Chapter Text
The postcard lands on David doormat alongside unpaid bills, bank statements and menus for shitty takeaway food outlets. It’s so apparently insignificant, so unexpected, he barely realises when Charlie’s muddy school shoes plants a wet footprint over the tiny Invernetian landscape. He only notices when he bends down to look, throwing Charlie’s reading folder at the bottom of the stairs. The green bleeds shaky colour into his otherwise mostly beige hallway. It’s enough for mild intrigue, at the very least. The mud doesn’t blear the neat biro font across the back—wish you were here.
David’s forehead naturally crinkles as he looks for a name, and finds none. He’s got family close to Inverness, but none that couldn’t send a text and none that would go on holiday there. None that regularly speak to him. As far as he’s aware, he’s got no friends holidaying up there either. It’s possible that maybe the postcard was meant for next door, or over the road—but no, his address is right, down to the postcode.
“Dad!”
Ella’s voice punctures his curiosity, and he looks up to find his daughter standing irritably with her arms crossed. Her long hair is braided and she’s wearing a new blazer that’s just a little bit too big for her, but like Vicks said, she’ll grow into it. Out of protest, Ella’s rolled up the sleeves, wearing a selection of beaded bracelets halfway up her arm that definitely violate the school uniform code. Vicky had tittered about Ella’s supposed rebellion, but he’d not been that worried about it. She’s on the edge of being a teenager in a brand new school full of bigger kids. Ella was just trying to find her place, stand out a bit.
“Yeah, what is it sweetheart?” he asks, smiling tightly. Ella rolls her eyes.
“We’re hungry. What’s for tea?”
Tea. Yeah, tea, he’d have to feed them before Vicky came to pick them up. He scratches the back of his head. “Uh—I think there’s some fishfingers in the freezer. Put the oven on and I’ll be in in a minute, yeah?”
Ella sighs dramatically, as all nearly-twelve-year-olds do whenever they’re asked to do anything. He ignores her, returning to the unusual delivery, thumbing the peeling corners carefully. He’d been in his job long enough, seen enough, to know that often things were not what they seemed. Ulterior motives lurked in ordinary objects like the blood pulsing behind his skin. There was always something else. When the edge of a mountain folds over, he pulls the tacky picture back, the mossy green film shedding away into white. There’s a second detail to the card—on that the sender had deliberately hidden, meant only for the recipient.
It’s an address. His thumb traces the clear handwriting carefully. There’s no name, again, but his fingertip curls over the final letter in the postcode, and oh God—
His heartbeat stutters manically. He feels unintended tears burning at the back of his eyes, hot and hopeful yet utterly furious, because he knows, he knows, he knows. He knows there is only one person this could possibly be from. All these months—over a year—and he knows, because who else would do this?
It should have clicked straightaway. But it’s been so long. He’s been so tired, like the last year has been desperately treading through mud in the hope of finding something better. He’s mostly just found shit, tonnes and tonnes of it, but as the weeks dragged on the sheer volume of it appeared to reduce. The counselling has helped. Seeing the kids has helped. It’s by no means anywhere near finished, but it was beginning to ease. The constant ache fading into a dull throb that God knows he takes enough medication for.
David’s whole body seems to shake as he dizzily paces into the living room and falls onto the sofa. He reads the address over and over, wonders what the hell she’s been playing at all this time. It makes sense, but also makes as much sense as quantum physics. Anger flits into sadness, then into absolute fury. He wants to throw something. Smash the mirror on the wall, so his face cracks and reflects back the state of his broken head. But there’s Ella, and there’s Charlie, and he cannot afford to have a breakdown right now. He cannot afford to let Vicky take them away again. Think he’s not safe for them.
Ella stomps back from the kitchen again, but her annoyed glare softens into concern. She bites the nail on her thumb. “Dad?”
David blinks, shakes his head. He slips the postcard down the side of the couch and pretends he can’t feel it burning, threatening to burn down the whole house like a cigarette falling out an ash tray. “Yeah, love?”
“Are you… okay?” Ella’s eyes are wide, and he does his best to reinstate normality. He smiles and thinks it looks reassuring. “I tried to turn on the oven but I’m not sure how it works. Also Charlie wants chicken dippers.”
Okay, so this is easy, this is normal. He can deal with this. “Well, tell Charlie that I’ve only got fishfingers, so unless he wants a big plate of broccoli he’ll have to eat them.”
Charlie’s unwillingness to eat anything green had become a family joke. Both him and Vicky had attempted to get vegetables into his diet by any means necessary—their latest tactic of hiding them in mashed potato had failed miserably when Vicky had found mash smeared in an empty biscuit tin—so he sees this as safe territory. It works and Ella calms instantly, her grin mirroring his own.
“I’ll sort the oven,” he says, pulling himself up from the sofa, “C’mon.”
-x-
He tries to be normal through dinner. Really, really tries. He asks Charlie about his volcano project and whether his mum ever got that papier mache off the bathroom ceiling, and Ella blushes when he asks about that boy she was talking to at the school gates. He’s just Tony, she says, and he’s an idiot.
