Page 81 of Cassian is Getting Out

Lily, the elder, had one fist wrapped in the fabric of Nic’s jeans and the other clamped around her sister’s wrist. Poppy peered out from behind Nic’s hip.

“Hiya, Nic.” He kissed his sister on the cheek.

She gave him a one-armed hug, brief and firm, her free hand still resting on Lily’s shoulder.

His mum’s roast was already filling the hallway with the smell of rosemary and rendered fat, and the table in the dining room had been laid with the good plates.

Nic was the one who’d come to see him, the year the medication turned optional in his head, with printed pamphlets and a speech she’d clearly rehearsed on the way over. She’d sat him down in his kitchen and told him that she loved him, that they all loved him, and that watching him cycle between godlike energy and weeks of deep depression was destroying their mother.

He’d told her to mind her own business, in language considerably less polite than that. So the one-armed hug was fair.

“I’ve got something for you two,” Ruari said, crouching until his bad knee complained and his eyeline dropped level with the girls.

He pulled the two hair bows from his jacket pocket and held them out on his open palm. They were the same bows Cassian had chosen at the Portobello Road stall, months ago, the ones Ruari had never got round to posting.

Lily’s grip on her sister’s wrist loosened. Poppy’s hand came out, hovered over the bows, and selected the raspberry one. Lily took the buttercup and held it up to the light.

“Can I put it in your hair?” Lily asked.

“Go on, then.”

Ruari sat on the carpet with his back against the sofa, and Lily stood behind him with her tongue between her teeth, sectioning off a tuft of his hair. Poppy flanked him on the left, working the raspberry satin into a clump above his ear.

“You need more hair,” Poppy informed him.

“I’ll work on it.”

“Daddy has more hair,” Lily added, without looking up from her work.

“Daddy’s not an ex-footballer with a receding hairline, is he?”

“What’s receding?”

“Running away. My hair’s running away from my face.”

Poppy leaned around to examine his forehead, patted it once, and returned to her ribbon.

From the doorway, Nic laughed. She had her mobile raised, framing the shot, taking in her enormous brother on the carpet with a buttercup polka-dot bow listing sideways above one ear and the raspberry satin one trailing into his eye, a niece at each shoulder.

She took the photo.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The box from Ladurée was one of the most beautiful things Cassian had ever carried, and the most depressing.

It was cream cardboard with gold filigree, tied with a sage-green ribbon. He’d selected the pastries himself at the counter in Covent Garden, pointing through the glass at croissants and pains au chocolat and a single kouign-amann.

He set the box on Felix’s conservatory table beside a spread that could have fed an entire wedding reception. Felix’s staff had outdone themselves again.

Ivar was already in his usual chair, legs stretched out, working through a crispbread layered with dill and cream cheese. Fallon had stationed herself on Cassian’s feet the moment he sat down.

“What’s in the box?” Felix asked, reaching for the ribbon.

“Pastries.”

Felix pulled the bow apart and lifted the lid.

The croissants sat in their fluted paper cups, golden, structurally sound, and absolutely fine. The lamination was neat. The colour was even. The cream piped into the mille-feuille held its shape in tidy rosettes.