《EYES OPEN》全部章節：第 111 章 - 第 120 章

Sophie's flat is on the second floor of a building in East London that is warm and slightly chaotic in the specific way of a home that belongs to a single mother of a three year old... shoes by the door and drawings on the fridge and a general cheerful disorder that feels more alive than tidy.Sophie opens the door and looks at me with the specific expression of a woman who has thought about this moment and is not entirely sure how to be in it."Camille," she says."Sophie," I reply. "Thank you for this."She steps back to let me in and I step into the hallway and from somewhere deeper in the flat a sound starts, small feet on a hard floor, moving fast, and then Evan appears in the hallway doorway.He is bigger than his photos.Bigger and more present and more entirely himself, dark hair sticking up slightly, Derek's jaw, eyes that are completely his own, and he stops when he sees me and stares with the total unself-conscious assessment of a small person who has not yet learned to pret

Two days after the pavement, Derek sends flowers.Not to the apartment.To the Signal Strategy office.Which means he found the address, which means he either looked it up himself or heard it from someone, and either way he now knows where I work and has chosen to send something there specifically rather than to the home address he has already used once.Escalation dressed as romance.The flowers are extraordinary.Not a standard arrangement. Something Bea would approve of, garden roses in deep cream, trailing greenery, the specific weight and texture of something chosen by someone who paid attention to what I said I wanted.Which is worse somehow than if they were generic.Saoirse signs for them.She brings them to my desk with the expression of someone who has drawn a conclusion and is waiting to see if I am going to confirm it."From Derek Vann," she says. Reading the card before I can stop her, not deliberately, it is just sitting there open. "I thought these might make your offic

He does not send anything for a week.Which is its own kind of move.After the pavement and the flowers and the phone call to Rhys, the silence arrives and sits in the room like something deliberate, because with Derek everything is deliberate now, and I notice it the way you notice when a sound you have gotten used to stops.Rhys notices me noticing.He does not say anything about it.Which is also deliberate.We are both being very careful with each other in the specific way of two people who love each other completely and are navigating something that does not have a rulebook and are trying not to make it worse by pretending it is simpler than it is.Wednesday evening, I come home to find Rhys on the floor of the living room with Arlo and what appears to be an architectural drawing spread across the coffee table and the specific absorbed focus of a man who has been doing something physical with his hands because his head needed somewhere to go.I drop my bag.Sit on the floor besid

The morning is blue and cold and bright.The specific October Saturday that London produces occasionally as if apologising for all the grey, sharp light and clean air and the kind of sky that makes everything look considered.I stand in the bedroom in my underwear looking at what to wear and Rhys appears in the doorway with coffee and looks at me with warm eyes and says nothing about the three outfits already on the bed."The green," he says."You did not even look properly," I protest."The green," he says again, handing me the coffee.I look at the green.He is right.He is annoyingly, consistently right about what I should wear and I have never fully explained how much I find this both convenient and irritating.We drive.Arlo in the back, tail going, absolutely certain that whatever is happening today is excellent.Sophie's address is forty minutes in Saturday traffic and Rhys drives and I have my feet on the dashboard and the October light does something extraordinary with the ci

Sunday morning we drive to the building with thermoses and the good bread from Henderson's and Arlo who considers any car journey a personal adventure regardless of destination.The building is quiet on a Sunday.No craftsmen, no site manager Marcus, no construction sounds. Just the building being itself in the October morning light, the newly unblocked windows doing what they do and the stone holding the silence the way Felix said it held sound.Rhys unlocks the main door.We go in.The hall is different on a Sunday morning.Everything the same, the cornicing, the restored plasterwork, the musicians gallery with its ironwork that the third generation craftsman's hands rebuilt from moulds, and yet something about the Sunday quiet makes it fuller somehow, more itself, like the building breathes differently when nobody is working on it.I stand in the centre of the hall.Look up.Rhys stands beside me.Arlo explores the perimeter with professional thoroughness."Here." "Here," Rhys agr