january, age 12
The first week back after the Christmas holidays was always a difficult one, especially when the two week break had been so relaxing. Lucas had drifted between his parents, spending a little more time with his father as his mother’s due date had neared. The house had begun to feel crowded with Audrie stressing about her boyfriend and her A-levels while Liliana and Felicity had been bouncing off the walls waiting for the new baby, and Truman had been juggling his job and his family when his wife had struggled to keep on top of everything. Her fourth pregnancy had proved to be the most difficult, plagued by morning sickness for the first three months and her third trimester had seemed to pass impossibly slowly as she hauled herself through each day before being bedridden by Christmas.
Charlotte Mi-jin Song was born at ten past four on Saturday the fourth of January, eighteen hours after Sarah had decided it was time to go to the hospital. Truman had been by her side from her first contraction on Friday morning until she had been dismissed after lunch on Sunday with their new baby. Her parents had stepped in to look after the girls while Lucas had been with his father when he had heard the news. It wasn’t until the baby was home that he had met her, leaving his father’s house a few hours early to meet his new sister as she slept in her own cot in her parents’ room. Liliana and Felicity had been staring at her as though she was a unicorn when he had arrived: they hadn’t moved for hours.
After meeting Charlotte on Sunday afternoon, it had been back to school for Lucas on Monday morning but it was difficult to feel in the mood when he had hardly slept a wink that night. Charlotte didn’t seem to happy about having been born, the cold world a harsh reality after nine months of warm luxury. She had a good set of lungs on her that had hardly been out of practice since her birth. All through the night she had wailed as nothing seemed to settle her: she was fed and dry, her bed perfectly comfortable, but she only quietened when she was swayed in her mother’s arms. That was no easy task when Sarah was beyond shattered after a hellish labour: she hardly had enough energy to hold up her head, let alone soothe the baby that had torn her apart.
The lack of the sleep was the last thing Lucas needed when school was already a struggle. The lessons were long and hard, the school still too big even after more than a year, and he was finding it difficult to spend another year without Asher in his class. Mika was still by his side in every lesson with her trademark smile and her words of encouragement and he appreciated her and her positivity to no end, but it couldn’t change the fact that Asher had other teachers and other friends. He had Adler.
After a week that had seemed to go on forever with Charlotte screaming blue murder every night, Friday was hell. He couldn’t stop yawning from the moment he had stepped through the gates with Audrie, the two of them going their separate ways once they hit the quad. She headed off to the cushy sixth form centre to relax before she had to be in her form while Lucas headed straight to his classroom. At the start of Year Seven, he had waited for Asher but he was almost always late and Lucas couldn’t stand being less than five minutes early to morning registration: he needed time to get ready for the day, time to find his books in his locker and settle in his seat.
When lunchtime finally rolled around after a terrible morning – history and double maths followed by double science after the break – the last thing he felt like doing was pasting a facade over his exhaustion. His body was almost as tired as his mind, his shoulders sagging as he dragged his feet out of the science lab as soon as he had packed up after the bell had rung. He like the bells: they gave the day structure. He didn’t like the teachers who ignored them.
“Hey! Lucas!” Mika called, chasing him into the hallway with her heavy bag thumping against her back as she jogged to catch up with him. “Aren’t you coming to lunch?” She pulled her hair out from under her collar when she came to a stop, scooping it up into a ponytail.
“I’ve got a packed lunch.”
“Aren’t you going to come to the cafeteria?” she asked. She was used to how unintentionally facetious he could be sometimes, answering questions with the wrong answer, failing to read between the lines. “I’m meeting Tom there in five minutes. Aren’t you gonna come?”
He shook his head. “I don’t really feel like it. Sorry, Mika.”
She shrugged, shifting the straps of her bag over her shoulder. “It’s ok. I’ll let Tom know and I guess I’ll see you in registration,” she said, her smile returning. She spent most lunchtimes with Tom, who had begun to open up when he had realised how utterly harmless she was: she truly didn’t care if he was a bit different to everyone else, she just wanted to be his friend. He had let her.
“Ok.”
“Are you?” she asked, tilting her head.
“Am I what?”
“Are you ok?”
