Scottish Highlands — Highland Medical Trust | September 16, 2011 | 09:00
The estate sat on the hill above the village like something that had grown there rather than been built — stone the same color as the surrounding rock, surrounded by moor that in the September morning was all bracken and pale grass and the particular grey-green of the Highlands in autumn.
He had taken the overnight train from Cambridge and walked the last three miles from the village. Old habit. He liked the approach on foot — it gave him time to read the ground, the sightlines, the points of egress. It also gave him time to think about what he was doing, which he was not entirely certain about.
The sign at the iron gate: HIGHLAND MEDICAL TRUST.
A caretaker at the gate, weathered-looking, with the specific wariness of someone responsible for an elderly woman's security. He studied Alen for a moment.
"Looking for Dr. Amelia Richard," Alen said.
"She's with patients. Who's asking?"
"Tell her it's about Jessica."
The wariness shifted into something more careful. He opened the gate.
* * *
She came into the study wearing a white coat over wool, moving with a cane that she used with the specific efficiency of someone who had adapted to it rather than accepted it. She was tall. She had Jessica's jaw and Jessica's eyes, and the sight of those eyes looking at him from a face he had never seen before did something specific to his composure that he managed, just.
"I am Dr. Amelia Richard," she said. Clipped. Precise. The voice of a woman who had been managing her own authority for a very long time. "You have news of my daughter?"
"My name is Alen," he said. "I was Jessica's son."
She stopped.
He watched her face do the thing that faces did when something reorganized the entire framework of what was being processed. She touched the doorframe. Her hands came up. She reached out and touched his face — the same touch Baba Anya had used, which was the touch of someone checking whether what they were seeing was real.
"Jessica's boy?" she said. "You have her chin. You have her—" She stopped. She looked past him. "Where is she?"
This was the moment he had been preparing for since he found the photograph.
"I'm sorry," he said. He took her hands carefully, the way you took the hands of someone who was about to need something to hold. "Jessica passed away. Ten years ago. Pancreatic cancer. It was rapid. She wasn't alone — I was with her."
Amelia's legs went. He had expected this — he was already in position, and he guided her into the armchair without letting her fall.
She wept quietly, which was worse than weeping loudly. The specific grief of someone who has learned that thirty years of imagined life were not real — that the daughter she had been writing to in her head, giving space to, protecting from intrusion, was gone and had been gone for a decade while the letters continued arriving at an address that held nothing.
"She never told me," Amelia said. "All these years I thought I was giving her space. I thought—"
"You didn't abandon her," Alen said. He meant it precisely. "She protected you. It was the thing she did — she protected people she loved by keeping the weight of her own life away from them. She wasn't alone. She had me. She saved me first and then I stayed because I wanted to, and she was brilliant and she was kind and she was the best person I have known." He placed the diary in her lap. "She wrote to you every day. In here. She never stopped talking to you."
Amelia looked at the worn leather cover. She traced it with one finger.
Then she looked at him — properly, the full examining look of a doctor who had been reading people for fifty years — and something in her face changed again, from grief into something warmer and more specific.
"My grandson," she said. The word came out quietly, like something precious being handled for the first time. "I always wanted a grandson."
She held him with the strength that very old people sometimes have — the strength that has been compressed by time into something more concentrated than it looks.
"You are not alone anymore, Alen," she said. "You are home."
He closed his eyes. He let himself have it — the specific warmth of being held by someone who had no operational motive for doing so, who held him only because he was hers.
He was John Michael Kane now. And John Michael Kane had a war to fight.
But today, for this hour, he was just a grandson.
END OF CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Chapter Forty-Three follows...