ThorneVale

chapter Seventeen

The memory came to him unbidden, the way it always did, usually at night, usually when he'd let his guard down enough for sleep to loosen its grip on the careful order he kept everything else in.

He was eleven. The house smelled like autumn, woodsmoke and the particular sweetness of his mother's baking, and he was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework he didn't remember the subject of anymore, only the ordinary, unremarkable texture of that evening, the last ordinary evening he'd have for a long time.

His mother had been humming. He remembered that clearly, a tune he could never quite place afterward no matter how many times he tried to reconstruct it, and she'd been standing at the counter with her back to him, and there had been a knock at the door that she'd answered without hesitation, because Thornevale in those days had still felt like a place where danger announced itself, where a knock at the door was just a neighbor, just an ordinary visitor, not a threat wearing an ordinary face.

He didn't see what happened next. That was the mercy his mind had granted him, the specific blank space where the worst of it should have been, memory protecting a child in the only way it knew how. What he remembered instead was after. The sound, sharp and wrong, cutting through the ordinary evening. His father's voice, raw in a way he'd never heard before or since. Being pulled into a back room by an aunt whose face he could no longer clearly picture, told to stay, stay, don't come out, while sounds he still couldn't fully name moved through the house beyond the door.

He remembered the funeral in fragments too. Rain that didn't feel dramatic enough for what it was marking. His father's hand gripping his shoulder too hard, like letting go might mean losing something else. Del, too young to understand fully, asking when Mom was coming back, and no one in the room finding the words to answer her.

What he remembered most clearly, the memory that had shaped every choice he'd made since, was the weeks after. His father at the kitchen table, the same table where Callum had done his homework that last ordinary evening, sitting for hours at a time with nothing in front of him, no food, no work, just sitting, hollowed out in a way that felt permanent even to an eleven year old's understanding of the world.

His father had loved his mother enormously. Callum had never doubted that, not for a single day of his childhood, and watching that love become a wound that never fully closed had taught him, more thoroughly than any lesson he'd been formally given, that loving someone made you a target twice over. Once for yourself, and once for the devastation of losing them.

He woke from the memory sometime past three in the morning, the ridge house dark and quiet around him where he'd fallen asleep in the chair by the window, having stayed later than usual after Wren had gone up to bed, some part of him unwilling to leave even once the immediate reason for staying had passed.

He sat in the dark for a long while, the old grief settling back into its familiar shape in his chest, and thought about the conversation in the yard the day before, the words he'd said out loud for the first time in years. I want the bond.

He'd meant it. That was the frightening part, more frightening than the memory itself, that some part of him had finally stopped being able to pretend the wanting wasn't there, buried under years of careful control.

He thought about his father, hollowed out at that kitchen table, and understood, with a clarity that felt both terrifying and strangely freeing, that the version of protection he'd built his whole life around, distance, control, careful walls, hadn't actually saved his father from that grief. It had just delayed it, and made it worse when it finally arrived, unprepared and unpracticed at carrying something so heavy.

Maybe the answer wasn't distance at all. Maybe the answer was building something strong enough, together, that it could survive whatever came for it.

He didn't know if he believed that yet, not fully. But sitting in the dark of a house that had started to feel less like duty and more like something he wanted to return to, he found himself, for the first time in twenty one years, willing to consider it.