He nodded. He was getting better at lying to avoid awkward or unnecessary conversations and as genuine as MIka was with her concern, he didn’t possess the words to explain to her that he wanted to be on his own. He needed to recharge his batteries, having spent all day running on empty, and he couldn’t do that unless he had space to be alone. Peaceful moments were hard to come by at school, constantly being ferried from lesson to lesson, and he craved the cool, quiet calm of his own classroom. Mr Finney was on duty today: he would have the room to himself
As much as he wanted to be alone and as happy as Mika was to do her own thing, he did feel bad to leave her. He felt worse to leave Tom. Ever since starting high school a few months ago, Tom had been utterly miserable. Each day was a struggle, dragging himself from one minute to the next as he prayed for the moment his father would pick him up at four o’clock on the dot. Lucas had overheard his mother and his grandmother talking during the holidays; he had heard Maddie break down in tears when she had talked about her son, how he cried every single night. To say Tom didn’t like school was an understatement: his hatred ran far deeper than just not liking the workload. He was smart: homework didn’t faze him, but he couldn’t be himself in a place that didn’t understand him. Lucas wasn’t sure he had seen him smile since the summer.
Within a minute, Lucas was alone. His entire class rushed to the cafeteria for the best choice of food and only once they had gone did he continue on his way. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his oversized blazer and kept his head down as he crossed the quad, heading up the stairs of the opposite building. Mr Finney passed him as he was coming down, flashing him a grin.
“Hey, Lucas. How’s it going?”
Lucas gave him half a smile and a nod but he didn’t stop, knowing his teacher didn’t really have the time for a full answer to the question. He didn’t want to give one either. He just wanted to be on his own.
“I’ll catch you later,” Mr Finney said, saluting Lucas as he trotted on down to the cafeteria where it was his job every now and then to oversee lunchtime. That rarely meant more than ensuring the students cleaned up after themselves, throwing away their rubbish and stacking their trays by the bins.
The classroom was dark and quiet and Lucas didn’t change that. He left the lights off and pushed the door shut, relishing in the first moment of peace he’d had for a while. Home was too loud. Even his dad’s house could overwhelm him sometimes, when Isabella and Matilda played games together. They enjoyed dressing up to do fake news reports, filming each other on their parents’ phones. The games almost always ended up in hysterical laughter which Lucas had found could be as irritating as inconsolable tears. He pulled out his seat – they weren’t assigned places but in every single classroom, there was one seat he chose every time and his classmates respected that – and sat down with his packed lunch in his hand.
A plain chicken sandwich, an apple and a packet of raisins. Everything else was too messy: crisps made his fingers too greasy and a muffin would sprinkle crumbs down his front, and he was never too hungry at lunchtime anyway. He preferred breakfast, trusting the food his parents or Audrie prepared for him. Biting into the sandwich, he allowed himself to sink into his seat and close his eyes. The week had been a bad way to start the term and he hoped it wouldn’t tarnish the next five weeks before half term. That week off seemed so far away, an unreachable goal that he tried not to focus on.
He hardly had ten minutes of peace before the door flew open and a laughing Asher strolled in with Adler at his side. She swept her hair over her shoulder and stood with her hip jutting out, her arms crossed. Lucas even hated the way she stood: she was all angles, unfriendly and uninviting.
“Hey,” Asher said with a grin. “There you are. We’ve been looking all over for you!”
Lucas doubted Adler had cared where he was.
“Mika said you’d be here,” she added, her voice as flat as the chest she pretended was bigger.
“You should come downstairs, we were going to get some lunch.”
Had Asher been alone, Lucas would have jumped at the chance. Although he never ate from the cafeteria that he didn’t quite trust with its greasy, reheated food, he had grown used to the buzz of activity as he sat there with his best friend, but there was almost always a plus one. Adler acted as though she was the most popular girl in the year but she never seemed to sit with anyone but Asher.
“I’ve got lunch,” Lucas said, holding up the apple he had just started eating. There was no evidence of his sandwich: as soon as he had finished it, he had cleaned up until not a single breadcrumb remained.
Adler rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, stop being so difficult,” she said with a groan. “Are you coming or not?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to.”
Asher’s face fell, eyeing his friend. “Are you sure? We were just gonna hang out.”
Lucas wrinkled his nose. “I’m fine here.”
Adler crossed her arms even tighter, her hip sticking out further. “Don’t be a droopy drawers, just come down. Move your arse. It’s so depressing in here,” she harrumphed as she looked around. “Why are you just sitting here in the dark?” When Lucas made no move to stand, she curled her fingers around Asher’s elbow. “Come on. All the good chicken will be gone.”
