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Hayden:I did go home.
I follow it with another message.
Hayden:Made it here safe and sound.
A third message is harder to type. Not for trembling reasons, but because of how true this feels.
Hayden:Wish you were here with me.
And if my hands quit shaking anytime soon?
I might even find the guts to send it.
21
RAE
The train to Paddington takes long enough for me to shuffle my images into order. Then I rearrange them a hundred times while practicing a sales pitch that could push my publishing deal over the finish line and score the advance I need to keep my project going.
So why does it feel like I’m headed in the wrong direction?
That suspicion travels with me until I emerge from an underground station into a nighttime city.
Kensington is a world away from Cornwall. A world away too from the beach that should be my next stop if I get a yes tonight.
That’s what I need.
A solid yes—from a partner the publisher will approve of—and a publishing contract.
I should look forward to both.
I can’t help looking backwards in one of London’s poshest postcodes, where there is no sign of a river, yet I wade like I did when Hayden was caught in a whirlpool behind me.
I hope he isn’t stuck tonight, unable to escape swirling water without me to hold out a hand to him. I really hope he’s on hisway to visit his sisters. And to see a woman I last saw wrapped in feathers as soft as her eyes after he said he might make it home for the first time in ages.
That’s why I pause when I truly don’t have time to loiter.
I should hurry, and I need to if I’m gonna make a pitch that could keep my one-man band going. My feet still drag, my portfolio strangely heavy. My rucksack too, and it makes no sense that I look for Hayden over my shoulder once again and expect to see him reaching out to take it from me.
I can’t count how many times he’s helped me.
Who does that for him?
Plenty of people seem to want to. He doesn’t let them, and I didn’t know why until he got as bare as the branches on that last willow. Now I have a little more detail to add to a picture of a man who doesn’t think he’s earned help.
Fuck that.Seriously.Fuck it right in the eye.
I’m on a street far from shifting sand dunes, but that’s what flashes in my mind’s eye next—me, kneeling at the base of a dune and digging for someone drowning on dry land.
I see that pink feather boa next, hear the woman who wore it telling Hayden not to keep sending money. Now here I am, surrounded by swanky homes worth millions, yet all I can think about is a man who doesn’t have four walls and a roof of his own. Who has sold almost everything he owns, like all but one of those bell tents, and I understand travelling light, but…
Migrants trade their possessions when traffickers come calling. When desperation drives parents, they’ll give up every single thing they own for their kids’ futures.
What is Hayden trading away his life for in such a hurry?
I start walking again then but grind to another halt while picturing a face that looked bare, even with his beard regrowing. I’ve had a long journey to think over everything he’s shown me. Like how his beard is probably only growing back because hecan’t always trust his hands with a razor. That adds to everything else he’s told me, including a last confession I’m almost certain he only shared to get me moving.
He’s hidden part of himself in plain sight while confessing to something else, and the more I think, the closer I circle what feels like his real reason.
