The morning after Gabriel Hart broke his family in front of half the British entertainment press, he woke at 6:17 to discover that someone had pushed a photograph of Miles under his hotel-room door.
For several seconds, Gabriel did not know where he was.
The curtains were open two inches. London showed through the gap in grey vertical slices: rain, glass, the top half of a bus crawling along the street below. His head felt packed with hot sand. He was still wearing yesterday’s trousers. His shirt lay on the carpet beside the bed, one cuff turned inside out, and there was a crease across his cheek from sleeping against the hotel pillow like a man who had been dropped there rather than put himself to bed.
Then he saw the photograph.
Miles was nine in it, grinning around two missing teeth, holding a football above his head. Gabriel knew the picture. He had taken it six months earlier after Miles scored twice in a school match and then spent the entire drive home explaining, in forensic detail, why the second goal had been better than the first.
On the back, in Hannah Price’s handwriting, were four words.
DON’T FORGET HIS PRESENT.
Gabriel sat on the edge of the bed.
For the first time since seventeen, he wished someone else had forgotten for him.
The thought was ugly enough to wake him properly.
He picked up the photograph.
Miles’s birthday was in four days.
Ten.
Double digits, as Miles had been announcing since approximately February.
Gabriel had spent six weeks finding the gift.
Not sending Hannah to find it. Not asking an assistant. Him.
Miles had become obsessed with old Republic of Ireland football matches after Gabriel showed him grainy footage from Italia ’90. Somewhere along the way, Packie Bonner saving Daniel Timofte’s penalty had become sacred family history, despite Miles having been born almost two decades later and in England.
The boy had wanted an original 1990 Ireland shirt.
Not a replica.
Not one made last year and advertised as retro.
“One that was actually alive then,” Miles had explained.
Gabriel had told him shirts were not alive.
Miles had informed him this was why actors should stay out of football.
After weeks of telephone calls, a private collector had agreed to sell Gabriel a match-era goalkeeper jersey with impeccable provenance. It had been sent to a specialist framing shop near Covent Garden, where Gabriel was supposed to collect it yesterday afternoon.
Then yesterday became yesterday.
A premiere.
Nicole Fraser.
Four months compressed into a headline.
Lucy’s face.
Miles saying, You said cheaters were losers.
Clara’s hand beginning to reach for his when Jude kicked and then remembering that it no longer belonged there.
Gabriel pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes.
His phone lay face-down on the bedside table.
He had turned it off at 2:11 in the morning after the thirty-seventh call.
The first twelve had been management.
The next nine had been the studio.
Three were from his solicitor.
Six from people he hadn’t spoken to in years who had apparently chosen scandal as an excellent opportunity to reconnect.
Two from Nicole.
One from his mother.
And four from Lucy.
The four from Lucy had arrived before he left the premiere.
She had called him while sitting in the car with Clara and her brothers.
He hadn’t answered because Hannah was talking to him about the statement.
He had seen his daughter’s name on the screen.
He had looked at it.
And then Hannah had said, “If we don’t get ahead of this in the next ten minutes, they’ll write the chronology for us.”
So he had silenced Lucy.
Later, when he called back, she did not answer.
Gabriel had spent the night understanding that the worst habits were rarely new. Catastrophe simply turned the lights on.
There was a knock.
He looked toward the door.
“Room service.”
“I didn’t order anything.”
“Mrs. Price did.”
Of course she did.
Gabriel opened the door wearing trousers and no shirt, because dignity had ceased to be an available resource.
The young waiter froze.
Gabriel recognised the exact second the man realised who he was and, more importantly, why he was in a hotel instead of his own house.
To his credit, he recovered quickly.
“Breakfast, sir.”
“If you say congratulations, I’ll throw myself out the window.”
The waiter stared.
Gabriel looked at the trolley.
“Sorry.”
“No problem, sir.”
“That was a joke.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bad one.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
Gabriel looked at him.
The waiter shrugged.
“I work breakfast.”
A laugh escaped Gabriel before he could stop it.
The boy smiled cautiously.
“Coffee’s strong.”
“You may have saved my life.”
“Wouldn’t mention that near the window.”
Gabriel almost laughed again.
He tipped him obscenely because rich men often confused gratitude with money and because today Gabriel had neither the energy nor moral confidence to examine that habit properly.
The waiter wheeled the trolley inside.
At the door he hesitated.
“For what it’s worth, sir.”