(The way Ella’s swirls her food round her plate with her fork, her head dreamily lolling onto her hand, makes David think that Tony is an idiot who his eleven-year-old daughter has probably kissed behind the bike sheds at lunchtime. God. That’s not something he’d even mildly considered worrying about yet, alongside everything else.)
But at the back of his head is Inverness.
The logical part of his brain is telling him not to go. He’s got a life here that is somehow getting back on track, and he knows trailing all the way to Scotland will undoubtedly cruelly shatter his equilibrium. And—who is she? To lead him on all these months, all the fucking grief, all the guilt and the blame and the feeling of his heart shifting like broken glass in the recesses of his chest? The suicide attempt and the dirty mercy mission that followed, his need to claw back vengeance even though every single person around him thought that he was the bomb at the heart of it all?
(And he was, in the end, but not in the way everyone thought. He did it all for her. It was always for her, in her name, her fucking posh, Tory, everything he should despise but somehow didn’t name.)
Julia Montague destroyed him. Granted, he was fractured way before their paths ever crossed, but she had him splintering. Crunching under foot. And for her to be…
Yet, somehow, this is what he thought would happen all along.
His heart is telling him to go.
After all, it was his heart that opened up to her, in those dark hotel-room nights where he clung to her bones like fabric. He kissed her manically, desperately; but sometimes they laughed, too, and he caught himself wondering if maybe this was right. Maybe this was love. Because after the bomb—there was justice, and revenge, but love sat hopelessly at the heart of it. He can’t help it. The thought of her being alive and hidden away for months as he grieved hurts—God, it hurts—but it can’t hurt more than the thought of her being dead. It can’t. It can’t.
“Dad! Your beans are getting cold!”
Charlie’s voice is cheerfully oblivious. He stuffs a chip into his mouth. David smiles.
“Ah, good spot, Charlie,” David looks across the table at his two beautiful children, thinking they are more than enough. He is so lucky to have them, these two amazing little human beings. Ella and Charlie. The product of a love that had always been fragile but then sputtered and died, but his love for his children had never changed.
His love for her had never changed, and maybe that was the saddest thing of all. His equilibrium was always going to be skewed. Whether he went to Inverness or not.
Vicky comes to pick them up an hour later. He asks her in out of politeness but fortunately she has to jet off, something about an early shift tomorrow.
As they stand in warm familiarity on the doorstep, he almost doesn’t say it. He hands her Charlie’s book-bag and Ella’s PE kit and the words sit in his mouth. A mild, September wind blows into the doorway and Vicky shivers.
“I…” he starts, Vicky’s eyebrows arching in anticipation, “I—I’ve got to go away for a couple of days. Maybe more.”
“Oh,” Vicky says, “Is it a work thing?”
“Yeah, just a work thing, nothing important. But I have to go.”
Vicky looks a little unconvinced for a second, but eventually settles. It’s not the first time he’s been away for work and every time he’s come back fine, if not better, so he can see she thinks there’s nothing to worry about. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe this whole thing is a big fat lie, concocted in his head.
It strikes him then how heartbroken he’d feel if he’d got all this wrong. It must be her, it’s got her written all over it, but what if it isn’t? His shoulder subconsciously sag as he internally lives that absolute nightmare. He’s so, so angry with her, but he doesn’t want his fury misdirected at a ghost.
Vicky’s hand reaches out for his shoulder. “You okay?”
David shakes her off, but smiles anyway. “Fine, yeah. Sorry.”
Ella and Charlie rush through, kissing their dad goodbye before trekking out to the car across the street. Vicky presses a gentle kiss on his cheek, out of friendliness and compassion, barely an ember of what once was.
“Take care of yourself, Dave,” she says, as she always does. When he closes the door, he waits at the window until they drive off. Charlie waves, sticking his tongue out. David sticks his tongue out back.
He’s going to Inverness.
He has to.
-x-
He takes a night to think it over despite already being decided. Sleep completely eludes him, his bedside clock blinking mockingly as two drags into three then four. Eventually he abandons it altogether, throwing off the duvet and packing a holdall in the muted orange of an autumn dusk. He gets the train so he can sleep a little on the road, then he hires a car once he arrives in Scotland. The Satnav leads him away from the town and deep into the highlands he’d passed through hundreds of times as a kid, all dark and grass and heather, mud on wellies and the gentle steps of his grandparents’ border collie as it ran on ahead. After what feels like hours and hours of driving, the sun beginning to set once again, he rolls up outside a small white cottage standing alone amongst sheep farmland.
There’s the possibility that this is some kind of trap, because that’s not unusual in counter-terrorism. A smarter man than him probably wouldn’t have come all the way here without telling anyone where he was going, but he’d left school with barely any Highers anyway. He clutches the postcard between his forefinger and thumb, his hands clammy and chilled. It takes him a few seconds to get out the car, although he assumes the resident of the cottage has already heard him pull up the drive.
His feet crunch on the gravel as he wanders up to the door. His knocks are short, decisive—there’s not much to hold him back now. It slowly unlocks a moment later, and his heart lurches in unspeakable trepidation.
In the dim glow of the hallway light, he’s greeted by a ghost.
And the ghost—the ghost, she’s holding a baby.