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Cassian didn’t have friends who would take him shopping and soothe him while he cried in a hair salon. Felix would rather chew glass than set foot in a shopping centre. Ivar had informed the MOAN group that Västervikska people wore exclusively hand-knitted wool and sealskin, and would not be drawn on whether this was a joke. But he did have access to Colin and Diwa’s walk-in wardrobe, which was a room the size of a one-bedroom flat that happened to contain clothes.
Cassian now stood in the middle of it at six in the morning, on the heated floor, surrounded by more clothing options than he’d ever clapped eyes on in his entire life.
The wardrobe was organised by colour. Diwa’s side ran from white through navy to black, each section hung on matching velvet hangers with the labels facing the same direction. Colin’s side was smaller, more practical, and featured a number of high-vis vests.
Cassian bypassed Colin’s side. Colin’s primary concern when dressing himself was shielding himself from baby vomit, and that was not the energy Cassian needed today. He needed Lily-at-the-bar energy. He needed Ruari’s hands to stop moving and his mouth to stop making train noises, so that his eyes would land on Cassian and stay there.
He pulled a shirt off its hanger. It was silk, dark green. He held it up against his chest and examined himself in the full-length mirror.
Too big. Diwa was broader than Cassian through the shoulders, and the shirt hung off him like a very expensive pillowcase.
He tried a black button-down. Also too big, but less dramatically so, and when he left the top three buttons undone the fabric fell open across his collarbones in a way that looked deliberate rather than ill-fitting. He tucked the front into an imaginary waistband and turned sideways.
His reflection looked back at him: a twenty-two-year-old with dark circles under his eyes and too-long hair.
“I’m mature,” he told the mirror, lowering his chin and narrowing his eyes the way Lily had done in the changing room scene. “I’m sophisticated.”
He looked like he was trying not to sneeze.
There was a row of shirts on Diwa’s side that Colin called the wanker shirts, and Cassian headed for them next.
They were plain, short-sleeved, and made of some kind of light natural fibre that clung to Diwa’s arms and chest. Colin would clock Diwa wearing one, and his gaze would stay longer than it needed to. “Augh, the wanker shirt,” he’d complain.
And Diwa would smirk and say, “If you hate it so much, come take it off me.” Then Colin would ask Cassian if he wouldn’t mind terribly looking after Tala for a bit, and the two of them would vanish upstairs and not come back for a while.
Cassian had once asked Colin what they did up there, since he always came downstairs smiling, and Diwa never actually changed out of the wanker shirts. Colin had said “tax returns” in a voice so flat that even Cassian knew he was lying. Diwa wore the shirts a lot.
They ran along Diwa’s rail from navy through gunmetal, slate and charcoal to black. Cassian counted fourteen of them.
He pulled a wanker shirt off its velvet hanger and tugged it over his head.
The mirror delivered its verdict immediately. What clung to Diwa’s chest and biceps hung off Cassian’s frame like a bin bag. The sleeves drooped past his elbows. He looked less like Lily walking into the bar and more like a child who’d raided his father’s wardrobe for a school play about being an adult.
Cassian reached behind himself, gathered the excess fabric at his lower back into his fist, and twisted it tight. The front pulled taut over his chest, and the mirror showed him something closer to what he was after. His collarbones sat sharp above the neckline, and the fabric followed his waist in before his arm ruined it.
He couldn’t walk into Proving Ground holding the back of his own shirt.
He let go. The fabric billowed out again, and he was back to bin bag.
Cassian grabbed the hem of Diwa’s wanker shirt with both hands, separated it into two halves just above his navel, and tied them together.
The knot sat snug at his stomach. The fabric pulled tight over his chest and shoulders, and the sleeves hitched up to sit just above the bicep.
He turned sideways in the mirror. It showed him in a knotted shirt and yesterday’s boxers, with his hair unbrushed and one sock on, but the wanker shirt was a start.
The doorbell rang, and Cassian was down the stairs in a flash.
He loved the doorbell. Every ring brought the promise of company. Someone had come to the house, on purpose, to see the people inside it, and Cassian was one of those people now. The not-knowing who it might be was the best part, because for the three seconds it took to cross the hallway, his visitor could be anyone at all.
Diwa had asked him, twice now, to please look through the peephole before he opened the door. Apparently there were people in London who rang doorbells with intentions that were not friendly. Cassian had nodded seriously and then continued to fling the door open like a game-show host revealing a prize. The peephole turned everyone into a distorted fish-person and took all the joy out of the reveal.
Today, though, he remembered Diwa’s request and he pressed his eye to the peephole.
Something was blocking it. A dark shape filled the tiny circle from edge to edge, so he threw the door open.
Ruari was standing on the front step with a basket the size of a laundry hamper balanced against him. The basket was full of pastries in rows: croissants with their tips curled tight, pains au chocolat with dark seams of chocolate visible at their torn ends, and a cluster of small golden rounds he didn’t recognise, their tops cracked and glistening with burnt sugar.
Cassian took a step closer and dipped his nose towards one of the golden rounds.
