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Which is where I’m going.

Or he might be a hundred other places he hasn’t told me about because sometimes we don’t do much talking.

I woke up with him two days ago.

Feels like a year and weird anxiety creeps into my chest. Not the old kind. The silent suffocating panic I woke up with twelve years ago, when the world had become too quiet to trust. Most of that has healed and this feels different.

Smaller.

Dafter.

As if my heart thinks I want something I can’t have, but that’s not true. I know where Oscar lives, I see the ocean he draws a living from every day of my life. I’ve felt Oscar laugh and sing. I’ve felt him come with his hand wrapped around mine in the dark. So why does knowing what his son likes for dinner feel more important?

I start walking again, autopilot kicking in as if movement will jar the answer out of me—the obvious answer. But my head feels noisy tonight, like it does sometimes when too many things move at once and I don’t know where they all fit.

Things.

Feelings.

Facts are easy. I know Oscar drinks strong instant coffee. And the wheat I’m nursing through its first season will need extra water soon if the heat keeps up. I know Oscar still isn’t sure how he wants to fuck if we ever get that far. Everything else is messy and refuses to stay where I put it, and my thoughts keep circling an answer I just can’t see.

Try harder.

Use the right tools.

But I’m out of time to stretch my brain beyond solid things; beyond the land, the weather, the gulls in the sky, and the wildfire physical attraction Oscar and I share that’s the easiest thing in the world. I come up on the Joker and duck inside before I can think too hard about that either.

Which turns out to be a mistake, but one I don’t notice straightaway. The Joker is packed, but I don’t mind that. The press of form and movement. Glasses catching the light as most people at least try to shrug out of my way. Crowds have rhythm if you pay attention and I learned how a long time ago.

In any case, it was busier the first night I came here, when Oscar was singing with the man I’m looking for tonight. If the crush of ale-soaked bodies was going to bother me, it should’ve bothered me then. So it’s not the swelter of the low-ceilinged, airless pub that snares my breath in my throat and pushes me underwater. It’s something less predictable, anywhere, any place but a town like Porth Luck.

It’s a female shanty group, a big one, clustered by the garden doors. Twenty of them, maybe more, in full song, animated and loud—I can tell. Bright eyes, flushed skin, hands clapping, moving to something I can’t access at all.

Because women’s voices carry different.

There’s no low vibration in the air, no faint shape of sound. I can’t feel them, and an invisible wall drops between me and the outside world.

Abrupt.

Extreme.

Like I’ve been flung off the edge of a cliff and landed with my head in thick mud, a sensation I’ve never learned to handle. Because sometimes there is no learning. We just endure, and it frustrates me I can’t do it tonight.

You have to.

I don’t. I can leave any time I want. But with Dav’s wages burning a hole in my pocket, I find the tether I need to shove my agitation down and shoulder my way to the bar.

I’m looking for Sol.

He’s not there.

Neither is Jack. But as I near the bar, I recognise a face I’ve never seen before—because it’s the one Folk told me to look out for if I ever needed anything down here and he wasn’t around.

At the time, I’d thrown a sofa cushion at his head. Now, I’m grateful he described Mal Gallagher so well to me I reckon I could pick him out in the dark. Partly because he looks a little like Folk—same build, same clothes. Mostly because Folk told me to look for a bloke who carries himself with the air of a murderous hawk. As if he expects trouble and he’s annoyed when it doesn’t happen.

A dangerous man pretending to be chill, Mal Gallagher’s lurking, not working. No one around him. He doesn’t scare me, though. None of my brother’s friends ever have.

I slide into the space beside him and hold out the envelope. “This is for Sol.”