Gabriel braced himself.
The boy nodded toward the photograph in Gabriel’s hand.
“My dad messed up once. Really badly. Still my dad.”
Then he left.
Gabriel stood in the middle of the hotel room holding a photograph of his son.
“Brilliant,” he muttered. “Now the porridge is giving me life advice.”
He ate none of it.
At seven, he turned his phone on.
The world arrived immediately.
Eight hundred and eleven messages.
More notifications than he could count.
His name trending in six countries.
Two newspaper apps that apparently considered his adultery worthy of breaking-news alerts.
He deleted both.
Then he opened his messages.
Clara’s name sat at the top.
One message.
Sent 5:42 a.m.
ELVA WOKE ASKING FOR YOU. I TOLD HER YOU HAD TO WORK LATE. I WILL NOT HAVE HER LEARN ABOUT THIS FROM A SCREEN OR SOMEONE AT NURSERY. DO NOT SPEAK PUBLICLY ABOUT THE CHILDREN. MILES STILL WANTS YOU AT HIS MATCH SATURDAY. LUCY DOESN’T WANT TO TALK. GIVE HER TIME. WE WILL DISCUSS EVERYTHING ELSE WHEN I CAN DO SO WITHOUT THE CHILDREN HEARING US.
No x.
Gabriel stared at that absence longer than he should have.
Twenty-five years of messages and suddenly one missing letter could measure a continent.
He typed:
How is Jude?
Deleted it.
Typed:
How are you?
Deleted that too.
He finally wrote:
I understand. I won’t say anything about them. I’ll be at Miles’s match. I’m sorry Elva woke upset. I’m sorry for all of it. Is Jude okay?
The message delivered.
No reply.
Gabriel set the phone down.
At eight thirty Hannah arrived with sunglasses, two phones, three coffees and no patience.
“You’re dressed.”
“I’m offended by your surprise.”
“I was expecting Regency poet dying of consumption.”
Gabriel looked down at jeans and a black jumper.
“This is my crisis knitwear.”
“It’s cashmere.”
“Luxury crisis knitwear.”
Hannah put a coffee in front of him.
“Statement is holding.”
“There shouldn’t be a statement.”
“There has to be.”
“I cheated on my wife. I don’t need a communications strategy. I need a priest and possibly a blunt object.”
“You need not to make it worse.”
“I already achieved that at an elite level.”
Hannah sat.
For a minute she stopped being his publicist.
“Have you slept?”
“Technically.”
“Clara?”
“Texted.”
“Children?”
“Miles still wants me at the match.”
Hannah’s face softened.
“Of course he does.”
“Lucy won’t speak to me.”
“Of course she won’t.”
He looked at her.
“You’re excellent at this.”
“I charge accordingly.”
He picked up Miles’s photograph.
“The shirt.”
“I know. That’s why I shoved him under your door.”
“Bit sinister.”
“You ignored six reminders yesterday.”
“I was preoccupied destroying civilisation.”
“The framing shop closes at five.”
Gabriel checked the time.
“I’ll go now.”
Hannah laughed.
“No.”
“What?”
“There are photographers outside.”
“There are always photographers outside.”
“Today they would climb inside your ribcage if they thought there was a quote in there.”
“Miles turns ten once.”
“The shirt can be couriered.”
Gabriel stared at her.
Hannah realised before he spoke.
“Right.”
“I promised him I’d pick it up.”
“Gabriel, he will not know how the item entered your possession.”
“I will.”
The room went quiet.
Hannah leaned back.
“Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m about to smuggle an internationally recognisable idiot through a service entrance.”
“You’ve always wanted adventure.”
“I wanted dental coverage.”
Forty minutes later, Gabriel emerged from the back of the hotel in a cap, dark glasses and a coat belonging to Hannah’s husband.
“I look ridiculous.”
“You look divorced. Keep moving.”
“We’re not divorced.”
Hannah’s face changed.
Gabriel looked away.
“Sorry.”
She touched his arm.
“Go get your son’s present.”
He walked.
For the first time in years, Gabriel walked through central London without a driver waiting at the kerb.
Rain misted the pavement. Delivery vans blocked half the street. A cyclist swore at a taxi. Someone carrying six baguettes nearly knocked him into a bin.
Nobody cared that he was Gabriel Hart.
It was strangely medicinal.
