And learned. Because this was a completely different side of his wife. She was so gentle with Nan, matching her bite for bite, cajoling her into another slice of sweet bread, or a sliver of the spiced peach tart, spreading the crackers with some of the chutney, making a second pot of tea. Most of it was the same, the wild restlessness alive in Tilda seemingly from birth. There were stories about wrists sprained falling out of trees, knees skinned tumbling down rocks near the sea. Tilda belonged in this old house, full of sunshine and sea air. She belonged here in a way that was deeper and more powerful than the way she made New York her own. Suddenly her life in New York seemed like a profound dislocation.
“How old were you?”
“Oh, six, I think,” she said.
“Five,” Nan corrected. “Five, and nowhere to be found from sunup to sundown.”
“It was summer,” Tilda objected.
“And what about the times the head teacher called, ‘Matilda’s not here yet, Mrs. Davies, have you any idea where that child’s got to this time?’”
Tilda laughed. “I always turned up.”
“Down some path to the sea, or under a bush. You’d turn up dirty and late, brazen as you please.”
“But I did turn up.”
“Near feral, your grade-one teacher said. Unruly, undisciplined, unable to sit still two seconds together, and brilliant. You were bored, you didn’t like it, and you didn’t care who knew it.”
“I still don’t.”
“You solved the problem with dirt and fresh air, and running. She never walked anywhere,” Nan confided to Daniel. “A little whirlwind. Ran with the boys from an early age. She had them wrapped around her little finger. They couldn’t sort her out, you see.”
“She hasn’t changed much. I’d love to see more of the pictures like the one you sent me before Christmas,” Daniel said.
Nan’s face brightened, but Tilda went blank, like a fire brutally quenched, before laughter trilled from her throat. “Oh, Nan doesn’t keep anything like that. Besides, all this,” she said with a sweeping gesture that took in sea and sky, “and you want to look at old snaps of me?” she said.
“Where are you staying?”
“At Cliff House, where you’ll be having supper with us. I want to have a look at your bank statements while I’m here,” Tilda said.
Nan put her hands on the table to rise. “I’ve got this,” Daniel said when Tilda started to gather the dishes.
The interior of the house was as small as the outside hinted, a single story with very low ceilings. The kitchen ran along the front wall, a couch and table the length of the house and a small table in between, a bathroom, a cupboard, and a single bedroom off the main living area. The room seemed locked in time. The taps were handles so old they’d become retro popular again, and the water streaming out of them smelled of well water. The room smelled faintly of bleach and pine, the windows sparkled, but under the spotless surfaces, everything was worn, scratched, dented, stained. A cheery tree decorated with multicolored lights and ancient ornaments sat on the little table by the sofa.
He washed all the dishes carefully, then dried them with the threadbare tea towels draped over the oven’s handle. Tilda and Nan put their heads together over a sheaf of paper, murmuring, while he covered the leftovers and set them neatly in the small fridge. The sums they discussed were small, with a few gaps in Nan’s memory Tilda had to prompt her to fill. Daniel contrasted her gentle tone with the sharp precision she used on the call with the financier in London, and tried to assemble the pieces of Tilda into a coherent picture.
“I’ve got something for the pair of you,” she said, after Tilda folded away the bank statements.
“Nan, you really didn’t have to.”
She rose, then made her way into the bedroom. While she rummaged around, Tilda nodded at the sofa. “That’s my childhood bed. That very sofa. I slept with Nan until I was three or four, but I kicked.”
With Tilda, conversational shifts came out of nowhere. He was tired enough to need a second to find the reference: their conversation at Christmas, in his room at his parents’ house. “Okay.”
“Surprised?”
What characterized true poverty was a complete disconnect from family and a sense of place. Love and belonging permeated this house, even if Tilda had slept on a sofa. “Not after a decade with the FBI. How long did you live here?”
“Until the year I turned eight. Mum finished her PhD that year, and came to collect me. She left when I was two, and came back for breaks, unless she was doing research or attending classes elsewhere.”
“That must have been hard,” he said absently. His brain was past the point of sloshing in his head, and now vibrated at a frequency barely audible to human ears. “Not having your mother around, I mean.”
