Page 74 of The Bargain

“We should probably go back, love.”

She turns to throw me a defiant look over her shoulder. “I would rather die than let you go back to those people.”

Something lurches inside me, like her words somehow reached into my chest and grabbed my red, bloody heart.

“Those people pay my school tuition fees,” I point out with a light laugh.

“So?” She whips around, stopping dead in her tracks so that I almost bump into her. She gazes furiously up into my eyes. “That doesn’t give them the right to use you, or control you. You don’t belong to them. You’re⁠—”

She cuts herself off abruptly, clamping her mouth shut.

I pull closer, half-smiling. “I’m what?”

“You’re nobody’s,” she says, with renewed fervour.

“Not even yours?” I ask, smile blossoming fuller now, wider.

The lurching sensation in my chest has metastasised, evolved into an inexplicable elation. It’s coursing through me, making me feel suddenly reckless, invincible, ecstatic. I have the crazy urge to grab Desdemona in my arms, to spin her around, to kiss her mouth again, and then again, until my kiss is tattooed onto her mouth, my existence indelibly inked into her skin.

“If you were mine,” Desdemona says, “it still wouldn’t make it okay for me to use you.”

But I’d still let you.

The thought hangs, unspoken, between us. We’re facing one another in the middle of the street, London’s noisy nightlife blurring by with us frozen in its centre, a moment suspended in time, and our future whirling, a distant tornado slowly closing in.

The Pearsons, the Harvard scholarship, our fake relationship, Birnam Hastings, my future, the inevitable point of separation when Desdemona will go back to her perfect, blameless life, and I’ll fall backwards into the darkness to take the fall for a crime I didn’t commit.

It all exists, it’s all coming—but not right now.

Right now, a gust of wind gasps through the city, shoving my hair into my face and flapping Desdemona’s skirt so high I catch a glimpse of her long thighs. Rain flickers in the air, light as a sea-tossed spray.

This time, it’s my turn to reach forward and grab Desdemona’s hand in mine.

“Come on,” I call through the rush of wind and traffic and rain. “I know where to go.”

The hardest thing about growing up in foster care is that there’s almost never any privacy. You might be lucky enough to not share a room for a night or two, but spaces in children’s homes fill up fast. Most people would be shocked how clogged the foster system is, how many kids end up unwanted, cast away or removed from their families.

Most of us end up finding our own ways of carving out spaces for ourselves, like dents in a dense wall. Some kids would pick up art in school, just so they could spend a couple of hours a week in a cramped secondary school art studio. Some kids found small nooks in busy places: a windowsill broad enough to sit behind a curtain, the bottom of a closet to sit in with a pair of staticky headphones. Some kids even found their privacy inwards: disappearing between the pages of a book, or shutting themselves away behind a barrier of music.

I used to come here.

St Dominic House Observatory isn’t really supposed to be open to the public at night—hasn’t been for years. It was built a century ago, when the Navy thought they could map the world by measuring the stars, but the last proper astronomer packed up sometime in the 1950s. Now it’s just another London heritage site that they wheel out for fundraising events and school trips.

I got in the first time when I was thirteen. My foster placement at the time was in a council flat in Lambeth—I first saw the building by chance, having taken a different path back from school to avoid two boys who used to hunt me for sport. The sight of the dome, sticking out over the London skyline, a washed-out white that looks almost green with half-faded lichen, ridged and slightly cracked at the top like a broken egg in a carton, had stopped me in my tracks.

Later, much later, I found the side door to the observatory wing. It wasn’t locked properly—old bolt, swollen frame. I slipped inside and climbed the spiral stairs, and when I reached the top, it felt like I’d stepped into the ribcage of some massive beast, and found another world contained within.

The dome was half open, the metal ribs catching what little light there was. The air smelled of rust, stone, and rain. The old-fashioned telescope stood in the middle, its brass dulled to the colour of honey that’s been left, abandoned, at the bottom of a jar. All around, the walls were mapped with constellations, the paint long faded to powder-blue and dull gold.

I remember thinking it was the first room I’d ever been in that didn’t belong to anyone. Not a carer’s, not a teacher’s, not a family’s. An enclosed space—looking outward.

That first night, I just sat on the floor beneath the dome, my coat spread like a blanket under me, watching the slice of sky through the open hatch. It was February, still cold enough that I could see my breath steam from my mouth, but it didn’t matter. I watched until I couldn’t feel my fingers, and fell asleep for a few hours, and awoke shocked to find a cloudless sky filled with stars.

“What is this place?”

Desdemona’s murmured question brings me back to the present. She was frowning but silent when I snuck us in through the rusted side door, like she was certain I was about to get her into trouble but willing to trust me anyway. As I led her through the darkened corridors, I could feel her press closer to me, as if for safety, and it sent a shimmering burst of emotions through my chest.

I want to keep her safe, I realise. Like being entrusted with a beautiful, precious object, I want to keep her close and protect her from anything that could damage her.