He took side streets because Hannah had told him to. He kept his head down. He passed cafés opening for the day, a florist dragging buckets of roses onto the pavement, a laundrette and a tiny bookshop with handwritten recommendations taped to the glass.
The city smelled wet and impatient.
His phone vibrated.
He hoped it was Clara.
It was his mother.
MARGARET HART.
Gabriel considered not answering.
Then remembered Lucy.
He answered.
“Mam.”
“You absolute gobshite.”
Gabriel stopped beneath an awning.
“Morning to you too.”
“Don’t you morning me.”
Margaret had lived in Dublin for seventy-one years and believed celebrity was merely a condition her son suffered from abroad.
“Have you spoken to Clara?”
“Not properly.”
“Have you apologised?”
“Yes.”
“Properly?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“Good. At least you’ve developed one useful symptom.”
He closed his eyes.
“Mam.”
“Your father would rise from the grave to kick you if he weren’t far too comfortable where I put him.”
Despite himself, Gabriel smiled.
Daniel Hart had been dead eleven years.
Margaret still spoke of his grave as though it were a rented flat whose terms she supervised.
“I know.”
“No, pet. You know you’re in trouble. Different thing.”
The tenderness in pet nearly undid him.
He stared at the rain.
“The kids hate me.”
“They do not.”
“Lucy might.”
“Lucy is thirteen. She has hated you four times this month.”
“Not like this.”
Margaret went quiet.
“No. Not like this.”
Gabriel swallowed.
“Miles still wants me at his match.”
“Of course he does. You’re his dad.”
“Clara told him I’d be there.”
“Of course she did. She’s a better woman than you deserve at present.”
“At present?”
“Don’t get hopeful. I said what I said.”
A laugh cracked out of him.
Margaret sighed.
“Where are you?”
“Walking.”
“Why?”
“Picking up Miles’s birthday present.”
“Good.”
“Hannah wanted it couriered.”
“Hannah is sensible. Ignore her occasionally. Builds character.”
“You like Hannah.”
“I do. That’s why I want her to experience adversity.”
Gabriel smiled again.
Then Margaret said, softly, “Do you remember the week Clara got you into the audition?”
His steps slowed.
“She didn’t get me in.”
“No. She got you through the door.”
The old sentence.
His mother had remembered it too.
“Mam—“
“You were seventeen and full of talent and terror. She filled out half your application because you kept putting it off. She borrowed my good iron because your shirt looked like you’d slept in a ditch. She stood outside in the rain while you tried to run away.”
Gabriel leaned against a brick wall.
“I remember.”
“Do you?”
He closed his eyes.
There was no accusation in her voice.
Worse.
A question.
“I have to go.”
“Gabriel.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. You’re still a gobshite.”
“Understood.”
“And buy the boy a card. You always forget the card.”
She hung up.
Gabriel stood beneath a grey London sky, suddenly seventeen and forty-two at once.
He resumed walking.
The framing shop should have been three streets away.
It was not.
Gabriel checked the map twice.
His phone insisted he was standing almost on top of it, but the address in front of him belonged to a closed tailor with brown paper over the windows.
He walked around the corner.
No framing shop.
He tried another lane.
Nothing.
“Brilliant.”
The rain strengthened.
He ducked beneath the nearest awning.
A brass bell chimed above him.
Gabriel looked up.
He had stepped into a shop.
He could not remember opening a door.
For a moment he simply stood there.
The place was narrow and much deeper than the building had any architectural right to be.
Dark wooden shelves climbed toward a ceiling lost in shadow. Lamps glowed under green shades. Glass cabinets held pocket watches, fountain pens, rings, medals, small framed photographs, keys without locks and locks without obvious keys.
There were books stacked sideways beneath clocks that disagreed violently about the time.
A violin rested in a chair.
An umbrella stand contained three walking sticks and what appeared to be a sword.
The air smelled of dust, cedar and oranges.
Behind the counter sat an old man reading a racing paper.
He had white hair, a dark waistcoat and spectacles balanced so low on his nose that they seemed less corrective than judgmental.
Without looking up, he said, “If you’re here to rob me, take the clocks. None of them behave.”
Gabriel said nothing.
“I’m not here to rob you.”
“Pity. Could use the shelf space.”
The old man turned a page.
Gabriel looked back toward the door.
Rain streamed down the glass.
Painted backward across it were words he had not noticed outside.
VALE & BELL
LOST THINGS, OLD THINGS, THINGS WITH BAD TIMING
Gabriel looked at the man.
