Page 69 of A Box of Wishes
“I know, I know,” he whispered, stroking the cat’s velvet nose and trying to entice him out of the carrier and into his arms. “You don’t want to be here all by yourself. I get that. But I need to talk to Ryan before I can take you back to the coffeehouse, and…”
He wasn’t ready to see Ryan yet. Not while he felt so torn. If he returned to Ryan, it had to be because he believed it would work.
Morris stepped out of the travel box and rubbed the length of his body against Ben’s hands until Ben picked him up and buried his face in the soft fur.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, big boy.”
Morris squirmed and Ben set him down, offered an extra treat and escaped before he could change his mind. He was still mulling things over when he knocked on Alastair’s door.
“Morning. Could I have a word, please?” he asked when Ryan’s cousin answered his knock.
“Sure. Come in.” He led the way inside, and Ben followed. “Coffee?”
“Wouldn’t say no.” Ben hitched himself up on a barstool and watched Alastair prime the coffeemaker. The man appeared to have slept less than Ben, his pale skin sallow and dark shadows under his eyes.
“You here to talk about Ryan?”
Ben blinked. “Not really. Do youwantto talk about Ryan?”
Alastair set milk and sugar on the breakfast bar and added brimming mugs as soon as the coffee was done brewing. Then he looked Ben up and down. “It might be useful, seeing how the two of you walk around bleeding. Yes, I know that’s blunt. I’m nothing but blunt if it’s helpful. And there are things that Ryan won’t ever tell you.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t either.” Ben spoke around the lump in his throat, his voice rough and scratchy.
Alastair leaned back in his chair. “Maybe not. But Ryan needs someone to lean on. And ever since I met you, I thought that someone was you.”
“I allowed myself to think that, too. But how can you build something without trust? And how can I trust Ryan when he lies to me?”
“He didn’tlie. He just… kept things private. I’m sure you’ve done the same at some point.”
Ben remembered Tarbert’s words. He’d kept many things private. For a long time, too. It wasn’t something he was going to discuss with Ryan’s cousin.
“What I want to tell you has nothing to do with your… disagreement. Or more than you realise, if you’re struggling to understand what makes Ryan tick.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, sending strawberry blond strands in all directions. “Ryan was born to help people. When he sees someone who needs help, he can’t just walk away.”
“I know. Mrs O’Shaughnessy pointed that out to me at Christmas.”
“I strongly doubt that,” Alastair said. “I love that woman, don’t get me wrong, but she only sees what she wants to see. If you’d said you talked to Ryan’s da, that’d be a different matter. Ryan has a gift. He can tell when someone needs help just from looking at people. And I do mean that literally.”
Ben knew some of that already but decided that he might as well listen. “Carry on.”
“Ryan, Cara, and I grew up together. When he was little, Ryan would talk of blue men, orange women, green dogs. By the time he started school, he had a colour vocabulary most adults couldn’t match. And every so often he’d start crying or curled over in pain and he’d complain about the grey. His ma dragged him from doctors to psychologists, but they couldn’t explain it either. Not the colours, not the sudden pains, or the… I suppose these days you’d call it anxiety.”
Alastair drained his cup and got up for a refill. He’d been keeping his face expressionless, but Ben hadn’t missed the tightly leashed anger in his tone. Ben wasn’t so far away from anger either. He could picture a small Ryan, hugging himself in pain, breathing through tears, at the mercy of something he didn’t understand.
“That must have sucked,” he said, meaning it. “How did he get over it? How did he find out how his gift worked?”
“My mother figured it out.” Alastair made a face. “Maybe because she had more to hide than the rest of us. She realised that the colours Ryan sees are a person’s aura. I’m not sure if she got any further than that, because she didn’t tell us. But she did double down on Ryan. She was the one who called him a freak and an abomination, usually when nobody was around to help Ryan defend himself.”
“What?” Ben didn’t think he’d heard right. Ryan spoke of his family with deep affection. He’d never hinted at anything like this.
“Ryan isn’t stupid. He watched himself and others and realised that the grey, the pain, the… whatever… meant that someone needed help. And that he felt better when he could convince that person to make a wish. So, of course, he went out of his way to reach out. Not that he got a lot of thanks for it.”
“He told me… a bit about that.”
“Being told to make a wish is a bit out there, and Ryan could be rather persistent.”
“And not everyone who needs help actually wants it?”
“Quite. Besides, I’m convinced my mother is responsible for much of the nastiness that came Ryan’s way as we grew up.”
