were in his study, reading his words, Nathaniel wasn’t really gone.

But soon, I’d be sat in that church, mourning him, and I wouldn’t be able to pretend any more.

I looked up at Edward, and took in the grey tinge to his skin, and the ways his hands shook, just a little as he reached for the next box.

“I guess.” He shook his head, like he wasn’t sure. “I just don’t get why they want me to. Ellie said that Isabelle told her to ask me. Why would she do that? She hates me right now.”

“No, she doesn’t.” He gave me a look. “Well, maybe a bit. But it’s not you. It’s what you represent. And that’s exactly why she wants you to speak.”

The majority of the congregation would probably be readers, rather than close friends – Nathaniel always had more of the former than the latter – and Edward was the only one of us who could talk with any confidence about his writing, or his professional life.

“To most people, Nathaniel was his books. That’s what she wants you to talk about. His legacy.”

We worked in silence for a long while, enjoying the warm summer sun lighting the room, and the rustle of papers. Occasionally Edward would pass a tattered old photo, usually with black and white figures staring at the camera, and I’d try and decipher Isabelle’s scrawl on the back to puzzle out who they were. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that without the cooperation and assistance of my family, we’d never be able to uncover all the information we needed to write these memoirs.

Deciding to go ahead with the project wouldn’t be enough. I’d need to convince my relatives that it was a good idea, too. And that sounded even more impossible than making sense of Nathaniel’s boxes and boxes of notes.

“I’m learning a lot about you in these boxes.” Edward handed over another, more recent, photo: me, aged around ten, wearing a glorious black and fluorescent pink combination, with my hair cut much the same as it was currently – bobbed just above shoulder level.

“Maybe we should swap boxes,” I suggested. Mostly, I’d been wading through book reviews and communications with publishers – interesting, sure, but not really very enlightening. More than anything, I was just amazed that Nathaniel had kept so much stuff, all these years.

In the back of my mind, I knew exactly what I was looking for – whatever it was that Isabelle was so afraid of. And my thoughts kept circling round to the story Nathaniel had told me in the tree house, the day of the Golden Wedding – the story of that first, possibly fatal party there at Rosewood. Was that it? Was that the secret? I still wasn’t sure how much of Nathaniel’s story was just that – a story. But I wanted to find out – and I was in the best possible place to do just that.

Edward pulled out my school report, circa 2004. “Absolutely no way I’m swapping.” Flipping through the pages, he began to pick out some choice phrases. When he reached my PE teacher’s comments, I shoved the box I was reading through off my lap and onto the floor, and launched myself at the report and, by default, Edward, landing half across the desk, and half across him, hanging on to the report for dear life.

Laughing, Edward relinquished his hold on the report, mostly so he could put his hands on my waist to stop me careening onto the floor. “I guess your old school reports don’t have all that much relevance to your grandfather’s memoirs.”

“Exactly my point.” I struggled into an upright position, failing to notice until I’d achieved it that it just left me sitting in Edward’s lap, his arms around my waist and my heart pounding. I could feel the blood flooding to warm my cheeks.

“Good job that door’s locked,” he murmured, but other than that there was no sign, no move, no signal that he wanted to kiss me as much as I wanted him to.

But maybe he was just good at hiding his feelings. I mean, he’d wanted to sleep with me, hadn’t he? Not even a week ago, so he must have found me vaguely attractive, right? And yes, okay, so we’d both been drunk and I’d run out on him, but still, it meant something, right? So maybe I should just kiss him, and forget all the waiting around to be kissed. Maybe this was what was meant to happen. Maybe I should just…

“What’s that?” Edward leant forward, tipping me from his lap as he reached for a yellowing newspaper clipping that had become dislodged from a pile in our tussle. He held it up to me, and I shivered as I took it, despite the sun.

“It looks like it’s a clipping from the society pages.” I stared at the image of a twenty-something Isabelle, and an even younger Therese, both in evening dress, smiling out for the camera. Between them stood a man I didn’t recognise, his grin bigger than either of theirs. And behind them all loomed Rosewood, unchanging and unchangeable.

Heart in my throat, I checked the caption. Pictured: Isabelle Drury, Matthew Robertson, Therese Drury. So, before Therese was married. My gaze flicked further down to the text underneath.

All eyes are on Rosewood House this weekend, home of literary darling Nathaniel Drury and his wife, as they prepare for their first party in their new home.