“Things with bad timing?”
“Our strongest department.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Usually.”
Gabriel took off his sunglasses.
The old man glanced up.
His gaze rested on Gabriel’s face without recognition.
Or with perfect recognition and no interest.
Both possibilities were refreshing.
“I’m looking for a framing shop.”
“Then you’re doing very badly.”
“Apparently.”
“Name?”
“Morrison & Pike.”
The old man pointed with the racing paper.
“Moved.”
“My phone says—“
“Phones say all sorts of things. Mine said my sister was calling last Tuesday. She’s been dead since 1998. Turned out to be British Gas.”
Gabriel stared.
The old man’s mouth twitched.
“Two streets over. Blue door.”
“Thank you.”
Gabriel turned to leave.
Then he saw the locket.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No music.
No flickering lights.
No invisible hand shoved him toward it.
It simply lay in a shallow velvet tray inside the nearest glass cabinet.
Oval.
Silver.
Small enough to disappear inside a woman’s palm.
Blue enamel forget-me-nots circled the edge, worn almost white in two places.
His next breath stalled.
“No.”
The old man lowered the paper.
Gabriel moved closer.
There was a tiny dent near the hinge.
He knew the dent.
He had caused it.
Dublin. They were nineteen. He had been trying to help Clara fasten the chain while they hurried for a bus. The locket slipped, struck the corner of a radiator and left Clara furious for nearly four minutes.
Gabriel had offered to replace it.
She had looked at him as if he’d suggested replacing her grandmother.
He touched the glass.
“Where did you get that?”
The old man looked toward the tray.
“Which?”
“The silver locket.”
“Ah.”
The man’s expression changed so slightly Gabriel might have imagined it.
“That one.”
“Where did you get it?”
“People bring things. People leave things. Occasionally things arrive with more initiative than their owners.”
“I’m serious.”
“Terrible condition.”
Gabriel looked at him.
The old man folded the paper.
“You famous people always look mildly offended when the universe refuses to brief you.”
So he did know him.
“You know who I am.”
“My television works. Intermittently.”
Gabriel glanced at the locket again.
“That belonged to my wife.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know?”
“It disappeared twenty years ago.”
The old man stood.
He was taller than Gabriel expected and walked with a slight limp.
“Twenty?”
“About that.”
“People are very casual with decades.”
“I’m not.”
The old man gave him a look.
It was the first cruel thing anyone had done to Gabriel that day without saying a word.
He unlocked the cabinet.
“Name’s Arthur Bell.”
“Gabriel.”
“Yes, I gathered.”
“Arthur Bell. Vale and Bell?”
“Vale’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was eighty-nine and cheated at cards. Death has improved his manners enormously.”
Arthur lifted the locket carefully.
Gabriel held out his hand.
Arthur did not give it to him.
“How do you know it’s hers?”
Gabriel stared at the tiny dent.
“I dropped it when we were nineteen.”
“Romantic.”
“She wore it every day.”
“Less romantic.”
“Her grandmother gave it to her.”
Arthur’s expression sharpened.
“And when did she lose it?”
Gabriel searched memory.
Twenty years ago.
Clara at twenty-two, halfway through medical school.
Their tiny Dublin flat.
Boxes.
An argument about money.
A frantic morning.
Clara kneeling on the floor pulling cushions off the sofa.
Gabriel emptying drawers.
They had searched for days.
He had gone back to the café where they’d eaten.
Called the university.
Checked buses.
Clara had cried exactly once, quietly, when she thought he was asleep.
He had promised he would find it.
Then life moved.
Exams.
Auditions.
Rent.
London.
The promise became one of those things loving people failed to keep without ever deciding to break it.
“She was twenty-two.”
Arthur nodded.
“Open it.”
Gabriel looked at him.
“What?”
“If it’s your wife’s, you’ll know what’s inside.”
Gabriel took the locket.
The metal was warm.
Not room-temperature warm.
Skin warm.
He almost dropped it.
Arthur watched.
“Careful. You have history with that.”
Gabriel ignored him.
His thumbnail found the old catch.
It opened.
Inside was a photograph no larger than a postage stamp.
Two teenagers crushed into a photo-booth frame.
Clara at seventeen, laughing so hard her eyes were almost closed.
Gabriel beside her with too much hair and an expression of complete devotion he had once been too young to hide.
He knew the photograph.