“I had Nan. I loved it here,” she said. Her voice was low, intense. “You’ll see later. Rocks and sea and sky, the wind in the grass. I loved it here.”
“Here you are. It’s not much, mind you,” Nan said.
The box was wrapped in used paper and tied with a bow. Tilda smiled at it, smoothing her hands over the box then carefully opening it. Nestled in a bed of new tea towels, the kind Tilda preferred to dry dishes, were three jars of homemade currant jam.
“My favorite,” she said softly, and leaned into her Nan’s shoulder.
“I know.”
“Nan used to feed me biscuits spread with this jam for tea,” Tilda said.
“Not a proper tea, but I had to get her to eat somehow.”
“I have a similar problem,” Daniel said. The jars were neatly labeled in a script similar to his own grandmother’s handwriting.
“Thank you,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss Nan’s cheek. “I’ll have some on my toast in the morning, and think of you.”
“You’re welcome. It’s not much—”
“It’s perfect. Exactly what I want,” Tilda said. “Something that reminds me of you. Of . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She smiled, bright as a scythe, bright as the tears in her eyes, smoothing the tea towels over and over.
—
“Nap,” he said when they got back into the car.
“It’s better not to sleep, and I want to go for a long walk,” she said. Her eyes were bright, and wild.
“Nap,” he repeated, more firmly, and started the engine. “Just an hour or so. I can’t even go for a walk. I’ll trip over my own feet.”
They drove back into the village and checked into the inn. The owner knew Tilda by reputation and welcomed her warmly. In their room Tilda perched in the window seat, while Daniel set his phone to go off in an hour and stretched out on the bed in his clothes. He was asleep in seconds.
When the alarm went off Tilda was still sitting in the window seat, staring out at the cliffs enclosing the harbor, the ocean beyond. “Did you sleep?”
“I might have dozed for a few minutes,” she said.
After quickly cleaning up they set off through the village, Tilda pointing out landmarks like the church, the school, the pub on their way to the path worn into the tough grass long ago. Dirt gave way to thick, tall grass and a split-rail fence. Her jacket knotted around her waist, Tilda stepped through the stile and set off along a narrow dirt path. Daniel followed her.
The wind patted him from all angles, the sunshine more constant but less powerful. Ahead of him, Tilda’s hair lifted in the ocean-drenched breeze. When she turned to check on his progress, she looked shockingly young.
“Keep up,” she called, mischief in her grin.
“I’m trying to enjoy the walk,” he said. “Where are we going?”
She pointed to a promontory curving into the bay. A narrow beach hugged the base of the long cliff, the water dotted with huge stone towers left behind after the ocean carved away softer portions. “There,” she said.
Mossy grass ran up to the very edge of the cliffs, and ran down the sides, clinging to any flat spots. The dirt trail was nearly invisible behind and ahead of them. While the wind’s speed and intensity varied, its presence never did. Without the unseasonable temperatures, it would be a cold, damp visit.
Several yards ahead of him Tilda stopped and flung her arms out and her head back, exposing her throat and collarbones to the wind and sky. She said nothing, but the way her wedding ring glinted in the sun, the sheer exuberance of her tousled, dancing curls, the utter abandon screamed,
Home, home, I am home!
He smiled, and followed, increasingly aware of seismic shifts under the continental plates of Tilda. She fit here, loved it here. He could see her working as a waitress in one of the restaurants, somehow capturing the essence of Cornwall for visiting tourists, bright smile and laughing eyes and wind and sunshine and sea. He could see her having affair after affair with wealthy businessmen down from London on holiday, laughing at their efforts to woo her and take her away from this wild place, rich only in gifts that couldn’t be given, only received, spurning their offers of jewelry or a car or clothes, walking out of their bedrooms and back onto the moors. The wind would scour her clean of their scent. She wouldn’t have a car here, either. She’d walk or bicycle everywhere, in her slim jeans and her Wellington boots, needing nothing they valued, wanting only whatever they could offer her that night, trading it for her freedom—
He tripped on a rock embedded in the dirt path and came back from his decidedly unromantic mental detour.
