Chapter 155: Breakfast

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 155: Breakfast

Harriet Slade made her report at eleven the next morning, in a room with no windows, to a woman who did not look up for the first four minutes of it.

"He came up the stairs," Harriet said. "I want to start there, because everything else is in the written version and that isn't."

Marguerite turned a page.

"Go on."

"He wasn't in a hurry. Three of us in a locked flat and he came up the stairs one at a time." Harriet had her hands in her lap and kept looking at them. "Colm tried the door. Colm's ex-military. He's done eleven of these with me and he's never once been worried. He put his shoulder against it and I heard him breathing."

"And then."

"And then the key turned from the outside, on its own, and I've spent eight hours trying to work out how and I'd like to stop."

Marguerite looked up.

"Your ability."

"Gone."

"Describe gone."

"I tried it on a cat this morning. My neighbour's." Harriet's voice did not wobble and her hands did. "Nothing. Not weaker — nothing. Like reaching for a light switch in a house you've moved out of." She turned her palms up. "He said one word and it went. Twenty-two years."

"Which word?"

Harriet told her.

Marguerite put her pen down very slowly, and for the first time in the eleven years Harriet had worked under her, she did not pick it back up.

"Get out," Marguerite said. "Not you. I mean — go home, Harriet. You're done. Go home and don't come back and don't tell anyone why."

"I don't understand."

"No," Marguerite said. "Neither did I, the first time I heard it."

Breakfast in the flat was at eight and Cole had nothing to read out.

He sat at the table with toast and a mug of tea he could hold perfectly steadily now, and when Dana looked at him — the look she had given him every morning since the meeting, the one that meant anything? — he shook his head.

Reeve was across the table.

He had not slept. He had a plaster across one eyebrow from the edge of Ivor's kitchen table and a bottle from 1961 on the floor by his chair, and he had been looking at his own plate for eleven minutes.

"Reeve," Mia said. "You look terrible."

"Yeah."

"Eat something."

"In a minute." He put his fork down. "I need to say something first."

Cole looked up.

He did not say don't. Reeve would think about that for a long time afterward — that he could see Cole thinking it, and that Cole didn't say it.

"Cole didn't know I was going to Ivor's," Reeve said. "I didn't ring him. I didn't tell Dana the address. Nobody knew."

Dana put her mug down.

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"He woke up on the stairs," Reeve said. "In his coat. With his hand on the door. He doesn't remember getting dressed or the walk or how he knew which flat. And on the doorstep at quarter to five he asked me not to tell Vesper."

The kitchen was completely silent.

Vesper did not move. She was at the counter with her back to all of them making toast, and she did not turn round, and the toast popped up and she did not take it out.

"Reeve," Cole said.

"I know."

"I asked you—"

"I know you did." Reeve's voice cracked on it and he kept going. "And for eleven days last year I held something because I wanted to be the one who carried it, and everybody in this room was right to be angry, and I said I wouldn't do it again, and I'm not going to."

"It wasn't the same."

"It's exactly the same," Reeve said. "You said at the meeting. If I think of something at two in the morning I'll read it out at breakfast. It's breakfast."

Cole sat with that.

Every person at the table was watching him, and he knew what they were watching for, because he'd have watched for it too: the argument. The reason. The very good explanation of why this particular secret was different.

He had one. It was a good one. He had been building it since quarter to five.

He didn't give it.

"Yeah," he said. "It's breakfast."

Then he told the rest of it properly.

That he'd gone to bed at half one. That the next thing he knew was a stairwell and his own hand on a door. That he did not know what had driven him there and that it had been right, and that being right was the thing that frightened him most, because it meant something in him knew things he didn't and was acting on them without asking.

"How many times?" Dana said.

"That I know of? Seven now."

"That you know of."

"Yeah," Cole said. "That's the part."

Vesper took the toast out.

She buttered it very carefully, both slices, all the way to the edges, and put it on a plate, and brought it to the table and sat down with it and did not eat it.

"I understood something on Thursday," she said. "At Agnes's. When she said the name of the town."

"I know. You said."

"I understood more than the name." She was looking at the toast. "I've been deciding since Thursday when to tell you the rest, and I'd decided on tonight."

"And now?"

"And now I'm not going to," Vesper said.

Nobody breathed.

"Not forever. I'm not punishing you." Her voice was completely level. "But you asked somebody to keep something from me four days after you sat in this kitchen and promised you wouldn't, and I'd like to find out what it feels like to be the one deciding when you're ready."

"Vesper—"

"I'll tell Dana," she said. "Today. She'll write it down. And when I think you've gone long enough without asking Reeve to hold things, I'll tell you."

Cole did not argue.

That was the second time in a week, and Mia counted it.

She found him afterwards on the landing, sitting on the top step, which was where he went now instead of the fire escape.

She sat down one step below him, the way she had done since she was six, and did not say anything for a while.

"You're going to be horrible about this," she said eventually.

"I'm not."

"You're going to be quiet and reasonable about it for about four days and then you're going to do something stupid on your own to prove you can." She pulled her knees up. "I've watched you do it since I was nine."

"That's a lot of confidence."

"That's sixteen years of data." Mia leaned her head against the banister. "Cole. Reeve told because he loves you. Vesper's not telling because she loves you. You understand that both of those are the same thing, right?"

He didn't answer.

"You do," Mia said. "You just hate it."

She got up, and on the way past she put her hand on the top of his head, briefly, the way you'd check a child for a temperature — a thing she had not done since she was about eleven — and went downstairs.

Dana had the ten by four o'clock.

Nine of them were exactly as Harriet Slade had described. An office. A warehouse. A bakery in Ashfield that was not Arden Row. Nine people in their twenties and thirties who had come in with Refusal to Fade and had been filed down to Resonance Fatigue and had gone on to have entirely ordinary lives.

The tenth was the girl with the gap in her teeth.

Her name was Lottie Farr and she was twenty and she worked at a nursery in Halden Cross, and Reeve said he would go.

"On your own?"

"No. With Mia." He'd already asked her. "Not Cole. I'd like to meet her without anybody who's going to — without anybody who'll read her before she's said hello."

They got there at half three, when the parents were arriving.

It was a low building with painted handprints on the windows and a gate with a latch at adult height, and a young woman in a lanyard was standing at it saying goodbye to a boy in a dinosaur coat.

Gap in her front teeth. Hair tied back. Laughing at something the boy said.

Reeve stood on the pavement across the road and could not make himself cross it.

"Go on," Mia said.

"She's happy."

"You said you wanted to know if she's all right."

"I know. She is." He had his hands in his pockets. "She's completely all right, Mia, look at her, and I'm about to walk over there and—"

The girl looked up.

Straight across the road. Past the parents, past the gate, past the traffic. At Reeve.

Her face went white.

And Lottie Farr, twenty, who had been reclassified at sixteen and had not remembered anything unusual in four years, took one step toward the gate and said, loud enough to carry across a road:

"Reeve?"

[End of Chapter 155]