There had been four pictures in the strip.
In the first, they’d tried to look serious.
In the second, Clara crossed her eyes.
In the third, Gabriel kissed her cheek.
In the fourth, this one, they were both laughing because Clara had elbowed him in the ribs.
She had cut it out and put it in the locket at eighteen.
On the opposite side was a tiny photograph of her grandmother, Nora Byrne, as a young woman.
Gabriel sat down without deciding to.
“Jesus Christ.”
Arthur leaned against the counter.
“Not currently. Arthur.”
Gabriel looked up.
“This is hers.”
“So you’ve said.”
“No, you don’t understand.”
“People tell me that often. Usually immediately before explaining something I’ve understood for years.”
Gabriel stood again.
“Where did you get it?”
Arthur’s humour disappeared.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not possible.”
“You’d be surprised how many possible things people reject because they’re inconvenient.”
“Someone had to sell it to you.”
“No record.”
“Then check.”
“I did.”
Gabriel took that in.
“When?”
Arthur looked at the locket.
“This morning.”
A chill moved through Gabriel.
“Why?”
“Because it wasn’t there yesterday.”
Silence.
Rain whispered against the window.
One of the clocks ticked loudly enough to become irritating.
Gabriel almost laughed.
“Okay.”
Arthur nodded.
“Excellent response. Very grounded.”
“You’re telling me a twenty-year-lost locket appeared in your cabinet this morning.”
“I’m telling you I did inventory last night and didn’t see it. At my age that is not legally the same thing.”
“How much?”
Arthur looked at him.
“For the locket.”
“It’s not for sale.”
“It’s my wife’s.”
“Then I imagine she already owns it.”
“Good. I’ll take it.”
“Not so fast.”
Gabriel’s patience snapped.
“Mr. Bell, I’ve had an unusually terrible twenty-four hours.”
“Yes. The papers were very thorough.”
“I need to go.”
“Then go.”
“With the locket.”
Arthur considered him.
“Why?”
Gabriel almost laughed.
“Because it belongs to Clara.”
“That’s an answer to a different question.”
“What question?”
“Why do you need it?”
Gabriel stared at the old man.
He thought of Clara’s face at the premiere.
Twenty-two-year-old Clara searching beneath furniture.
Seventeen-year-old Clara standing in Dublin rain.
The message without an x.
“Because I promised I’d find it.”
Arthur was quiet.
Then he nodded once.
“Ah.”
“Ah what?”
“Nothing.”
“I hate mysterious old men.”
“We’re devastated.”
Arthur held out his hand.
“Twenty pounds.”
Gabriel blinked.
“What?”
“For the chain. The locket is hers. Chain is mine.”
Gabriel took out his wallet.
Arthur recoiled.
“Cash.”
“I don’t have cash.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“I’ll pay by card.”
“Machine’s broken.”
“Do you run this shop as a punishment?”
“Mostly for amusement.”
Gabriel found a fifty-pound note folded behind an old receipt.
Arthur took it.
“Change?”
“You seem rich.”
“You’re robbing me.”
“Take the clocks on your way out.”
Gabriel closed his hand around the locket.
Arthur’s hand covered his for a moment.
The old man’s eyes changed.
Grey.
Clear.
Suddenly not funny at all.
“Mr. Hart.”
Gabriel waited.
“Some things disappear because they’re lost.”
Arthur looked down at Gabriel’s fist.
“Some disappear because they’re not needed yet.”
Gabriel pulled his hand away.
“That’s exactly the sort of thing a mysterious old man says before someone gets murdered.”
Arthur smiled.
“Then don’t walk down any dark alleys.”
“Very reassuring.”
“And Mr. Hart?”
Gabriel turned at the door.
Arthur had picked up his racing paper again.
“If you ever get the chance to be seventeen twice, try not to be an arse both times.”
Gabriel stared at him.
Arthur looked over the top of his glasses.
“Joke.”
Gabriel did not laugh.
Two streets later, Morrison & Pike had a blue door.
Exactly as Arthur promised.
The framed Ireland jersey was magnificent.
Gabriel stood looking at it far too long.
The green had faded slightly with age. The framing was simple. At the bottom, on a small brass plaque, were the words:
FOR MILES HART — TEN YEARS OF MAKING EXTRA TIME WORTH IT.
Gabriel had written the inscription months earlier.
He nearly asked them to remove it.
Instead he carried the package himself.