“All right, then?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. Who spent a walk by the sea with his new bride mentally conjuring up a different version of her, one where she loved and left as much as she laughed?
As he pondered this question, Tilda sat down on the edge of the rocks, nothing between her and a three-hundred-foot drop to the ocean, and slipped over the edge. He gave an inarticulate shout and lunged for her, going to his knee on the grass. She popped back up again like a jack-in-the-box, genuinely bewildered.
“What?” she said. She stood on a shelf of rock only as wide as her feet that was, as far as he could tell, supported by fuck-all underneath it.
He dropped his head to his upper arm and waited for his heart rate to slow into the double digits again. “I thought you went over the cliff.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, although her eyes were dancing.
“You’re going to pay for that,” he replied, and peered over the edge to see a tiny beach sheltered between two towering, hewn edges of the cliff. Now that he knew to look for it, he could see the path leading down the rocks, to the crescent of sand. “What’s down there?”
“A very private, very sheltered beach.”
That sounded appealing, but one of them had to be reasonable. “I don’t know, Tilda,” he said. “I’ve got size-twelve feet. A goat couldn’t get down that path.”
“I’ll give you a really filthy blow job,” she said so seriously he laughed.
“Deal. Let me go first. That way if I slip, I won’t take you out on the way down.”
In the end, he didn’t fall, although there were a couple of near misses, and his knuckles were scraped and bloody by the time he set foot on the beach. The sunshine warmed the sand and rocks. All he could see was a two-hundred-degree swath of ocean.
Tilda sprawled out on the rocky sand and heaved a sigh of contentment. “We’re really lucky with the weather. It’s uncommonly warm and sunny.”
“How did you know about this place?”
“Rory showed me, the summer I was fourteen,” she said. Her first kiss, Daniel remembered, but he was reconstructing his impressions of a first kiss in this place, the sea and sky and the cries of the birds.
“You’re different when you’re with your grandmother.”
“How so?”
“Calmer, softer, quieter,” he said. “More receptive. You smile differently, hold yourself differently.” Without the sharp angles, without the edge, but he kept that observation. She was vulnerable with Nan, something he never would have realized if he hadn’t seen her here.
“Isn’t that how people are supposed to be with their nans?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Why didn’t you want me to see pictures?”
“Nan put them away after Granddad died and Mum left for school. I think it’s too hard for her to have them out. She doesn’t have much room, either. Not really a packrat, our Nan.”
He felt like a jerk for writing Nan and asking for a picture to give Tilda. He’d thought it would be thoughtful, and instead he’d put his foot in it.
“You didn’t know,” she said. “Don’t think anything more about it.”
Sun-warmed and protected by the cliffs, he dozed to the sound of the waves lapping irregularly at the beach, and awoke to the sensation of Tilda’s mouth on his cock. For a moment the possibility of being seen seized him. He closed his fingers in Tilda’s curls and tugged. “We shouldn’t,” he said.
“No one can see,” she whispered. The breeze dried her saliva on his shaft, tightening the skin.
It was as filthy as she’d promised. Utterly exposed and completely hidden, he felt like he was at the end of the world, lost in time and space. She slicked his entire shaft with saliva, then tugged his jeans down far enough to lick at his balls. He came with his cock nudging the back of her throat and the rush of the ocean in his ears. The wind carried away his shout.
“I don’t think I can climb the hill,” he said.
She swished her hands in the ocean and dried them on her jeans. “The tide’s coming in,” she said matter-of-factly.
Properly motivated, he scrambled to his feet. The climb up the cliff was only slightly less terrifying than the climb down. They walked back to the inn with the sun setting into the ocean. He thought about the picture in his mother’s house, the one that said
Home is where your story begins
. He thought about the albums Tilda deftly prevented Nan from showing him. He thought about their story, so new, about how little he’d known about Tilda’s home, and wondered what kind of story they’d begun together.
