THE INVISIBLE SCAR

CHAPTER 5 :THE MAN AT THE DOOR

CHAPTER 5

THE MAN AT THE DOOR

Six months later.

The show on the television was bad. It was the specific kind of bad show where the dialogue was doing things that no human being would say out loud and the lighting looked like a stage production from 1994, and Isla had been watching it for forty-five minutes because she had completely ran out of the energy required to look for something better.

She was wearing a threadbare t-shirt that had been through approximately a hundred washes

and had a very faint stain near the hem that had once been red wine. She had her hair down which she had eaten cereal for dinner and she had absolutely no regrets about it. On the coffee table in front of her were the remains of her dinner, phone, laptop , with three freelance invoices half-drafted, and a mug of tea that had gone cold forty minutes ago.

She was, in the specific way of someone who had successfully dismantled a grief and packed it away in a basement in their chest, fine. She was fine but she had a decent client list now three corporate clients, nothing glamorous, that required her to think too hard about the year before which she had a decent flat in Bermondsey, and she had her mother's voice on the phone every Sunday, and she was completely and thoroughly and absolutely fine.

The knock came at two-fourteen in the morning.

She heard it and her first instinct was that it was her downstairs neighbour, who had locked

herself out twice already and who Isla had quietly given a spare key to last month. She turned the television down. She padded to the door in her socks.

She opened it.

Marcus Blackwell was standing in her hallway.

Her mind did something very strange for about three seconds .The way a body refuses to register pain for a beat after impact, making space for the animal processing to complete before the understanding arrives.

He looked nothing like himself.

He was still tall, still unmistakably him those wide shoulders, angular jaw, the grey eyes

that usually carried the controlled intensity of a man who had not once in his adult life been

confused about what he wanted. But he was in a plain dark shirt that was creased at the collar, not a suit, and his hair was wrong loose, a little damp, like he'd been running. He was wearing jeans and she had never, in three years, seen him in jeans and on his left wrist, just visible below his cuff, there was a white hospital bracelet.

His face was grey, Not ill, exactly more like a man who had been carrying a very heavy thing

for a very long time and had not yet decided how to put it down.

He was holding a ring box.

He was looking at her the way people look at landmarks after an earthquake ,checking to see if it's still there and if it's real.

"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was rough,Lower than she remembered. "I know what time it is

I—" He stopped. He pressed his mouth together and hiis hands were shaking very slightly. "I don't know your address and I don't know how I got your address."

Isla gripped the door frame.

"I found it written on the inside of my wallet," he said. "In my own handwriting I don't

remember writing it." He looked down at the ring box in his hand like he'd half-forgotten he was holding it, and then backed up at her, "I found this in my jacket pocket."

He opened the box.

The ring was small and antique-looking, rose gold, with a central stone that caught the hallway light and threw it back in warm, amber-green. Perido, she registered distantly her birthstone,the stone she'd mentioned, once, in passing, to exactly no one at Blackwell Industries, in a conversation about her but couldn't even remember something ordinary and unremarkable.

She had never seen this ring in her life.

She looked at his right hand. The ring was there too and a second one the same setting, clearly a pair. He was wearing the match.

"The hospital," he said and his voice was doing something now, very controlled, very

careful, but underneath it there was a current of something that was barely contained "the

hospital said my name. And the woman who came to collect me she said—" He stopped again. He looked at her directly, and what was in his eyes was not the measured, calculated gaze she had spent three years learning to work around. It was something open and lost and entirely unguarded, and it hit her somewhere between the sternum and the throat.

"She said I had a fiancée," he said. "She said you were my fiancée," A pause. "I don't know if

that's true. I don't know—" His jaw tightened but he was clearly a person who hated not knowing it in a way that went all the way down. "I woke up and I had no memory of the last six months, Nothing. And they kept asking me if I was all right and I kept asking them your name and they told me and I—".

He stopped.

In the silence, the television was still on in the living room some improbable drama and someone crying.

"I don't know who you are," he said quietly. "But I woke up with your name in my mouth and

I found this ring ,found your address and I—" He swallowed, "Please tell me the truth."

Isla looked at him for a long moment.

She should say: you have the wrong woman.

She should say: there's been some kind of mistake she should close the door and call someone, or anyone, the only person in this city who might know what was happening, and figure it out from a safe distance with sensible shoes on and a plan.

His hands were still shaking.

He was looking at her like she was the only solid thing in the world.

"Come in," she said.

She stepped back held the door open. He walked in, past her, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, and he smelled like himself, expensive soap and something underneath it that was just him, and her body recognised it before her brain had finished telling it not to.

She closed the door.

She turned around.

He was standing in the middle of her small living room, looking at the cereal bowl and the cold tea and the terrible television drama, and he looked enormous,lost, and quietly terrified in the way of men who were not accustomed to terror.

He looked at her.

God help me, she thought but I still love him.

"All right," she said. "Sit down. I'll make tea."

His eyes moved across her face, and then down, very briefly — to her left wrist, to the compass tattoo, back up. Something crossed his expression that she couldn't name.

He sat down on her sofa.

"Isla," he said quietly, as if testing the weight of it. The way a man says a word he's been saying alone, in the dark, and isn't sure anyone else can hear it. "That's your name,Isn't it."

She was already walking to the kitchen. Her back was to him with her hands perfectly steady.

"Yes," she said. "That's my name.”