By noon he was back at the hotel.
There were twelve photographers outside the main entrance.
He went through the kitchen.
The same breakfast waiter saw him carrying the enormous framed shirt.
“Window still closed?”
Gabriel looked at him.
“For now.”
“Good. That’s a nice shirt.”
“My son’s.”
“Birthday?”
“Ten.”
The waiter nodded solemnly.
“Serious age.”
“Apparently.”
“Mine turned ten last year. Told me he didn’t need me to walk him to school anymore. I cried into a croissant.”
Gabriel smiled.
“Thanks for the warning.”
Back upstairs, he placed Miles’s present against the wall.
Then took Clara’s locket from his pocket.
He had intended to call her immediately.
I found it.
Three words.
Twenty years late.
He imagined Clara asking where.
He imagined trying to explain Vale & Bell.
He searched the shop online.
Nothing.
No website.
No map listing.
No business registry result that looked right.
He searched the address.
The building contained a stationery wholesaler and three flats.
No antique shop.
Gabriel put the phone down.
“Of course.”
He poured whiskey at 12:24 in the afternoon.
Not his proudest decision.
He sat in the armchair by the window with the locket in one hand and the glass in the other.
London moved below him.
His marriage existed somewhere across the city without him.
Elva would be at nursery.
Miles at school.
Lucy pretending not to check her phone.
Clara perhaps at home because Hannah had quietly told him the hospital had arranged cover after the story broke.
Seven months pregnant, publicly humiliated and still organising who would collect which child.
Gabriel drank.
He opened the locket again.
Teenage Clara laughed up at him.
Seventeen.
He remembered that girl better than he deserved to.
Everyone assumed fame blurred the beginning.
It hadn’t.
The beginning was the clearest part.
Dublin rain.
Cheap chips wrapped in paper.
Clara’s school uniform beneath a coat too big for her.
Her sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor reading Lady Macbeth badly on purpose because he took Shakespeare too seriously.
His mother shouting that dinner was ready.
His father coming home smelling of sawdust and cold air.
Clara falling asleep over chemistry notes while Gabriel learned speeches beside her.
They were not lovers immediately.
That would have been easier to explain.
They became necessary first.
By eighteen, Gabriel could tell what Clara was thinking from the way she tied her hair.
By nineteen, she knew when he was lying about money.
By twenty, there was no version of the future Gabriel imagined without automatically putting Clara somewhere inside it.
Then he got what he wanted.
A play.
A television part.
London.
A film.
Another.
A nomination.
An award.
Money.
Drivers.
Suites.
People who laughed before he finished jokes.
People who learned his coffee order because remembering it was their job.
People who called ordinary preferences requirements.
He took another drink.
“When did I become such a prick?”
The seventeen-year-old in the photograph offered no assistance.
Gabriel’s phone lit up.
A message from Clara.
JUDE IS FINE. I AM FINE PHYSICALLY. PLEASE DON’T KEEP ASKING ME TO REASSURE YOU TODAY.
He shut his eyes.
Fair.
A second message arrived.
MILES ASKED IF YOU REMEMBERED HIS PRESENT.
Gabriel looked at the framed jersey.
He took a photograph and sent it.
I remembered.
Three dots appeared.
Vanished.
Appeared again.
Then:
HE’LL BE HAPPY.
Gabriel stared at the screen.
He typed:
I found something of yours too.
He stopped.
Deleted it.
Not today.
He didn’t get to use Clara’s lost locket as a romantic lever while the photographs of Nicole were still fresh enough to headline lunchtime television.
That would turn a miracle into manipulation.
For once, Gabriel recognised the difference before Clara had to teach it to him.
He put the phone away.
The second whiskey became a third.
At some point he moved to the bed.
He did not remember deciding to.
He lay on top of the duvet still wearing his shoes, the locket resting against his chest.
Rain tapped the window.
The television played with the sound off.
His own face appeared beneath a red BREAKING banner.
Gabriel reached for the remote and turned it off.
Silence.
He closed his eyes.
Clara at seventeen.
Clara at twenty-two searching for the locket.
Clara at the premiere refusing his hand.
Arthur Bell’s voice drifted through his mind.
If you ever get the chance to be seventeen twice, try not to be an arse both times.
Gabriel laughed once into the pillow.
“Very funny.”
The locket clicked open beneath his hand.
He opened his eyes.
He hadn’t touched the clasp.