New Year’s Eve
T
he cabdriver heaved their bags from the trunk of the black London cab that amused Daniel to no end. “I’ll get them,” Daniel said, and handed him several bills. Tilda scanned the backseat one more time to be sure all the bags had made the transition from cab to street; they’d nearly left her shoulder bag in the rental car when they turned it in, and she wasn’t eager to have to go back out again and track down her laptop, tablet, cell phone, and wallet in the back of a black cab.
When she looked up, the front door to the town house was open. Her mother stood in the doorway. “Hello, darling,” she said, but made no move to come down the stairs and greet them.
Daniel glanced up, then at Tilda. There was no point in explaining that her mother would never greet them in the street, would never fly down the steps and envelop her daughter and new son-in-law in a hug that either would be considered common at best and hopelessly gauche at worst. Instead, she shifted her bag higher on her shoulder and reached for the smaller of the two suitcases.
“I’ve got them,” Daniel murmured.
She climbed the steps. “Hello, Mum,” she said, leaning in for a kiss.
“Come in, come in,” she said to Daniel, who somehow managed to jockey their enormous suitcase through the narrow door without smearing the grime from the pavement on her mother’s cream cabled leggings. She wore a heavy brown wrap sweater over the leggings, and her hair was swept back from forehead and temples. Her mother had the classic beauty of a forties screen star, high cheekbones and forehead, full mouth. Daniel didn’t do anything as obvious as a double take, but as she watched, he did some very simple math and put together another piece of the puzzle.
Tilda closed the door. “Mother, this is Daniel Logan. Daniel, my mother, Elizabeth Davies.”
“So lovely to meet you, Daniel,” her mother said.
Daniel correctly deduced the body language and shook her hand rather than bending for a cheek kiss, as Tilda had. “It’s a pleasure, Doctor Davies,” he said.
“Elizabeth, please,” her mother said. “How was the drive? I heard there was construction on the A30.”
“There is, but traffic was light. We left the car outside the city and caught a cab here,” Daniel said.
“You’ve got lovely weather for your visit.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Daniel said.
And that covered the two English standbys, the weather and the state of the roads. Tilda smiled to herself.
“Although I think Tilda will see more office parks than anything else,” Daniel added.
“Really, darling?” Her mother turned to look at her, genuine surprise on her face, leaving Tilda to wonder once again if her mother actually read her emails.
“I’ve got meetings with Quality Group,” she said.
“How nice. We can discuss it over dinner,” her mother said. She tucked her hair behind her ear. Silver strands gleamed in the black, and a very expensive pen was tucked over one ear. Tilda recognized the abstracted expression on her face. “Unless you’d like to have coffee in the reception room, but I’m in the middle of a rather tricky chapter and I’m sure you’d like to freshen up.”
“Go back to work, Mum,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”
“All right, darling. Lovely to see you. Help yourself to whatever,” she said, gesturing vaguely down the hall toward the kitchen.
It was an automatic response. Her mother drifted into her study. The clicking of keys accompanied Tilda and Daniel past the towering Christmas tree decorated with white lights, up the stairs to the second floor.
“The reception room?” Daniel said under his breath.
“Living room.”
“That’s what a living room is called in England?”
“Only in Chelsea,” she said. “In here.”
She opened a door to a room whose bed was bare of linens. Surely her mother would have remembered to tell her household help to make up a guest room. No, wait, she was remembering the town house two streets over. “Hang on. Here.”
She opened the door to the second guest room, the one with the en suite bath, and found a four-poster bed straight out of Elizabethan England, mounded with white bedding topped with white satin throw pillows, and stopped dead. Still preoccupied with trying not to bang the luggage into the cream wallpaper, Daniel nearly ran up her heels.
He stifled a laugh. “It’s very . . . bridal,” he said, and nudged her forward, into the hideous room. “Is this her idea of a joke?”
That was the problem with her mother. Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps she was trying to do something lovely for Tilda, something romantic. Perhaps it was a not-so-subtle gesture to give her back what was long gone. Explaining the vast, labyrinthine history leading to these divergent possibilities to Daniel was beyond her. “White’s very chic at the moment,” she said.
“I’m not sure I can wait to see you in that bed,” Daniel said under his breath. He set his small rolling case on the strip of hardwood left bare by the Turkish rug, then crossed the room to heft Tilda’s larger bag on the luggage rack in the closet. She unzipped it and pulled out her toiletries bag.
