Page 5 of Never a Hero

‘Joan—’

‘You don’t have to keep asking, Dad. I’m really fine!’ It came out frustrated. Joan pressed her lips shut. She didn’t want to fight about it. She didn’t want to tell Dad more lies than she already had.

In the silence, the wind rattled the windows. Dad’s sigh was barely audible over it.

Joan looked past the kitchen’s open-plan arch to the photos on the living room wall. Joan and Dad. Joan as a baby. Mum. The three of them together in a park, Mum and Dad holding Joan’s hands. As a kid, Joan had stared at those photos for hours, trying to match her own features to Mum’s. Joan had always looked more like Dad than Mum. More Chinese than European.

‘You remind me so much of her,’ Dad said. He’d followed her gaze. ‘More and more every day. She’d have been so proud of you.’

That pressure of emotion again. There were things about Mum that Joan really didn’t want to think about. Mum had died when Joan was a baby. Her death had always been a fact—one that Joan had learned before anything else, before she’d learned to count or read. An immutable fact. A foundational fact of her life.

‘Gran never talks about her,’ Joan pushed out. ‘Like, never. Don’t you think that’s weird?’

Dad was silent, his eyes still on the photos. ‘I didn’t understand that either for a long time,’ he said. ‘But … your gran and your mum didn’t always get on. They had an argument just before your mum died. I think your gran felt very guilty about that. I think she blamed herself for your mum’s death in some strange way.’ He took off the oven mitts. Mum must have bought those ones. All the dark stuff in the house was hers; Dad preferred bright colours.

‘I think this dinner is a big step for your gran.’ Behind his glasses, Dad’s eyes were wet.

He wanted to go to this dinner, Joan realised. He wanted to see the Hunts tomorrow. He wanted to remember Mum with Mum’s family on this anniversary.

Joan took a deep breath. ‘We’ll both go together?’ she said. Dad would be at this dinner, she reminded herself. The Hunts wouldn’t be able to talk about monster things in front of him.

‘Of course,’ Dad said. ‘It’s a family thing.’

‘A family thing,’ Joan echoed. Not a dinner with monsters, but a dinner with Mum’s family and Dad. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘A family dinner.’ And after their dinner, Joan and Dad would go home to their normal lives. It wasn’t like Joan would be pulled back into the monster world.

two

It was a hot morning, but the path to Holland House was cool in the shifting shade of trees. Joan could hear the sounds of the garden already: kids laughing, peacocks cawing, the booming voices of the tour guides.

She emerged onto the lush lawn. It wasn’t even noon, but the place was already packed. It seemed that everyone had had the same idea: to take advantage of the good weather at the park. Costumed guides led groups of tourists toward the maze. Kids kicked up water in the shallows of the pond.

Beyond them, glints of glass reflected the morning sun. Holland House was always beautiful, but this was its best time of day. The red-brick facade glowed.

Joan was struck with a pang of grief out of nowhere. It didn’t look like this anymore, she remembered suddenly.

It had burned.

She woke with a start.

Light showed through cracks in her bedroom blinds. Outside, it was still raining heavily, a relentless roar. Joan tried to slow her breathing. The ache of loss hit her again. In her memory, Holland House had been one of London’s most popular tourist attractions; people had visited from all over the world.

In this timeline, it lay in ruins. People didn’t even remember its name.

Joan rubbed her eyes. The dream had been so vivid that this actual rainy morning seemed surreal. She glanced at the clock. Still pretty early. She had a vague feeling that something difficult was happening later today. A maths exam? No, it was Saturday.

Then she remembered. She was seeing the Hunts tonight. I got the feeling that your gran wanted to talk to you about something, Dad had said. Joan’s empty stomach turned over. What was Gran going to say? Joan half wished that she could step back into that dream—go back to that sunny day, so far from here, to that long-gone house.

Too late, she registered that she’d veered into dangerous emotional territory.

The morning light dimmed, as if night were falling again. The patter of rain muted. Even Joan’s own growing panic felt far away from where she was. She had a flash of Aaron touching her, his grey eyes alarmed. Hey, stay with me.

Still half-asleep, Joan fought to ground herself in the present moment, as Aaron had taught her. She focused on the details of her physical surroundings. The sound of rain. Stripes of morning light on the wall. The rough embroidery of her quilt. She clawed back each sense, one by one. It felt like forever before morning dawned again, and the rain rose back to a roar. Joan’s next breath was a choke of relief. She sat up and gripped her knees. I’m here, she told herself. I’m here and I don’t want to be anywhere else.

These fade-outs were getting worse, she knew. She’d done her best to stop them. Her bedroom walls had once been covered with old maps and illustrations of ancient places, but now they were bare. She’d dropped history at school. She’d tried to remove everything from her life that might trigger her desire to travel in time.

She remembered Aaron’s words. You nearly died. You tried to travel without taking time first.

She should have told Gran about this problem weeks ago, she knew. She shouldn’t have been avoiding the Hunts for so long. Tonight, she told herself. She’d tell Gran tonight.

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