Page 114 of Famous Last Words

And now Niall sees, burning bright on the horizon like the moon, why he does this job.

Cam and Luke love each other, and deserve to be together. And so Niall does it for the humanity of it: he does it for love.

58

Cam

Cam has shot a man in the thigh and she has run away from him. This is a fact that she knows to be true, but that her mind won’t yet let her care about.

She’s out on the dark street and she’s running and she knows exactly where to go.

Her husband. Returned from the dead, after seven years. Her husband, nearby, all this time.

She can’t think about it. Usually, Cam thinks too much, worries too much, but not right now. Now, her mind narrows to almost nothing, a single focal point, lit by a streetlamp: Luke. Luke. Luke. Nothing else. The past doesn’t exist. Seven years’ estrangement doesn’t exist. All she has is him, in her sights. At last. Her long-lost husband. She knows she ought to think about Polly, but she doesn’t. She thinks only of him, right in this moment. She will do her best, for Polly, to survive. But, right now, on this weekday evening in London, the night belongs to Luke, and to her, and to their love story. Forget Charlie’s betrayal. Forget it all. Nothing matters but this.

She takes the shortest way there, running fast, flagging down the first taxi she sees, the streets a blur.

She wonders how this is going to work, but she doesn’t dwell on it. Life has been leading her here for seven years. She didn’t know it, but it was. She’s just left her house but,really, she set off seven years back, on that hot June day that seemed to last for ever.

And how strange it is, Cam thinks in the taxi, gun held close to her body in the waistband of her shorts, as her destination looms into view. All along, she was looking for the heroes and the villains, and she had them the wrong way around. At the heart of this mystery was a book that solved everything for her, the way they always do. A story that made sense of the chaos of life. All sides of it, written down in her husband’s careful hand. For her, so that she understood it.

She tells the driver to speed, pays using her phone and reaches the quiet of what she is sure is her husband’s hiding place. The book said it. All along, the book revealed it to her.

A simple tap on a simple door. It opens just a crack, and she’s brought inside, willingly so, by hands as familiar to her as her own, as their daughter’s.

He takes her into the darkness, closes the wooden door behind her.

And—

And—

It’s him. It’s Luke. She reached him before everyone.

Her husband.

The missing love of her life. Her mouth parts, and her body stops all functions, or so it feels, and she’s right in front of him, real, warm-bodied him, and everything has slowed way down like it did that first day, the day it all began.

Luke’s eyes meet hers.

She holds his gaze for two seconds, three. His hair is darker than it was and he’s so thin and she cannot, cannot stop looking at him. Here he is. Returned to her.

He stares back at her and he makes a gesture, bringing hishands together across his body as if in prayer. He holds them there for several seconds, palms on his heart, just looking at her, and that’s how she knows it.

She knows everything she needs to: that he’s been wanting, needing, all this time, to come back to her, trying as hard as he can, but because of these people surrounding him, could not. He wrote to her instead. A one-hundred-thousand-word love letter. An explanation.

She breaks eye contact, casts her eyes downward. Thinking, Thank God. Thank God he’s good. For her, and for Polly.

Their fingertips meet, and then their hands, and then, finally, their foreheads touch together, just once, their eyes locking together, reunited.

Later, five minutes, ten, Cam doesn’t know, he speaks.

‘I owe you – an explanation,’ Luke says.

‘You wrote me a book.’

‘I know. I …’ He leans back. They’re in a tiny, wooden room. Inside is a dirty old pillow, a sleeping bag and a gun. There’s no natural light, only what filters in from the streetlights outside. A slice catches Luke’s blue eyes that sheen grey. His eyes. There they are. She’d forgotten the precise shape of them. They had been lost to time, like everything. Photographs couldn’t conjure them. Nor could her imagination.

‘I’ve been living here since I sent the book. Hoping you’d figure it out.’

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