Chapter 182

Liam

Kaia was waiting up when I got home.

It was past midnight. The lamp was on in the kitchen, and she was sitting at the table in my old gray sweater with her knees pulled up on the chair and a cup of tea gone cold in front of her, and when she heard the door, she didn’t get up. She looked at me across the kitchen, and I saw that she already knew. Somebody had told her. The whole town knew. They had been standing in the lane in the cold, watching the trucks come in, looking into every window for a face that wasn’t there.

I stood in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder.

“Liam,” she said.

I put the bag down. I didn’t take my coat off. I came across the kitchen and she stood up, and I put my arms round her and my face in her hair and held on, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all.

She smelled of the house. Of soap and woodsmoke and my sweater. Of home.

Abby had smelled of home too, on the steps at Greyhollow,