No explanation of who Matthew Robertson was. Could he have been Therese’s beau? I smiled at the idea. He certainly looked nothing like Uncle George, from what I’d seen in photos. This Matthew was far more handsome. He looked the suave, charming sort. Had he romanced Therese? Maybe I’d ask her. I frowned at the photo again. Where was Nathaniel, though? Matthew had his arms around both my aunt and my grandmother, but my grandfather was nowhere to be seen.

“Did he ever talk about a housewarming party here at Rosewood?” I asked Edward.

“Not as far as I remember,” he said, with a shrug. “But there’s got to be something about it somewhere in these boxes.”

I surveyed the mass of documentation and memorabilia. He was right, I realised. It had to be in here somewhere. All the secrets my family were keeping were. And, one by one, it was my job to find them.

“Everything okay?” Edward asked, and I snapped out of my trance to look at him again. Moments ago, I’d thought he was about to kiss me. Now all I could think about was what potential scandals my family were hiding, and Edward’s reputation for uncovering the truth, every time.

I gave a sharp nod. “Everything’s fine,” I said, and got stuck back into my box of papers.

The next couple of days passed in a haze of funeral preparations and research. I still hadn’t turned up anything else on that fateful party, but on the plus side, neither had Edward.

He hadn’t come close to kissing me again, either. I couldn’t quite decide if this was a good thing or not.

The night before the funeral, we all endured yet another awkward family meal during which nobody asked Edward or I where we’d been all afternoon, and Ellie gave me funny looks and Edward sat at the opposite end of the table to me, seemingly on purpose. By the time I was able to escape to my room I was tired, cross and tense. But then, I opened my bedroom door and found the dress.

It was obviously another Therese special, heralded by the tiny cream envelope tucked into the matching handbag which, when opened, yielded up a thick, cream card with the words ‘For tomorrow, Tx’ flowing across it in neat, black ink.

I sat back on the bed and looked at it. It was nothing elaborate, utterly unlike most of the other dresses she’d picked for me. It was, at heart, a simple, black Hepburnesque shift dress, eminently suitable for funerals, and much nicer than anything I had in Perth, even if I’d had the chance to go back and pack them. But there was something about it – maybe in the cut, or the trim, or the discreet diamond jewellery she’d included. Something that gave it a hint of something more, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what.

I just hoped it could give me the calm, grace-under-fire countenance that I’d need to get through the day.

The funeral was being held in the tiny local church, even though it was clear from the moment we arrived that there was no way everyone was going to fit inside. I’d walked down early with the rest of the family – except for Isabelle, Therese and Mum, who were following in the hired black car that travelled in convey with the hearse.

“That’s…a lot of people,” Edward said, pausing at the church gates. I looked up. Apparently Edward was developing a fine line in understatement.

“Mrs Dawkins was reserving the front two pews for family,” Dad said, gazing across the crowd.

“Reverend Tucker is looking a little shell-shocked,” Greg commented, and Ellie gave out a small, inappropriate laugh, before she smacked a hand across her mouth.

“Well,” she said, once she’d got herself back under control, “he’s probably never seen so many people in a church before.”

It took a while to even reach the doors of the church. Everyone, even people I’d never seen before, wanted to offer their condolences, which was overwhelming at the same time as it was kind. I kept shying away, every time I caught a glimpse of someone I’d seen or spoken to at the Golden Wedding. It seemed wrong to be seeing them all again so soon.

Isabelle had requested donations to charity rather than flowers, but there were still countless more floral arrangements already making their way into the church. We pushed our way through the crowd and the flowers and into the church and found our allocated pews. I kept Caroline close to me, and found Edward on my right, next to Dad. Ellie and Greg sat in the row behind. The rest of the family would fill up the empty pew on the other side of the chapel.

I fiddled with the service sheet I’d been handed at the door, and tried to figure out how Therese had convinced everyone that ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ was an appropriate funeral hymn. The sheet slipped from my hand and floated to the floor, where Edward reached down and collected it.

I nodded. I was absolutely fine, of course. How could I possibly be anything else?

And I was. I was fine all through the service, even when Edward stood up and talked about the honour – and difficulties – of working with such a celebrated writer, and the pleasure of becoming part of his family. I was fine as we stood at the graveside, shivering in the sudden summer wind as we watched the coffin being lowered into the verdant ground. I was fine as we held court at the nearby hotel – because Isabelle couldn’t bear the idea of having a rerun of her Golden Wedding celebration at Rosewood, but without her husband. I was polite and charming to the guests, sipping slowly on one glass of white wine when all I really wanted to do was swallow down the bottle and forget about it all until tomorrow.

