Will, and Will wondered now whether he had known on some level, if maybe that was part of why Will hadn’t wanted to leave him. Of course he had to go, there was no question of anything else, but that leave had been the last moment he was young, the last time he had the luxury of only looking forward, never back.
During that awful visit at Bermondsey House, Will had meant it when he told Martin he didn’t let his mind grapple with what might have been. If he let himself imagine a world in which he had somehow stayed home, he didn’t know how he’d claw his way back to the present. But now, when he thought of his eighteen-year-old self standing in that same spot, the boy he had been seemed infinitely fragile, so easily broken, so hard to put back together. He had done it, though, and if he had gotten through the past few years then he could get through anything.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and took a hard look at the house that stood before him. Fellside Grange was smaller than he remembered, a ramshackle pile of slate-roofed chaos, and it was hard to believe it had once housed five children, various parents, and other adults. He’d go in and see his father; he had long since made peace with what it meant to have as careless a parent as Alton Sedgwick, and while he’d never feel warmly toward his father, any bitterness was merely residual, the faint aftertaste of something long gone.
But he knew when he looked at the house that it wasn’t his home, and hadn’t been for long years. The contours of this house were as much a part of him as the lakes and the hills around him, but any possibility of them being his home was lost to him. This place could join the ranks of things that were lost at sea and in bottles of laudanum and in the clean sweep of time. He had other things instead, things he mightn’t have had if he had somehow stayed that boy of eighteen. No, not instead—it wasn’t like there had been a fair trade, a bargain. There were things this Will Sedgwick had, and which were as carved into him as this northern geography and that sloppy gray house: a way of earning a living, a life, a love, a home.
And with that he let himself acknowledge the fact that had been just out of sight all day. This wasn’t Martin’s home either. Of course he hadn’t gone to Cumberland, and Will had been badly mistaken to have ever thought so.
He passed a hand across his face and groaned. If he wrote Martin at once, the letter might reach Martin before Will himself did. Three days, maybe four, and he could be at the gamekeeper’s cottage beside Martin, home, where he belonged, a future stretching out as bright and sharp as anything his younger self could have dreamed of.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Three days passed without a letter, and if Martin had been slightly less confident of Will’s regard—if he had been anything less than dead certain that he possessed the entirety of Will Sedgwick’s heart, the idiot—then he might have taken it personally. As it was, he assumed a letter had gotten lost in the post or perhaps that Will had lost track of time what with the excitement surrounding the play.
But when another two days passed without any word from Will, Martin started to worry. He knew that Will loved him, but maybe it was the kind of love that faded with a bit of space. Not the friendship, of course, but the rest of it, the posies and the kissing. Martin had always feared that Will had only been indulging Martin, in the way that he would probably indulge any wish Martin had. That was fine, he told himself. It was better than fine, because this way Will wouldn’t have Martin dragging him down.
So he tried not to think about it. He failed miserably, but he didn’t go to pieces; he slept and he read and he ate everything Daisy brought him. He took care of himself. He tried to fill his days with things that brought him joy, and when he told himself that he deserved all of them, he almost believed it. He was living his own life, making his own choices, and not doing a terrible job of it. When Daisy told him he felt