happy and anxious all at once, and he wanted to talk to someone about it.
Someone specific, he realized.
You still out?
Nearly home. You?
Cormac felt a huge gush of relief. This was ridiculous. He didn’t even know this girl. But somehow, he’d found, she was the one he wanted to talk to.
I’m back too. It’s hot out there.
But what about the delicious meat buns?
It turns out I’m quite quick at eating meat buns.
Lissa felt her heart beating faster as she reached the little cottage. She went into the back garden to try to take a picture of Neddie Needles, but he hadn’t appeared.
So what’s on your mind? she found herself typing.
A bit of her, the tiniest bit, thought she should call him. But somehow, in the absolute stillness and quiet of the night, it seemed strange, such a boundary crosser. She was too nervous. This was safe, and she needed to feel safe.
You know when you were at that accident?
Yeah.
How did you feel?
You sound like my therapist! SHIT I need to skype my therapist!
Had you forgotten?
Yes!
I wonder if that’s a sign.
Of me being a coward, probably.
Of you getting better, maybe.
Lissa looked around the garden, the evening scents of the cooling grass hanging heavy in the still air. It was lovely, even if it was getting horribly overgrown. The stream tinkled prettily.
This place is quite special.
It is. So is London.
Is this about meat buns again?
Yeah probably.
Anyway, why are you asking?
I just . . . I think it might be a bit the same as the army.
Lissa didn’t say anything, just sat and waited, the little glowing phone in her hand, the center of her world right then. And Cormac poured it all out, typing as if his life depended on it, his spelling all over the place. Telling her about the hideous injuries, the pointless pain, the children caught in the cross fire; the waste of all of it. How he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop worrying about it. How he had come home, and his mother was ashamed of him, and he felt like a coward for leaving his comrades. She read it all, patiently and carefully. And at the end of it, she typed just two words.
I know.
And she signed it off with a kiss. And Cormac held his phone to his chest, close, just as, five hundred miles away, Lissa was doing exactly the same thing, as if they were holding each other’s hearts in their hands.
Chapter 57
Oh, the luxury, the rare luxury, of waking on a sunny Sunday morning with nothing to do and someone else to think about.
Once upon a time this would have made Lissa panic. She would have felt lonely and worried that she was living in the center of the greatest city in the world and not making the most of it. She would have been entirely concerned that she was wasting time, desperately checking her Insta to see if her friends had been up to something fun that she would have wanted to go to; pinging her mates immediately to see if anyone was up to anything, while trying not to look too needy; worrying if her mother was coming into town, who would want to complain about her hair or her living conditions, or why she didn’t just look at these brochures for research chemistry—she’d been so good at chemistry at school, and there were all sorts of interesting careers that could spin off it now, it wasn’t just in labs you know, you could travel all over the world . . .
But there was something about living in Kirrinfief that had changed all that, she could tell. Something about being perfectly content with your own company—you had to be in a region the size of London but with eight thousand people living in it instead of eight million. If you wanted company you could simply wander into the village and someone you knew would come along immediately; you could head down to the fair or the pub and find yourself caught up in whatever came along. If there was anything to do—a fiddle band playing, a community play, Nina running a book reading—everybody went automatically. And if there wasn’t, you stayed in and suited yourself. In the middle of nowhere, she found, she didn’t feel lonely at all. She was so far removed from everything she couldn’t possibly be worried about missing anything. And what was she missing anyway?
Nonetheless, she thought, stretching luxuriously, the sun making panes on the duvet. She would putter