I was even fine when we returned to Rosewood, sombre and subdued, and all gravitated towards the drawing room for whisky nightcaps.

In fact, I was still telling myself I was fine when Edward crouched down in front on my chair and took my empty glass from my hand. “Come on,” he said, and I blinked at him. “Seriously.” He stood up and took my hand. “Come with me.”

No one else was paying us much attention; Therese and Isabelle had got the old photo albums out and were explaining to Nathaniel’s agent, who’d joined us at the house, exactly who everyone was. Dad had taken Caroline up to bed, and Mum was sitting with Greg and Ellie, telling them stories about growing up at Rosewood. I realised, suddenly, that I had no idea how long I’d been sitting there.

Edward tugged me to my feet, and I followed him out into the hallway, through to the kitchen and into the small utility room where we kept all the coats and boots. Numbly, I let him shove my arms into the sleeves of somebody or other’s jacket, and my feet into a handy pair of sneakers that even I was aware didn’t really go with Therese’s carefully chosen dress. Fastening my laces, Edward nodded. “You’ll do,” he said, reaching for his jacket.

Outside was pitch black and utterly quiet, but these things didn’t really register with me. I was aware of them, but I didn’t care or feel about them either way.

Edward kept a tight hold of my hand, and I focused on that instead – his skin against mine. Human contact.

“Where are we going?” I asked, finally, but Edward didn’t reply; instead, he led me across the path towards the Rose Garden.

The Rose Garden didn’t have a lot to recommend it, stripped of most of its flowers after the Golden Wedding, and especially since it was too dark to see anything anyway. Still, Edward led me inside, and sat us down on the bench just inside the walls.

“It’s private here,” he said. “No one’s going to hear you or see you. I even brought the whisky, if you really want to keep drinking yourself into oblivion.”

“And considerably more than one whisky back at the house.” Edward shook the quarter full bottle. “Don’t forget, I was doing the pouring.”

“Absolutely.” He unscrewed the bottle top and handed the whisky to me. “And you’ll notice I’m doing nothing at all to stop you.”

“But I noticed that everyone else in the room was reminiscing – they were sad, but they were thinking about the good times. And you looked like you were thinking about Armageddon.” Which wasn’t strictly true. I hadn’t actually been doing any thinking at all, that I could remember. “And I thought that maybe you needed to get outside, or at least out of that room, somewhere where people weren’t watching you or worrying about you. I thought that maybe you were obsessing about keeping things together, and it might be good for you to fall apart for a little while.”

“So you brought me to sit in the dark on my own, so that I don’t bother anyone else if I decide to have a nervous breakdown?”

Edward took my hand. “Not on your own.” His voice was warm and comforting, and I could feel the tears already building behind my eyes.

Tucking my head onto his shoulder, I let the tears come – quietly at first, as I remembered all things that I’d never experience again, then louder as I thought about the next few days, weeks, months, years without Nathaniel. Edward simply wrapped his arms around me and let me sob – after moving the whisky bottle out of its precarious position between my knees.

It was some time before I felt calm enough to talk again. “How did you know?” I asked, wiping my eyes then nose with a handkerchief Edward had produced from one of his pockets.

We were still sitting so close that I could feel him shrug. “I was watching you. And I remembered what I needed when my dad died.”

“I’m sorry.” I contemplated the soggy handkerchief in my hands. I was really going to have to wash it before I gave it back. “I didn’t know.”

“Thank you,” I said, after a while of sitting in silence. “This was what I needed, and I had no idea.”

“Ready to go back in?” Edward asked, shifting his arm from around my shoulders.

I glanced down at my watch; it was almost midnight. “Yeah. I should get to bed. Lots of work to do tomorrow after all.”

Edward creaked to his feet, rubbing some of the chill out of his knees and legs before turning to me and offering me his hand. “Oh I don’t know, there’s only another twenty or so boxes to go through.” And one of them had to contain the information I was looking for. “Come on.”

He was facing the wrong way, so he couldn’t have seen it. But as I took Edward’s hand and stood up, my own bones aching suddenly in the night air, I saw a figure just beyond him, on the other side of the Rose Garden. A woman in white, indistinct and ethereal. Caroline’s ghost, again. Would Nathaniel return to haunt us here at Rosewood, I wondered hazily, through the whisky fog. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to or not.