Page 119 of Only a Monster

‘No,’ Ruth grumbled, but she didn’t really sound grumpy. She’d been more worried than she’d let on by Joan’s illness.

‘Take some fruit if you’re planning to walk,’ Uncle Gus said. He plucked a blood orange from Gran’s fruit basket and gave it to Joan. ‘You need to keep up your vitamin C.’

Joan had forgotten that detail too. Uncle Gus thought that vitamin C could heal everything from the common cold to a broken leg. Her smile wobbled, and she swallowed hard. She’d missed them all so much.

The blood orange was sweet-scented and heavy, red as a sunrise. Perfectly ripe. And out of season, she realised slowly. Oranges were winter fruit. Maybe it was imported. Or maybe someone had travelled to winter. She looked back up at Gus.

‘I’m fusspotting, aren’t I?’ he said.

Joan shook her head. ‘Nah.’ She managed a proper smile. But she put the orange back in the bowl. ‘I’d better get dressed.’

Gran was sitting on the front doorstep when Joan left the house. She shuffled over to let Joan pass her.

‘Geraldine from two doors down just walked past with a cat on a leash,’ Gran said. ‘Big ginger tom with white paws. Woman must be having a midlife crisis.’ She drank her tea. ‘Will you be home for dinner? I’m making treacle pudding.’

On impulse, Joan bent to give her a hug. They weren’t really a hugging family, but after a surprised second Gran put her mug down and hugged Joan back. The formidable Dorothy Hunt, Aaron had called her once, but in Joan’s arms she felt fine-boned and fragile.

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Joan said.

Joan remembered when she’d first returned to Holland House—a week ago now, still so ill that her legs would barely hold her. Her first glimpse of the house had been as much of a shock as seeing her family alive again. The old ruins in Holland Park, Gran had called it. But nothing could have prepared Joan for the reality.

The west wing was gone. The library where Joan had met Nick. Sabine’s Room, where Gran had died. The east wing was still there, but gutted. All that was left was the facade, now wrapped around a hostel. Joan had wandered inside in a daze and found a modern building, unrecognisable in layout. Where the Gilt Room had been, now there was a dormitory in cheerful kindergarten colours.

A pamphlet in the information office had said that the house had been bombed in the war—twenty-two times in one night. Joan took the pamphlet to Roger’s Seat, the hidden alcove overlooking the Dahlia Garden. The house might have changed, but she still knew some of its secret places.

There, curled up and half hidden by a curtain of leaves, she read about the new history of the house. In her own timeline, a private company had bought Holland House in the 1950s and turned it into a museum. In this timeline, the house had been destroyed before that could happen. The burned husk had been sold to the Royal Borough. It was all there on the page, in black and white with citations.

Joan had sat there for a long time. Whatever the pamphlet said, she knew that she’d done this. When she’d altered Nick’s history, she must have altered the history of the house too. It had just had the bad luck to be in the proximity of her power.

And she couldn’t help but ask the question: If she’d done this to Holland House, what other changes had she inadvertently made to the timeline?

Now, on her last morning in London, she walked the familiar path from Kensington High Street to what was left of the house.

Where do you keep going? Ruth had asked.

Joan didn’t know why she kept going back. Penance, maybe. The heaviness in her chest made more sense when she could see what she’d done to this place she’d loved. But it wasn’t just that. There were memories here that were nowhere else. She could walk through the gardens and imagine that he was here with her.

As Joan walked, she was joined by joggers and people pushing prams and walking dogs. There was a football field where the maze had once stood, and she could hear the distant smack of the ball, people shouting, the ref’s whistle.

After the long summer, the weather had finally turned. It was cool and drizzly as she walked past the house’s facade, past the little café, past the old icehouse. In the other timeline, food historians had churned ice cream within its thick walls, using fresh fruit from the kitchen gardens. In this timeline, it was a gallery space.

Joan lingered in the covered walkway between the icehouse and the old orangery. This bit was new—built after the rest of the house had been bombed. There were murals all the way down the wall, depicting a garden party in the Victorian era.

Joan’s favourite was the one where the partygoers were in an elaborate formal garden—ankle-high hedges creating intricate green loops. Women in voluminous skirts lounged against a central fountain. Whoever had painted this couldn’t have known the house, but they’d captured the mysterious atmosphere of the old gardens.

Joan stepped closer. She could almost have kept walking into the painting, she thought dreamily.

She caught herself with a sharp breath before the tug of yearning came.

Almost automatically, she grounded herself in the details of the moment—as Aaron had taught her. The smell of wet stone. The patter of rain outside the colonnade.

Footsteps.

Déjà vu washed over her. She turned toward the sound, knowing already that it wasn’t Nick. She’d have recognised the rhythm of his step. Still, her heart skipped in disappointment at the confirmation.

The newcomer was a soberly dressed man, perhaps twenty years old. He shook his umbrella carefully into the garden and then made his way down the walkway, stopping at the mural beside Joan.

His face was pale and Chinese—familiar, Joan thought. But recognition didn’t come until he stepped closer to the painting with an air of intent interest. He’d been an artist, she remembered.

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