Page 60 of The Shape of my Scar
Thane blinked. “What?”
“You must’ve been in Year Eleven. She was in Year Nine. She came home after a few days, told us she wanted to go back to her old school. Wouldn’t say why.”
Thane’s expression darkened. “I don’t remember… She never came to me or talked to me.”
“Maybe you didn’t notice. Or maybe she saw something that made her bolt.. As far I know, she never tried to reach out again.”
Thane sat very still. “Why didn’t she say anything?”
“Would you have believed her?” Callum asked softly. “Back then?”
They sat in silence again, the noise of the hospital around them faint and unimportant.
Finally, Thane looked down at his cooling coffee and muttered, “I never stopped looking for her, ya know.”
There was a long pause.
Then, quietly, he added, “I never believed she was dead.”
Callum glanced up, fork halfway to his mouth.
Thane didn’t meet his eyes. His voice stayed low, like saying it aloud would jinx things. “They told us she didn’t make it…said there was nothing left to bury but bare bones and charred flesh. But I never bought it. How could she be gone?”
He toyed with the corner of his plate, thumb rubbing at a crumb. “I kept looking. Through school, the training… Even when the rest of the lads stopped talking about the past, I kept digging. I couldn’t believe she would leave me. Sometimes I thought I would go insane. So many dead ends.”
Callum was silent.
Thane went on, the words slow and raw, like he was swallowing jagged glass. “I bribed people. I got Lirian to tap systems we weren’t supposed to. Whenever we had a break between jobs, I searched records, old police files, foster care logs. I looked for a missing girl named Dorothy.”
He finally looked up, and his eyes were tired—tired in that way that comes from a decade of trying to resurrect a ghost. “Turns out, I was chasing the wrong name all along.”
Chapter 29
The first thing Faolan noticed about the general ward was the noise. Not that the high-dependency room had been silent, but this was overwhelming—chatter, laughter, television, nurses calling out names, beeping IVs, and wheelchairs creaking across linoleum. Patients were in pain and alarms were always blaring. The world had opened up, and she wasn’t sure she was ready. There was nowhere to hide.
They wheeled her in with a smile and a cheerful “You’ve graduated!” as if it were a ceremony. She forced a smile. She was in a six-bed bay now. There were curtains for privacy, but no silence and no escape.
The chest tube was gone, leaving her ribs feeling raw and angry. Every breath was a reminder of the fight her body had put up. Her fractured arm was now slung up and plastered—a clean break, the doctor had said, easy to heal. But it throbbed at night and itched under the cast where she couldn’t reach. It made dressing feel like a logistical operation worthy of MI5.
Her neighbour was an elderly woman named Mrs. Wallace—fizzy white hair carefully pinned, lipstick always smudged. Sheused to be a headteacher, she said proudly, back when discipline was a thing and children didn’t talk back. She liked to tell stories from her school days, vivid tales full of names and anecdotes, even if the names changed every day.
But Mrs. Wallace also wandered the ward at night, confused and calling for her cat. Every afternoon, her husband would visit and sit by her bed, his coat always neatly buttoned, hands folded in his lap. She’d ask him the same question: “Have you heard from David? Is he coming today?”
And every time, her husband would smile, stroke her hand, and lie. “He’s at work, love. You know how busy he is.”
Faolan had overheard him once in the hallway, speaking quietly to a nurse when she asked why the son didn’t visit.
“He died in an accident a year ago, but she forgets. And when I tell her the truth, it breaks her all over again, every single time. I can’t do that anymore”
Some wounds should not be reopened.
Thane didn’t speak to her again but he lingered in the fringes of her life like a shadow.
Sometimes she saw the shift of a familiar silhouette just outside the ward doors. He was a large man and watching him try to blend in was like watching the lighthouse in the fog. He was hard to miss. Once, she woke to see him sitting across the room, still as stone, watching her with those eerie eyes. The moment their eyes met, he looked down and abruptly left.
She didn’t know what she wanted.
She didn’t want him to stay, but she couldn’t let him leave.
