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Like sunflowers.
And like one of those giant blooms Dad used to plant, I seek my own sun by finding Rae in the cabin. He is wedged between my sisters on a sagging sofa with a book on his lap, and I don’t need to see the cover to know it will be star-filled. Isla turns a page to show a kid with skinny arms holding back a huge boulder.
For a first time, I get to see how this story pans out, and how, many pages later, this kid is joined by a father he thought he’d lost to addiction.
Ava interprets. “He got his daddy back?”
Rae meets my eye before nodding. “Took a while, but yeah. It doesn’t always happen, which is what these pages in between were all about.” He flicks back to the beginning, then meets my eyes. His are dark with compassion. “We don’t always get the things we hope for, do we? The things we’d give anything in the world for.”
I nod, and he continues.
“This kid’s boulder was made of hope, and hope can be the heaviest thing to hold on to.”
Page after page shows how he wasn’t alone—other people take turns to hold his boulder for him, and I thank fuck Rae got to see this example when his own arms were shaking.
He tells my sisters, “Even if he didn’t get what he hoped for, he found out that he didn’t have to get crushed. That getting onwith having a good life would only make him stronger. Strong enough to take a turn at holding on to hope for other people.”
I hold on to some hope of my own on Friday.
Hold on to it?
There’s no fucking way I’ll drop this ball for Rae. I keep a death grip on it the whole way to London.
We take the train past fields empty of wheat, and that evidence of the farming cycle should pull at me—would leave me worried about finding work this winter if I didn’t have a text message on my phone from someone else who has been hoping.
For me.
Luke Lawson:Yes, I can get you a place on that course.
Luke Lawson:Find me after school starts again on Monday. We’ll talk.
For once, I don’t dread a conversation about the future. I’m looking forward even as Rae looks back before entering that publisher’s office.
His eyes don’t dance.
They are laser-focussed, and I love to see it. I love that he isn’t alone either. He has a lord beside him, and a mentor who made a transatlantic flight to help Rae get the answer he needs to keep his project going.
And when he leaves that office later?
Rae runs. Launches himself like a missile. At me.
I catch him, and fuck anyone who looks twice at a moment of triumph so bright it has to be visible from Cornwall. Or from France, which is his next destination.
We sit in the back of a cab next with London passing. I don’t see any of it. I only see him and I listen. “I have to do this. Buy supplies and get them to where they’re needed. But I’ve had an idea.”
“About?”
“About sharing the work.” He echoes what he must have heard Kirsty tell me. “It doesn’t all have to be down to me. And I think I know a way to?—”
“Give your arms a rest?”
Rae nods. “I’ll find a way to do it, and then I’ll come back. We can figure out how to make this work then.”
That’s what we both want.
He still rakes a lip with his teeth. “I don’t know how long it will take.”
“Then I’ll come to see you.”