“You may have to. Mother’s dinner parties can linger until the wee hours, if the conversation gets going. I want to have a look at the storefront locations,” she said and stepped past him into the toilet.
“I thought you were doing that tomorrow, with the real estate broker and Colin?” he called through the door.
She rinsed her face and began reapplying makeup. “I am, but I want to see the sites without someone telling me what I’m seeing.” She ran her brush through her hair, and opened the door.
“You want to do some surveillance,” he said with a little half smile. He was standing by the foot of the ridiculous bed, hands in his pockets, jacket and shirt miraculously unwrinkled, deliciously scruffy, but then Daniel always looked like he belonged. “Scope out the joint. Reconnoiter. See what you can see.”
“Exactly,” she said, and emptied her leather tote of all but the essentials—iPad, wallet, makeup case, lipstick, business-card case. Her cards still read
Matilda Davies
. The paperwork to change her name was staggering and would involve bureaucracies on two continents, as she was still a British citizen, with a passport issued in her maiden name, a green card also issued in her maiden name, not to mention her entire financial identity tied up in West Village Stationery. She would make at least one more trip to the UK to close this deal, perhaps two, and there was some talk of going to Tokyo and Dubai to meet investors. The thought of dealing with the TSA if somehow her names didn’t all align was enough to make her back away, hands up protectively. Daniel hadn’t asked about changing her name, and she hadn’t offered to.
“Let’s walk. I could use a walk.”
She followed him down the stairs, then peered around the door to her mother’s study. “We’re going out,” she said. “Dinner’s at eight?”
“Yes,” her mother said, clearly distracted. “Tilda, I’m in the middle of a rather tricky conclusion—”
“We’re leaving. We’ll be back in time for dinner. Text me if you need anything.”
Her mother seemed to remember their company. “Yes, of course, darling. Have fun showing Daniel the city.”
She closed the front door behind her and stepped out into a gorgeous London winter day. Shifting her tote higher on her shoulder, she reached for Daniel’s hand and set off down the pavement toward Marylebone. The quiet residential streets quickly filled as they approached.
“Good foot traffic,” she noted.
“Zip your bag,” Daniel responded absently. He was studying the buildings around them, but the cop never really stopped working. Tilda shoved her phone in the front pocket of her jeans and zipped the top of her leather tote. “Where are we going?”
“Bond Street and the Dover Street Market, and Primrose Hill,” she said. She left him reading a sign on the side of a building and walked the length of the block. A nice mix of shops, restaurants, cafes. Further up the street she could see two art galleries, one name she recognized and a second she didn’t. Crossing the street, she walked more slowly and examined the shop windows. Luxury goods, for the most part, the windows understated, elegant, the kind of angular theme in the shop windows that walked the fine line between artistic and incomprehensible. No sale signs, no price tags, even. If one wanted to inquire, one would have to go inside and ask, which meant one likely couldn’t afford it. “It’s the equivalent of the Upper East Side. Old money, which appreciates time-honored traditions, with new money buying in, eager to blend in. Let’s get a coffee.”
She claimed a table in one of the cafe’s outdoor seating areas while Daniel ordered two large lattes at the counter. When he sat down she had her iPad out, making notes. Lots of window-shoppers, tourists gawking, a few art students making their way from the galleries to the Tube stop several streets over. Range Rovers, BMWs, and Mercedes lined the streets, or in rarer instances, idled at the curb while the chauffeur waited to ferry a woman to her next destination.
“I thought the people at Quality sent you reports on the location. Foot traffic, sales information, that kind of thing.”
She sipped the latte. “They did,” she said. “But data can be massaged. Locations have a particular feel. South of Houston isn’t SoHo, London. SoHo isn’t the West Village. Places, like people, have an energy all their own.”
He looked up from the guidebook, and caught her eye. “You have a sixth sense for that.”
“You do, too,” she said.
“It’s a matter of life or death for cops,” he said, but his smile muted the seriousness. “If you don’t hone that gut instinct, you end up walking into bad situations. A healthy radar keeps it from going from bad to worse.”