Asher looked from Lucas to Adler, down at her hand before he lifted his eyes to her again. “I’m gonna stay here,” he said. “I’ll see you at registration.”
She didn’t like that one bit, her eyebrows pulling together as her frown set in. “Fine, I’ll go on my own,” she muttered, stalking out of the room. Although she was only just thirteen, she certainly had the attitude of a teenager, a bolshy girl with a sympathy deficiency. Asher watched her go for a moment before he pulled out the seat next to Lucas and sat down with a smile.
“Hey,” he said, stretching out as though he owned the place. “You ok?”
“Tired,” Lucas said. It was true. It wasn’t the whole truth, but he had learnt that he could lie without actually telling a lie.
“Sorry,” Asher said with a grimace. “Is that because of the baby?”
He nodded.
“Want to come over? You can stay with me this weekend if you want,” he said with a smile. “I know Mum wouldn’t mind.”
The offer injected a bubble of hope into Lucas’s smile and he wished he could accept but he already had a commitment. “I’m going to my dad’s this weekend,” he said. “Thanks, though.”
“Any time,” Asher said. “You know, if you want to stay over during the week, that’d probably be fine. Fine for us, anyway. I’m not sure it’d be fine with you when I’ve been on time approximately twenty-one percent of the days I’ve been here.” He laughed and Lucas smiled. “Not sure how you cope being my friend.”
“For better or worse,” Lucas said, recalling their wedding eight years ago. The specific words had never been spoken but the implication had been there. “If lateness is your worst…” He trailed off. Lateness wasn’t Asher’s worst quality: that was his ability to be friends with someone Lucas despised.
Asher chuckled. “Yeah, maybe let’s not dissect all my failures,” he said. “You know, that offers always there. It must be pretty crazy at home but there’s always space in my room if you need it. Or a whole room to yourself. It’s weirdly quiet at the moment.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, his face dropping a little. “Aaron’s at uni and Dylan’s dating Audrie. They’re hardly around anymore. It’s just me, Mum and Dad most of the time.”
“You’re welcome to borrow Charlotte,” Lucas said. As much as he adored every sibling, Charlotte wasn’t that fun to be around. When she wasn’t sleeping or eating, she was crying. Lucas could come to terms with tears when there was a reason for them, when she was hungry or needed her nappy changing, but she never shut up.
“I’m alright thanks,” Asher said. “I don’t really like babies. If you want to get rid of any of your siblings, I’ll take Liliana – she’s funny.”
“She knows.” Lucas sighed, taking one huge final bite of his apple. He missed this, the easy chatter with his best friend. He had never really been able to easily chat with anyone but Asher, only recently opening up that feature to Mika, and he missed the feeling to talk without judgment. He couldn’t say a word in class without twenty-odd pairs of eyes on him, his voice the only one to listen to, so he had take to keeping his points to himself. Someone else could put their hand up; the teacher already knew he knew the answer.
Asher bent down to dig in the bag he had dropped on the floor when he had come in, taking out two fun size packs of Haribo. He passed one to Lucas without asking if he wanted any and Lucas frowned at the little bag in his hand. Asher was protective over his sweets, usually bringing with him the exact number he wanted to eat in a day.
“What’s this for?” he asked. Asher shrugged.
“I made a promise, didn’t I?”
*
Asher had to go at ten to two, hurrying off to his classroom for registration with Lucas’s aunt Martha as Mika returned without her smile. She slipped into the seat Asher had vacated, slumping with her bag on her lap. It didn’t take a genius to realise that something wasn’t right and Lucas wasn’t sure what to do for a moment before he remembered the two words that almost never failed him.
“What’s up?”
Mika pouted. She looked defeated, on the edge of tears. She never cried and the thought that she might – or that she already had – was enough to set Lucas on edge. He held his breath, waiting for her response. “It’s Tom,” she said. “He’s just … he’s not happy and it makes me so sad but I can’t do anything. He hates school so much and no-one should be forced to do something that makes them feel so awful.” The corners of her mouth dropped and she clenched her jaw to avoid a wobble in her voice. “It doesn’t work for him at all. He can’t ever stand out here when he doesn’t have a voice.” She sat up straighter, shaking her head to herself. “You know all that though. Is he ok at home?”
