Page 24

I miss him.

Even though I can see him any time I like. Hanna’s door is as open to me as mine is to her and most days I’m proud that we co-parent so well. Thankful for her grace and kindness.

Today, I don’t think about it much because I’m thinking about Poet. About his arresting stare and addictive lips. About what might’ve happened if we’d been anywhere but the side of the road when we’d come across each other again.

He keeps my mind busy. But I live the way my parents taught me. I do not have endless chores stacked up and the housework only occupies me so long. It’s lunchtime when I run out of things to do and I do not feel like eating alone.

I walk to the Joker. Sol is at the pumps and I round the bar to embrace him. “No day of rest for you, my friend?”

Sol pours beer for a local and thunks it down, rolling his eyes as he gets a grunt in response. “Jack needed the rest more than me.”

“He is okay?”

“I think so. You drinking?”

“At this hour?” I shake my head at him. “No, Sol. I will eat, though. You are hungry?”

Silly question. Sol has to be drowning in his feelings to not want to eat, and those days are rare now—another reason to be thankful. He tells me there are mackerel fillets to be cooked in the fridge upstairs. I punch the code into the new lock on the door beyond the bar and let myself into the flat where Sol lives with Jack, Mal, and Skylar.

It is quiet up here, as quiet as my house without Aras. But I sense the presence of other living beings and I feel better instantly, despite finding them all asleep.

Jack on one couch.

His faithful dog on the other.

Fiadh cracks an eye and flicks her ears at me, and I remember for the first time in a while that her daughter, Ariel, lives with Folk and his family. That even here, in the inner sanctum of the Joker, I find connections to Poet Whitlock.

Because you are looking for them.

Because you want them.

I leave Fiadh be and move through the living room to the kitchen, breathing air that feels so much lighter now everyone who lives here is happy. Now Sol is happy, maybe. I am so deeply connected to my friend. It is how I knew I had not died when I woke up in a hospital bed. Because the first thing Mal told me was that Sol was alive.

Memory skates through me.

A shiver, despite the balmy day.

I open the fridge and retrieve the fish left over from our evening pop-up yesterday. Find the buns, the pickles, and the bacon Jack prefers over gherkins and horseradish. Retrieve the Lithuanian pans that should live in my kitchen, but honestly I do not need such large cookware when it’s just Aras and me at home.

Or just me.

The restlessness in my gut flares again. Feels like something else. Like pain that is not real, another memory prickling my skin. One I hide from in thoughts of tipping a strong and long-limbed man onto his back. Of pressing my body to his on the sand-dusted ground and⁠—

“Oscar?”

I startle and spin around. Jack is in the kitchen doorway, rubbing one eye, his gaze thick with sleep and the weight of waking up beneath a permanent brain injury. “It is me, Jack. Was I too loud?”

Slowly, Jack shakes his head, and I feel it more since my own reckoning with mortality than I ever did before.

I go to him and ease his hand from his eye. Gently, I do not knock it away like Mal does. “Come and sit,” I tell him. “Eat with me.”

“Where’s Sol?”

“Downstairs. You would like me to get him?”

Jack doesn’t answer right away. I let him think about it and go back to preparing lunch for him, for Sol. For myself and whoever else might be around. And in the end, Sol comes upstairs, leaving the quiet bar to the seasonal staff.

“Does anyone know how to open things on an email?”