Chapter 133: LOUDEST THING SHE CAN DO

Chapter 135

REN

I was sure I’d heard her wrong.

It had been a long day. I’d sat through a hearing, a fight in a corridor, a DNA report and three hours of staring at a clock.

A man in that state can mishear a lot of things. So I sat up, turned to face her properly, and gave her the chance to say it again in a way that made sense.

"You want to do what?"

"Help her go abroad." Lumi said it calmly, like she was telling me she wanted tea. "Chloe. I want to help her leave the country."

"Leave the country," I repeated.

"Don’t say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I’ve said I want to buy her an island." She pulled her feet up onto the sofa and tucked them under her. "I haven’t thought it through. I only had the idea in the taxi, on the way back. But it won’t leave me alone."

I waited. My wolf, who had been dozing at the back of my mind since the chips, lifted his head and pricked his ears. *Listen,* he said. *Don’t talk yet.*

For once, I took his advice.

"She wanted to be a nurse," Lumi said. "She told me that herself. She had a place, Ren. She’d got in. Then she got pregnant, and it all fell apart, and now she’s twenty, living above a bus station, and the only person who ever promised to help her was Sienna." She said the name like it tasted bad.

"Sienna used her. And now Sienna’s in a cell, or she will be, and Chloe’s got nobody. No mum she can go to. No money. Nothing."

"So you want to give her some."

"I want to give her a way out of this." She looked at me. "Everyone here knows what happened. Or they will. The police will want her statement, the papers are going to get hold of it, and she’ll be the girl who gave her baby away and got caught in the Sienna mess. She’ll never be anything else here. I know what that’s like." She stopped, and when she spoke again her voice was lower. "I know exactly what it’s like to be stuck in the story somebody else wrote about you."

I felt that one go in. I didn’t say anything. I put my hand over hers and let her go on.

"If she went somewhere new," Lumi said, "somewhere with a good nursing course, she could start again. Nobody would know. She could be twenty, and tired, and a student, like anybody else. She wouldn’t have to be Theo’s... she wouldn’t have to be anyone’s mistake."

"And Theo?"

"What about him?"

"If she’s on the other side of the world, how does she see him?"

"I don’t know." It came out sharper than she intended, and she pressed her lips together and tried again.

"I don’t know, Ren. I’ve not got that far. But I don’t think we should hold her here just so she’s close enough to be useful. That feels wrong. If she wants to be in his life, she can be, whether it’s from here or from somewhere else. What I don’t want is for her to be trapped, with no choices, because we were afraid to let her go."

I thought about that.

I had a lot of objections. They were lined up in my head like men at a door, and I could have called every one of them in. But the first was the loudest, and I made myself say it out loud.

"She’s a witness."

"I know."

"The police told us they’d want to speak to her again. She’s central to the case against Sienna. If she leaves before she’s given a proper statement, it looks as though we’ve sent her away on purpose."

"Then she gives her statement first."

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards, she goes, if she wants to." Lumi’s chin came up, stubborn. "I’m not saying tomorrow. I’m not saying hide her. I’m saying let her finish what she has to finish, properly, with a solicitor, and then give her somewhere to go."

"Lumi, it could look like a payment." She went quiet.

"People will say it," I said, as gently as I could. "Sienna’s lawyers, if she gets any. They’ll say we paid off the biological mother to keep her quiet and keep the boy. It’s the first thing I’d say, if I were them."

"It’s not a payment."

"I know that. You know that. But I want you to see what it looks like from outside."

I watched her take it in. She didn’t flinch from it, which I was proud of. She turned it over like a stone in her hand, the way she does with everything, looking for the flaws.

"Then we do it openly," she said finally. "Properly. With a solicitor drawing it up. No secrets, nothing hidden. It’s a scholarship, or a fund, or whatever you call it. Something in writing that says it has nothing to do with Theo and she doesn’t owe us anything for it."

"And if she says no?"

"Then it’s no."

"Even if you think it would be best for her?"

"Even then." She said it without hesitation. "It’s got to be her choice, Ren. That’s the whole point. Everyone’s been deciding things for her since she was seventeen. Sienna decided. The woman at the hospital decided, in a way. Even I nearly did. And then she said she didn’t know what she was allowed to want." She shook her head. "Nobody had ever asked her."

I looked at her for a long time.

Here’s the thing about Lumi that I don’t think she’s ever understood. People look at her and see a woman who has been through the worst of it, who has every right to be hard.

They expect it. Even I did, at the beginning. And she sits there with her feet tucked under her and her eyes red and tries to work out how to hand a young girl a future, with no thought at all for what it might cost her.

*She does this,* my wolf said, very quietly. *Every time.*

*I know.*

*Don’t be an idiot about it.*

*I’m trying not to be.*

"All right," I said.