Lucas wasn’t sure he could wriggle his way out of that one with a semi truth, not when Mika was so upset. “I don’t see him a lot,” he said.
“But when you do? Is he ok?”
“Not really,” he said at last. Mika dropped back, her face falling even more. “Mum says he’ll get used to it eventually and he just needs to settle.”
She shook her head as though she knew better but she didn’t elaborate on what she meant. Lucas didn’t ask. His brain was tired and he wasn’t sure he would be able to focus for the last two hours of the day, already mentally at four o’clock. All he wanted to do was go home with his father and sleep through the weekend but that wasn’t an option with the barrage of homework his teachers threw at him every single day. Even when it was easy, it was time consuming and he hated wasting so many hours doing work that meant nothing, pointless quizzes and diagrams that only meant more unnecessary work for both him and his teacher.
Mr Finney came into the classroom with the register in one hand and a coffee in the other. Lucas was sure he had to be fifty percent coffee by this point, the amount he had seen him drink over the past year and a half. He took his seat in the corner of the classroom, his desk and low bookshelf creating the essence of an office, and clicked his tongue to himself as he scanned the room and ticked off all the children he could see. It was a waste of time to call out names, he had found, especially when half of them were never listening.
“No announcements today,” he said, skipping through the sheets in the register for anything relevant to his class but there was nothing but a kit reminder for the under sixteens rugby team and a meeting for the sixth form classics students. “Five minutes until the bell… you might as well get a headstart on your commutes.” He chuckled to himself. The school was spread out, the five minutes between lessons sometimes not enough for the students to get from A to B, and he liked to give them extra time if he could.
As Lucas was zipping up his bag, he felt a presence nearby and he looked up to see his teacher standing a foot away from him.
“Do you have a sec, Lucas?” he asked, glancing at Mika.
“I’ll wait outside,” she said, scurrying out of the classroom. Mr Finney waited until the two of them were alone before he balanced himself on the edge of Lucas’s table, his arms crossed.
“Are you sure everything’s ok with you, Lucas? I can’t help but notice you’ve been a bit down recently. I’m just a little concerned, that’s all.” He gave Lucas an encouraging smile, his eyes soft.
Lucas didn’t like to lie to his teacher. He didn’t like to say the truth out loud either, but Mr Finney had so far kept his promise to always be there for Lucas: on the odd occasion he had worked up the courage to send an email when things weren’t going right, he’d had a response within twenty minutes, even when he had once sent one at nine o’clock on a Friday night. Mr Finney had proved himself, working his way into Lucas’s book of good and trustworthy people.
“Girls ruin everything,” he said. It wasn’t exactly what he had meant to say, nor exactly what he was thinking, but it was close enough. Adler was a girl, after all, and she was ruining everything. Or at least, she was trying. Lucas was sure of that.
“Ah,” Mr Finney said with a knowing look on his face. “You know, you’ve got decades ahead of yourself. I don’t think many people meet the one when they’re twelve.”
“I’m not looking for one,” Lucas said, a little confused by his teacher’s answer when he hadn’t realised that what he’d said could be construed in that way. “I like boys.” It had been easier to say out loud ever since he had told Asher, as though his was the only opinion that mattered, though it was still the first time he had come out so cavalierly. “I like a boy,” he corrected.
“Has he found a girl? Or has a girl found him?” Mr Finney asked without so much as the slightest hesitation at Lucas’s correction to his assumption. “Or have I got the wrong end of the stick and your girl problem is one of your sisters?”
Lucas frowned. “My sisters? No. They’re not the problem. Well, Charlotte is a bit, but only because she cries.”
“Charlotte? Do I know Charlotte?”
“She’s the baby,” Lucas explained. “She’s only six days old and she cries a lot but she doesn’t ruin everything. Not on purpose anyway.”
“Oh! Congrats,” Mr Finney said with a grin. “I don’t envy you, I must say. So, sorry, what’s been ruined? Or would you rather send me an email?” He checked his watch. “We’ve got four minutes until the bell. Nine minutes until your next lesson. Which is?”
“Geography.”
“Ah, only downstairs then. Do you want to talk?” That was the wrong question. It was rare that Lucas actively wanted to talk but sometimes all he needed was for his teacher to realise that there was something on his mind. Mr Finney was good at that, seeming to pick up on every microscopic change in Lucas’s behaviour. “This isn’t about Mika is it?”
