All Chapters of Unbeknownst: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Julien came back downstairs holding a single slipper like it was evidence in a trial."Found it," he said. "Under the radiator. I have decided not to ask how it got there.""Wise.""He is already asleep again. He fell asleep mid-complaint. I do not think he even noticed I solved the case.""Tragic," I said. "All that detective work for nothing."He set the slipper on the side table, which struck me as an odd place for it, and did not immediately sit back down. He stood near the sofa instead, one hand resting on the back of it, looking at me with an expression that hadn't fully recovered from the one he'd left the room with. I was still under the blanket. The lamp was still off. The only light in the room came from the hallway, low and gold, and from the pale reflected glow of the snow outside the window."You're staring," I said."I am aware.""Is there a reason?""I am trying to decide something.""That sounds ominous.""It is not ominous." He came around the sofa and sat down, close

England was exactly where I'd left it, which was somehow the most disorienting part.The same grey light, thin and reluctant, arriving late and leaving early. The same kettle that took four minutes longer than it should. The same commute, the same desk, the same email signature I'd typed so many times my fingers no longer needed my attention to do it. I kept waiting for some visible sign that I'd changed, a different colour to the light, a different weight to my own footsteps, and found instead that the world simply resumed around me, indifferent to the fact that I had spent five days becoming someone slightly different in a country I'd only meant to visit.My aunt found the sign anyway, three days after I landed, cornering me at a family lunch with the particular gleam of a woman who has heard a rumour and intends to have it confirmed."You went to France," she said, setting down her fork with the deliberate care of someone opening negotiations, "and came back

England was exactly where I'd left it, which was somehow the most disorienting part.The same grey light, thin and reluctant, arriving late and leaving early. The same kettle that took four minutes longer than it should. The same commute, the same desk, the same email signature I'd typed so many times my fingers no longer needed my attention to do it. I kept waiting for some visible sign that I'd changed, a different colour to the light, a different weight to my own footsteps, and found instead that the world simply resumed around me, indifferent to the fact that I had spent five days becoming someone slightly different in a country I'd only meant to visit.My aunt found the sign anyway, three days after I landed, cornering me at a family lunch with the particular gleam of a woman who has heard a rumour and intends to have it confirmed."You went to France," she said, setting down her fork with the deliberat

A year, it turns out, is not as long as it sounds when you're the one inside it.I flew back to France for the holidays again, almost exactly a year after the storm that had first stranded me there, and this time there was no cancelled hotel waiting to surprise me, no suitcase with a squealing wheel, no stranger's spare room I had to be talked into accepting. There was a key, cut for me that spring, sitting heavy and ordinary in my coat pocket, and a boy at the door who had grown a full inch and lost the last of his baby teeth and who still, gratifyingly, threw himself at me the moment I stepped through it."You're taller," I told him."You're the same," he informed me, with the air of a scientist confirming a hypothesis, and dragged me inside by the hand before I'd even set my bag down.

Lucas didn't know yet.Julien had decided that much within the first day, quietly and without much discussion, and I hadn't argued with him. There was no obvious right way to tell a seven-year-old that the mother he'd grieved, briefly and without much memory of her to grieve with, had never actually gone anywhere permanent at all. So the house carried on as though nothing had shifted beneath it, breakfast and school and an ongoing debate about whether a dog could be reasonably requested for a birthday still four months away, while upstairs and down, two adults moved through the days like they were carrying something breakable they couldn't set down.I passed the photograph in the hallway more than usual that week. I don't think I meant to. It seemed to catch my eye now in a way it never quite had before, the frame slightly crooked on its hook, Lucas laughing on a pair of shoulders that ended abruptly at the edge of the picture, the tear along the border rougher than a clean crop shoul