Todos os capítulos de CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER: Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

It happened that evening.Not planned, not arranged. We were in the sitting room after dinner, the three of us, and the conversation had wound down into the comfortable quiet of people who have said the important things and are resting in the after of it. Levi was beside me on the sofa and Nate was in the chair across from us and the fire was low and the estate was quiet and at some point I stopped pretending I did not know exactly what I wanted.I stood up.Both of them looked at me."Come," I said.Not to one of them. To both of them. And the word landed in the room the way words land when they have been a long time coming and everyone present knows it.Nate stood first. Then Levi.I took Nate's hand and then I took Levi's and I walked them both down the corridor toward the bedroom, and the only sound was our footsteps and the fire settling behind us, and when I pushed the bedroom door open and turned around they were both there, both watching me, and for the first time in months I

She arrived on a Thursday morning without calling ahead.That was the first thing — no warning, no arrangement, just a car on the gravel at ten in the morning and Vivienne Blackthorne stepping out of it in a cream coat and her particular expression of someone who has decided something and has come to deliver it in person because she does not trust anything important to a phone call.I was in the nursery when I heard the car.I had been standing in the middle of the room looking at the mobile, which was level now, both sides even, turning slowly in the draft from the window. I had been standing there for about ten minutes doing nothing except looking at it and thinking about the night before and the morning that had followed it, which had been the most ordinary morning I could remember Nate making coffee with Levi reading the paper at the kitchen table and both of them arguing about something inconsequential while I ate breakfast and felt, for the first time in longer than I could loca

The second morning I woke up before either of them.Nate was on his back with his arm over his eyes the way he slept when he had fully let go of the day, which I had only seen a handful of times and always found quietly remarkable. Levi was on my other side facing the wall, one hand still loosely holding the edge of the sheet, and the room was full of the early light that comes off water, blue and moving and entirely unlike the light at the estate.I lay between them for a moment and looked at the ceiling.Then I got up carefully, found the light robe on the chair by the door, and went out to the terrace.The beach at this hour was empty and the water was low. Tide out, the sand extending further than it had the evening before, still dark at the waterline and pale and dry further up. The sky was doing the thing it does just before the sun properly arrives, that wide uncertain light that is not quite dawn and not quite morning, that belongs only to itself.I sat on the terrace steps an

The last evening started slowly. Dinner on the terrace again, the four of us down to three plates now that the vacation had found its rhythm, and the conversation was easy in the way it had become over the past days, moving between things without effort, landing nowhere in particular and not needing to. The sun went down while we were still eating. Nobody rushed it. When the plates were cleared Levi poured the last of the wine for himself and Nate and set a glass of sparkling water in front of me without being asked, and I looked at it and looked at him and he raised his glass very slightly in acknowledgment of the unfairness of the situation. “Four more days,” I said. “Four more days,” Nate said. “And then back to all the rooms,” I said. Neither of them said anything to that. They did not need to. The rooms were what they were and we were all going back to them and the fact of this island and these ten days would go with us in the way that good things go with you, not as som

Levi knocked on the study door at eight in the morning.I was on the top step of the stairs when he did it, coming down slowly, and I stopped. I heard Nate say come in. I watched Levi go through and pull the door behind him and the click of it settling into the frame was very loud in the empty corridor.I sat down on the step.The walls were thick. I could not make out the words, just the shape of voices, the way you hear weather from inside a house. Levi's voice going for a long time without interruption. Then a silence that had weight in it. Then Nate's voice, shorter, and I could not tell from here what was in it except that it was not the voice he used when things were fine.Then nothing.A long nothing.I sat with my hand on the banister and the morning light on the landing and waited.The door opened.Nate came out and walked past me without seeing me. His footsteps down the corridor were even and controlled and that was the whole of what I got from him before he turned the corn