“Do you teach that?”
He flipped the book over and sat back, ankle on his knee. The intersection of his Oxford and jeans, the brown leather belt, the way his jacket gaped to reveal his slim torso sent a slow, hot rush through her. “I only trained a couple of rookies, but when I did, I hammered away at the danger signs. The rest of it is pure instinct. You either know when someone’s hiding something or you don’t. You either see the killer in a pair of eyes, or you don’t.”
“But where you counsel people to turn around and walk away if they feel threatened or challenged, you keep going.”
He shrugged. “That’s the job.”
“How were your instincts?”
“Sharp enough to keep me alive,” he said. “Better than most, worse than some. One rookie I trained, Deshawn Richards, was like you. He could read nuances in a person or a group like they’d whispered all their secrets in his ear before he walked into it. He knew who had power, who meant harm, who would walk away when told to, who would get in our faces, who’d walk away and then come at us behind our backs. He had instincts. I had memory.”
She smiled at him, caffeine and the adrenaline rush of the expansion coursing through her veins. She could almost, almost forget what lay ahead. “You’re an odd one,” she said.
He just lifted his eyebrows and grinned. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored. I know how you feel about being bored.”
“I know how
you
feel about being bored,” she scoffed.
“I’m never bored with you,” he said quietly.
The mood shifted, acquired an edge she didn’t recognize. He reached across the table and clasped her left hand, running his thumb over her thin wedding ring, then lifted it to his mouth and kissed it. Then he went back to his book.
They lingered for another hour. Tilda took notes, formulated the questions she’d ask at the meeting tomorrow, and bought a bottle of water to drink on the walk to the next location. Daniel methodically plowed through the guidebook, and disappeared for twenty minutes, coming back with a more confident step.
“Ascertained our location in the space-time continuum?” she asked. When he nodded, she added, “Let’s go,” and zipped her tote.
The visit to Primrose Hill was a short trip made longer by a meander through a secondhand bookstore. Tilda repeated her process outside the second location while Daniel leafed through a 1950 edition of the
Parade’s End
tetralogy.
“When’s dinner?” he said absently.
“Drinks probably around eight, perhaps eight thirty. We won’t sit down to eat until after nine.”
“Let’s eat something,” Daniel said.
Another seat at another cafe directly across the street from the shop with a For Let sign in the window. Daniel produced two more lattes and a platter of bread, cheese, olives, and fruit, with a gigantic shortbread for dessert.
“I’m not sure,” Tilda said. She knew London well enough to get around without consulting a laminated map, but beyond that, she was lost. “It doesn’t feel like the West Village.”
Daniel swallowed his mouthful of roll. “You can’t expect it to feel like New York.”
“Yes, but it needs to be close enough to replicate the success I’ve had there.” She closed her eyes and let the energy surge up from her feet, pooling in her joints, knees and hips and elbows and shoulders, her spine and her jaw. “It’s close. I’m just not sure.” She found her tablet and opened the documents from the real estate agent and investor.
Daniel stifled a yawn. “I need a nap or I’m going to fall asleep in the soup course when it’s served at ten.”
“I think it’s a cold soup, if that helps,” she said, still focused on the spreadsheet. “Can you find your way back?”
“I can,” he said, amused, “but you’re coming with me. You need a nap, too. I saw you sitting in the inn’s window seat when I woke up at two. And at four. You’re going to crash.”
“I wanted to watch the moon on the ocean,” she said absently. “And I do not crash. As much traveling as I’ve done, I hardly feel jet lag.”
“It takes the right combination of jet lag, sleeplessness, and stress, then you crash like an ocean liner sinking,” he said. “Slowly, magnificently graceful as you slip beneath the waves, but it takes a crane to get you up again. Thirty minutes. Just a short nap.”
“I just need to read through these—” So much was riding on this expansion. Everything she’d wanted the night she met Daniel. Quality Group joining forces with West Village Stationery would put her on the global map, taking her from a moderately successful shop owner into the rarefied air of an international brand. No one could take that away from her.