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Heads: Grace. Tails: the family, their real ‘limited’ company, Small Heath.
As the coin flew up, his eyes followed it. His future hung in the air.
He caught it in his hand, held it tight, slammed it to the desk. And then he didn’t look. He thought of the way he’d felt looking at her as she’d stood by the window, and when they danced alone, and the way he felt when they held each other. He was transported to every moment they’d spent together.
Momentarily, a pain hit him. It was a sudden pang in his chest that went as quickly as it had arrived. A shiver went down his spine.
He moved his hand from the coin.
Tails.
Tommy thought for a moment.
“No.”
He sat at the desk, looking at 'Shelby Brothers Limited'. Everything he had been working for. The whole fucking thing.
She was meant to help him.
When he got to the station, there was a commotion. It was late, so he couldn’t make sense of the small crowd that had assembled. Tommy approached a policeman who was puffing on a cigarette, away from the rest. “Dead.”
He began to realise that the other policemen were assembled around a body. Lying there on the platform, a small puddle of blood pooling at his head, was a lifeless chief inspector. He didn’t look so different dead. As a vantage point opened up, Tommy recognised the cold expression on his face, unaffected by the bullet wound at his temple. He looked empty. He was a hollow shell of rage, and the shell had cracked. What had he even been angry about? He’d been fighting for nothing. Nothing noble or worthy or honourable, anyway. That’s what bothered Tommy the most.
And where was Grace? As Tommy went to ask, he observed the silhouette of her sat on a bench at the other end of the platform. She stared straight ahead, never reacting to any of it. Not the commotion of the crowd, nor the crisp coldness on the wind.
Tommy rushed to her, fighting a feeling of overpowering slow motion. He stopped at her feet, kneeling in front of her. “Grace?” Just the way he said her name caught her breath. “Grace, did you shoot him? Grace.” She shook her head, and the moonlight made the tears in her eyes sparkle.
“He shot himself. He wanted me to see. He came here… He followed me here so that I would see. He wanted me to see. What I did to him.” Grace spoke every word as a breath.
He touched her then. Moved his hand to her face and held her cheek in his palm with a tenderness to echo every touch between them. She closed her eyes and was absorbed by him. She thought of Campell’s words: disgusting beyond all measure. “You have betrayed every principle and standard of honour that was your birth right, and for what?”
“Get him out of your head, Grace,” Tommy whispered quietly. He knew her. They knew each other.
“Then the only thing left… is you.” She wept her way over the words, trembling against his touch. He steadied her, moved his other hand to her face and his forehead to hers.
“So we’ll help each other.”
She looked him in the eye. It was the first time she had looked at him directly since he’d come to her. Everything between them was in that look. The whole fucking thing.
“Tommy, if I stay, Polly will have my head.”
“No. She’s a romantic. Wouldn’t have told me it was real otherwise.” Tommy spoke carefully, leaving her hanging on his every word. “Fuck us over again, Grace, and there’ll be no saving you. Nowhere to run that the Shelby name won’t catch up with you. That’s your lot. You’ll have to fight for your place at the table but that’s the way of it. Or you can leave now. But I can’t go with you, not to London or to New York. My family need me here. And… I need them.”
She knew him well enough to know the inevitability of his choice. “So you should be with them,” she accepted.
Tommy bowed his head.
She thought about his proposition. She wanted it. Grace wanted a place at the table. “You should be with them. And I should be with you.”
They were still. To be close to each other, just physically close, was electric.
“Let’s go home, Grace. Let’s go.” He took her hand in his.
“Home,” she said so faintly that he didn't hear.
And they left.