I take Aras to the table and help load a plate for him and one for Uncle Jack, hyperaware of every possible sound from downstairs that might mean Jack is on his way up.
But I’m not a soldier. Jack’s filling the kitchen doorway before I even begin to hear him coming, and I’m not sad about it. How can I be when it’s the best surprise on earth? When everything about him, even the parts that tear me up, make me whole?
Gods, I’m messy today, emotion tightening my chest. I hide behind Aras, but Jack knows. His gaze finds me and holds me there for a heartbeat too long, but not long enough. Hot and grounding—I’ve got you—but he hasn’t. Hecan’tbecause other people need him too.
Skylar.
Jack breaks our connection and scans the room, clocks Skylar’s absence and raises a dark brow.
I incline my head in the direction of Mal and Skylar’s room and he nods, accepting that Skylar’s home but not here, before he takes his own seat at the table. Next to Aras, who gives him a cautious wave that hurts my heart. Jack is as kind and dependable as Oscar. But that shadow in his brain is a wicked wicked thing, and Aras knows it as well as the rest of us.
The flip side is he knows the very best of Jack too. Knows he has a mischievous side that has him stealing some of the vegetables from Aras’s plate and hiding them on his own while Oscar is busy with the chicken.
Aras giggles and it fills the room with love and light. But then he asks…
“Where’s Mal?”
And his timing is tragic.
Skylar marbleises in the doorway, for whatever reason carrying Mal’s phone, and the silence that expands is truly terrible.
I take a breath to fill it.
Skylar gets there first, unfreezing and venturing further into the room. “Working away. He’ll be back soon.”
Aras accepts the simplified truth and starts in on his dinner. For a little lad, he puts some food away.
Skylar comes to me and deposits Mal’s phone in my hand. “Can you put this somewhere?”
I pocket the device without question, praying I’ll think of somewhere sensible and not immediately forget. Like I used to with my own phone before Jack got hurt.
Skylar looks as though he might leave again, but Jack glances up, they lock eyes, and Skylar takes a seat with a brittle sigh.
Oscar brings him a plate of plain chicken and sets the rest of the dishes on the table. Then he sits in what I’ve come to think of as Mal’s seat, and I realise it’s where he always sat before Mal came home. Because he knew how much Skylar needed the unobtrusive closeness of a friend.
Mealtime hush falls over the table. Me and Oscar talk, about fish and the songs we might sing later when Aras has gone to his mum’s for the night, and how the tides might behave when we set sail a few hours later. Jack is quiet. Skylar, utterly silent, but we get by, wesurvive, even if it is hard to imagine we ever lived these lives of ours without Mal.
Skylar eats only chicken. When he doesn’t bolt after, I take a chance and slide him a bowl of the white ice-cream he’ll eat sometimes. It earns me another sigh, but it goes down the hatch, and he doesn’t leave the table.
He’s still there when Oscar takes Aras to his ma’s, and when Jack goes back downstairs. When I’m done with the dishes and considering the Kraken bottle.
Skylar doesn’t drink spirits. I grab him a beer from the fridge and take it to the table with the rum.
“You want a glass with that?” he says, dry as all hell.
I shrug and swig from the bottle. Jack and Mal don’t drink rum either—anymore—so the only shared germs I have to worryabout are with my own blood, with Sev, and he hasn’t shown his face in Porth Luck since the summer.
It’s Christmas soon and it’s the first year I’ve decorated the Joker without him.
Imisshim, which gives me something else to be caught in my feelings about. I fall into my seat, texting one-handed while Skylar relieves me of the beer.
He pops the cap and takes a single swallow before pushing it away. “I shouldn’t be this fucking dependant on him.”
Him. Mal. I set my phone down. “We’re all dependant on something.”
“What’s your poison, Sol?”
Lots of things, and Skylar knows each and every one of them, so I take the question for the deflection it is. “When are you back on nights?”