“What? No. Mika’s my friend. She’s lovely.” Lucas frowned. He was losing confidence in himself, wringing his wrists. “It doesn’t matter. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid if it upsets you. You know the saying – a problem shared is a problem halved.”
That made sense to Lucas. The problem was Adler, who halved Asher when she made Lucas share him. He thought about the adage for a moment, the cogs in his brain clicking together as he analysed it.
“Why did you say girls ruin everything, Lucas? Someone’s clearly bothering you. You don’t need to name names, but you ca-“
“It’s Adler,” Lucas said, pushing past the plug in his mind. “She used to just be rude and mean, and sometimes she shoved me when my granny wasn’t looking, but now she’s still rude and mean and she’s trying to steal Asher. She makes me so angry and I really hate her and I always have, but Asher says she’s fine but he doesn’t see it. It’s like we hear things differently when she talks. She’s trying to steal my best friend from me.” Rage boiled up inside him and he clapped his hands over his ears, screwing up his eyes and dropping down onto his chair again. When he got angry, he often cried and the last thing he wanted to do was cry in front of his teacher – whom he knew was very close to his granny – right before he had to go to geography.
After a few seconds of talking without being heard, Mr Finney took Lucas’s wrists to move his hands away from his ears. “You remind me a lot of my daughter, you know,” he said, resting his arm across his knee once Lucas met his eye, “except she turns off her hearing aids when she gets mad and then I really can’t get through to her. But I can get through to you, Lucas, because I think you want me to, don’t you?”
Lucas nodded slowly.
“If you’re having problems with Adler, or any other student, you need to let me know. We have a zero-tolerance bullying policy here for a reason. I know you two had some issues before you came here – are those issues back?”
Lucas dropped his eyes. If Adler was a bully, she was a smart one: her comments and her glares cut him like knives, but he could hardly report her for the way she huffed at him or how he was convinced she had a vendetta against him. “Not really.”
“You need to let me know if they do come back,” he said. “I’m keeping my eye out but I need you to let me know if you’re having problems with anyone. Ok?”
“Ok.”
“It sounds to me like you should talk to Asher,” he added. “If you feel like Adler is stealing him from you, maybe it’s time to reach out and let him know that maybe you’re feeling a bit neglected. You could try to set some time aside each week just for the two of you to catch up.”
Lucas nodded glumly. He knew his teacher was right and that he couldn’t say anything too inflammatory but part of him wished he would just agree, that he would let slip that he didn’t like Adler either. His grandmother had done that a few times and sworn him to silence, and it made him feel better to know that he wasn’t alone in his dislike of the girl. Audrie was even more outspoken than him, taking his hatred and multiplying it by a hundred.
“How about we set up a time to have a chat, when we’ve got a bit more time,” Mr Finney said, taking out his phone to check his schedule. “We could talk at lunch on Monday if you want to. We can come up with some things you can do or say, and how to navigate this … situation. It can be really hard when two people in a friendship group don’t get along.”
“It’s really hard,” Lucas mumbled. “Thanks, Sir.”
“Any time, Lucas. Keep me in the loop and I’ll always do what I can do help you,” he said with his winning smile. He gave Lucas a thumbs up, raising his eyebrows. “Are you ok for now?”
Lucas nodded. Sometimes it helped just to get it off his chest.
“Fab. Right, I’ll let you get off to geography – and go and join poor Mika out there! – and I’ll see you on Monday. Have a great weekend, Lucas.”
“You too,” he said, hauling his bag onto his shoulder as he left. It was far from a fix, more of a plaster – he would just have to hold it together until he could figure out what he was supposed to do.
*
Floyd was bang on time to collect Lucas at the end of the day, his car running as he sat right outside the gates in a convenient spot. He grinned at his son as he got into the car, trying to get him to mirror even a fraction of it. He was no fool and thanks to a decent stream of communication between him and Sarah, as well as Cora and Truman, he knew there was a lot on his son’s mind at the moment.
“Hey, Lucas,” he said when he got into the car. “How was today?”
“Ok,” Lucas said. That was his standard answer when nothing particularly interesting had happened.
“Good week?”
He shrugged. Floyd sighed and ran a hand through his long hair before he shifted the car into drive and pulled away from the school.
“How’re you feeling? I was talking to your mum earlier; sounds like you must be tired.”
“I am,” he said, nodding. “I’m really tired.” He yawned just thinking about his exhaustion.
