eyebrows. “All looks good. But you know, we need to make changes.”
“One more thing, then.” Das straightened an already-straight dossier. “You know that I have immense respect for you, Mr. DeWitt, and I am grateful for the opportunities you have given me.”
Oh no. Bloody hell. No.
“I have learned a lot these past years and enjoyed myself immensely. These past weeks at the helm have been the best weeks of my career.”
No. Hell, no. Not Das too.
“The experience has firmed my resolve to run an enterprise of my own. I do not intend to be your secretary forever.”
“Now? You’re leaving right now?”
Das looked puzzled. “No,” he said slowly. “But if you are making changes, you should be aware.”
“Right. Changes. I’m aware.”
Joshua left soon afterward. They would all carry on fine without him. Just as they would at Sunne Park.
What he sought was not there either.
He headed into the streets, not sure where his legs were taking him. He had a vision of himself, wandering around the streets of Birmingham for years and years, stopping passersby to say, “I need to get to Birmingham” and not understanding when they told him he was already there. They’d call him the Lost Man of Birmingham. “He used to be someone,” they’d say when they saw him stumbling past, along the canals, amid the warehouses and factories, down High St. and Moor St. and Mercer St., asking for directions to the city where he was. “He used to be someone, but then his wife kicked him out and his friend left and his business fell to pieces and he lost everything he had.”
Bloody hell. He was starting by losing his mind.
He shook off the odd vision and made his way home, to find a house full of clutter, with his bed prepared, meal laid out, and the staff gone.
I know your life is in Birmingham, and I’ll go there with you happily if you want. But this is your home too.
He picked up one of Rachel’s clocks. The day he came home, when she was heavily pregnant and thoroughly bored, and he found her in the dining room up to her elbows in cogs and screws and blazes knew what, having pulled apart three clocks and not yet put them back together.
And Samuel’s tiger-skin rug, with its great heavy head and yellowing claws. The little boy cuddling the tiger’s head and telling it his stories, and looking up at him with a solemn frown to ask, “Papa, do tigers dance?”
Then Joshua looked in the tiger’s big glass eyes and he laughed.
He laughed until he wanted to weep, but he could not weep so he laughed some more.
He had been right: He had needed to come back to Birmingham. He needed to come back so he could see that his life was not here anymore. To understand how completely everything had changed, that he was no longer the man he’d been. To understand how thoroughly Cassandra had disrupted his life and colonized his heart.
Ah, Samuel, my boy. And Rachel, my friend. Birmingham, my past.
Cassandra, my love.
He would not undo it. Even knowing what he knew, he would not accept any version of his life or his past that did not have Samuel in it. He had tried to block out the pain, but all he had done was also block out the love and joy.
That’s what Cassandra had been trying to tell him from the start.
He would never find the answer in Birmingham, or Sunne Park, or London or any place on Earth. The answer lay not in metal or roses or baby bonnets or even in a tiger-skin rug.
The answer lay in her, and him, and in their secret world of two.
For a smart man, he could be very bloody stupid.
He dropped the tiger skin, and with the energy borne of excitement, a new excitement powered not by fear or anger, but by joy and love, he left the house and went back to find Das. They had work to do.
Chapter 31
By the third day, Cassandra had accepted that Joshua wasn’t coming back.
The first day had been easy; rage had given her resolve and his departure had given relief.
The second day had been awful; she twitched at every sound, hoping it was him, and hurting every time it wasn’t.
The third day, she was useless. Her body was lethargic, her mind agitated. She blamed the rain, though it had never bothered her before; but Lucy and Emily were in a mood, what with Joshua’s disappearance and