Her eyebrows went up. "All right?"

"Not ’yes, it’s done.’ All right, we’ll look at it. We’ll talk to the solicitor, and we’ll find out what’s possible, and legal, and sensible. And before anything else, we ask Chloe what she wants. Openly. Face to face."

"We?"

"You said you’d go with openly." I tried a smile. "I’d like to be there, if you’ll let me. I’ll sit in the corner. I won’t glare."

"You’ll glare."

"I’ll glare very politely."

She laughed, tired and a bit shaky, and leaned against me. "You’re not cross?"

"About what?"

"That I came up with it on my own. In a taxi. Without asking."

"Lumi." I tipped her face up with two fingers. "You nearly got me to promise something an hour ago, and I let you, and I’d do it again. I don’t need you to ask me first. I need you to tell me when you’ve decided. That’s different."

"Is it?"

"Completely."

She thought about it, then nodded slowly. "I’ll tell you."

"Good."

We stayed there for a bit. The rain had eased to nothing, and I could hear the hotel settling, pipes ticking, a lift somewhere far down the corridor. Through the half-open bedroom door came the sound of Theo turning over, a rustle of sheets, one small sigh.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Mm."

"Why abroad?"

She didn’t answer straight away. I felt her breathing change against my arm.

"Because I don’t want to be the reason she stays," she said. "I’m scared, Ren. I’m scared that if she’s here, near us, near him, then every time she looks at him it’ll hurt. And every time I look at her, I’ll wonder if today’s the day she changes her mind. Or I will. Or he will." She let out a slow breath. "I don’t know which of us I’m trying to protect. Maybe all of us. Maybe just me."

I’d been expecting some of that. I hadn’t expected how plain it would be, laid out like that, with no excuses.

"That’s allowed," I said.

"Is it?"

"It’s human. You love him. You’re afraid." I stroked her hair back from her forehead. "But I’d think carefully, baby. If distance is for her, good. If it’s for you, you might find it doesn’t help the way you want it to. Fear’s got a way of following people."

"That’s very wise."

"I read it on a mug."

She made a muffled noise into my shirt that might have been a laugh. Then she went quiet, and I thought she’d gone to sleep, until she said, very softly, "You think I’m doing it for the wrong reason."

"I think you’re doing it for several reasons," I said. "Some of them are kind, and some of them are frightened, and most people’s reasons are a mix like that. It doesn’t make the kind ones less real."

"You always know what to say."

"I don’t. I’ve been guessing for months."

"You’re good at it."

"I had a good teacher."

She lifted her head. "Who?"

"A woman who hums three notes when she’s scared," I said, "and then goes and buys everyone tea."

She stared at me. Then, slowly, she smiled, wet-eyed and a little crooked, the one I’d been hunting all week. I didn’t say anything. I just kept the picture.

The knock at the door, when it came, was so soft I thought I’d imagined it.

Lumi sat up. "Soup," she said. "I’d forgotten the soup."

"It’s been forty minutes."

"The hotel’s slow."

"The hotel’s very slow." I got up and crossed to the door, and I’ll admit I checked the spyhole before I opened it. Old habits.

A young man in a hotel jacket stood in the corridor holding a tray, looking as if he wanted to apologise to somebody.

"Sorry, sir. Kitchen was busy."

"It’s fine." I took it from him. It was minestrone, a basket of bread, and, somewhere between a joke and a threat, a small bowl of chips.

"We didn’t order those."

"Compliments of the house, sir," he said, with a very straight face. "The night manager heard there was a young man in the suite who was serious about them."

I thought about that.

"Thank you," I said. "Tell him he has a friend for life."

When I came back with the tray, Lumi was already holding out her hands for the soup.

"Chips?" she said, looking at the bowl.

"Not for you. They’re for the soldier asleep next door. In case he wakes."

"He won’t wake."

"Then they’re for me."

She tore a piece of bread, dipped it, and ate it with the focus of someone who hadn’t realised how hungry she was. I watched her for a while.

Then I picked up a chip, because I was a grown man and nobody could stop me, and ate it.

"Twelve," she said, with her mouth full.

I frowned. "We didn’t kiss."

"I’m counting the chip." She waved the bread at me. "It was a very romantic chip. You looked at it with feeling."

"That’s not how this works."

"I make the rules."

"You make them up as you go along."

"Yes." She grinned. "Do you have a problem with that?"

I leaned across the tray and kissed her, quickly, on the corner of her mouth, tasting tomato and salt.

"Twelve," I said. "Properly."

She went pink to the roots of her hair, and ate her soup, but said nothing at all, which, from Lumi, is the loudest thing she can do.