“Well, you’ve got all weekend to catch up on your sleep. It’s just you and me.”
Lucas looked up, frowning. “How come? Where’s everyone else?”
“Cora’s taking the girls to go and see her friend for the weekend. I thought it’d be nice if we could have a boy’s weekend, especially when you’re a bit overrun with girls at the moment.”
Lucas nodded, heaving a sigh. That was certainly true. “Thanks, Dad.”
“My pleasure,” Floyd said with a smile. “No pressure, too. If you just want to hang out and do nothing all weekend, that’s absolutely fine. I thought it’d just be nice if we had a quiet couple of days.”
“Mmm. That’d be nice,” Lucas said. He turned his head to look out of the window as they drove home but halfway, he realised they must have taken a different turning at some point. The road they were going down wasn’t the usual route and he furrowed his brow, looking over at his father. “This isn’t the way home.”
“No. Not yet,” Floyd said.
“Where’re we going?”
The car came to a stop in a clearing where the trees lining the road parted and Lucas noticed that at some point, they had climbed out of Farnleigh and into the surrounding hills. His brain had been so busy that he hadn’t even noticed the ascent.
“What’s this, Dad?”
“This,” Floyd said, slipping the car into park and shutting off the engine, “is somewhere we used to come when you were a baby.”
“Me? You and me?”
“Yup. Sometimes when you were tiny, the only thing that would settle you was going for a drive. Your mum would call me in tears because you wouldn’t stop crying and I’d strap you into the back seat and drive here.” He gazed out over the town below. It looked so pretty from above, the river curling through the middle of the park and winding around town.
“How come?”
Floyd nodded at the door and when he got out and leant against the bonnet with his ankles crossed, Lucas did too. The sun had already set, dipping below the horizon on the drive over, but an orange and red hue remained in the darkening sky. “Sometimes all you need to do is just sit back and take five,” he said, his words slow and measured. “When you’re in the thick of it, you can’t see the forest for the trees until you step away and take a breath.”
Lucas stayed silent as he listened to his father. His words didn’t go unnoticed – he realised he was making a point.
“When you were a baby, I used to get so overwhelmed sometimes,” Floyd said. “I was so scared I would do something wrong, and sometimes it just hit me that I would be your dad for the rest of my life. That’s a really strange feeling, you know, when you suddenly realise that your life is never going to be the same again. And there were times when that terrified me – I couldn’t see the big picture. But look where we are now.” He folded his arms, scanning the beautiful vista. “You’re almost a teenager. I can’t believe that.”
Lucas looked across at his father and was hit with the urge to hug him. He didn’t say anything but he shifted closer, placing Floyd’s arm around himself, and he held on tight. Floyd gripped him in a silent hug, not a single word spoken to disturb the moment until Lucas pulled away after a long few seconds.
“Dad?”
“Mmm?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course. You know you always can.”
Lucas dropped his eyes to the hard, dusty ground. There was a chill in the air; he pulled his blazer tighter around himself. “Have you ever loved someone who didn’t love you back?”
Floyd nodded slowly to himself. He knew the feeling well. He had loved Sarah from their first date over thirteen years ago; he had loved her when they had become parents; he had loved her still when she had broken up with him. Even once her love for him had faded, his had held strong. For three years, he had held onto that flame until she had looked him in the eye and asked him to blow it out.
“What did you do?”
Floyd gave Lucas a sad sigh. He doubted the question was mere curiosity and it pained him in a strange way to see his son growing up so fast. He would be thirteen in August, the years zooming by, and he couldn’t bear the thought that life would become crueller as his little boy grew up. “I moved on,” he said at last. “Love is a powerful thing, Lucas. It really is. You have to respect it: if you give it out and it gets thrown back at you, it can really hurt. You need to be loved back, not just shown a reflection. I moved on, and I found someone who loved me back.”
“Do you mean Cora?”
“No, my mistress,” Floyd laughed. “Yes, of course I mean Cora.”
Lucas pursed his lips, watching a thick cloud shift its way across the sky. “Is it hard?”
“Mmm. Yes, it is. But you know what’s harder?” He looked over at his son, waiting for him to look back.
“What?”
“Loving someone whose heart is in a different place.”
+ – + – +
i made it to the beach! i need a beach injection every now and then which is difficult to get in england. i hope you enjoyed this chapter!
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