The tiny photograph faced him.
Teenage Gabriel and Clara.
Laughing.
Then the hotel clock changed.
12:58.
12:57.
Gabriel stared.
12:56.
He sat up.
“No.”
The digits continued backward.
12:55.
12:54.
The bedside lamp flickered.
Gabriel grabbed his phone.
The screen lit.
For one second it showed the current date.
Then numbers began rolling backward too quickly to read.
Years.
Not minutes.
Photos vanished from the lock screen.
Notifications disappeared.
His children’s faces flickered through different ages in the photo widget.
Elva vanished first.
For a beat, Gabriel forgot to breathe.
“No. No, no, no.”
Miles became smaller.
Then disappeared.
Lucy became a toddler.
A baby.
Gone.
Clara and Gabriel’s wedding photograph replaced them.
Then that vanished too.
The phone went black.
Gabriel threw it across the bed.
The room tilted.
Not metaphorically.
The floor seemed to drop beneath the building.
He grabbed the mattress.
The locket burned in his palm.
“Arthur!”
As if the old man were hiding in the minibar.
The windows rattled.
A sound filled the room.
Not thunder.
Applause.
Thousands of people chanting his name.
Gabriel.
Gabriel.
Gabriel.
Then one girl’s voice cutting through all of it.
You don’t get to decide the ending before you’ve even walked through the bloody door.
Clara.
Seventeen.
The room went dark.
Gabriel fell.
He had time to think, absurdly, that Hannah was going to be furious about the carpet.
Then nothing.
---
Someone was banging on a door.
Gabriel opened his eyes.
His mouth tasted like metal.
His head hurt.
For several blissful seconds, he assumed whiskey.
Then someone shouted from downstairs.
“GABRIEL! IF YOU MISS THAT BUS, DON’T BLAME ME!”
Gabriel froze.
His mother.
Not the seventy-one-year-old voice from the telephone.
Younger.
Much younger.
He sat up.
The room was wrong.
Small.
Blue wallpaper.
A David Bowie poster above a desk.
A stack of cassette tapes.
Football boots under a chair.
His old school blazer hanging from a wardrobe door.
For a beat, Gabriel had no answer.
He knew this room.
He had dreamed about it after his father died.
He had not physically stood inside it for twenty-four years.
“No.”
His voice cracked.
Not emotionally.
Actually cracked.
Gabriel touched his throat.
He looked down.
His hands were wrong.
Too smooth.
Too thin.
No wedding ring.
He stumbled out of bed.
The mirror above the chest of drawers caught him.
Gabriel screamed.
Downstairs, Margaret shouted, “If you’ve found a spider, kill it yourself!”
Seventeen-year-old Gabriel Hart stared back from the mirror.
Too much dark hair.
No lines around the eyes.
No scar along his jaw from a stunt gone wrong in Budapest.
No fame.
No children.
No evidence that forty-two had ever happened.
Except—
His fist was closed.
Gabriel slowly opened it.
Clara’s silver locket lay against his palm.
The future one.
Blue enamel worn pale.
Dent at the hinge.
He backed into the desk.
A knock sounded downstairs.
Three quick knocks.
Pause.
Two more.
Gabriel knew that knock.
He had known it before he knew his own children’s.
His mother opened the front door.
A girl’s voice floated up the stairs.
“Is the coward ready?”
Gabriel’s knees nearly failed.
Seventeen-year-old Clara Byrne.
Margaret laughed downstairs.
“He’s been pretending to die for twenty minutes.”
“Good. Tell him he can die after the audition. The bus is in twelve minutes.”
Gabriel looked at the locket in his hand.
Then toward the doorway.
Footsteps started up the stairs.
Light.
Fast.
Familiar.
Clara appeared in the bedroom doorway wearing a rain-damp school coat, dark hair escaping its braid and a silver chain around her neck.
The breath left Gabriel.
Hanging from that chain was an oval silver locket edged in blue forget-me-nots.
The same locket lay in his hand.
Two of them.
One not yet lost.
One already lost for twenty years.
Clara frowned at him.
She was seventeen.
Alive with impatience.
Entirely untouched by the man he would become.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Gabriel could not answer.
Her eyes narrowed.
“Did you drink?”
He laughed.
Then cried.
Clara recoiled.
“Jesus, Gabe.”
There it was.
Gabe.
The name she had stopped using somewhere inside the years he had failed to notice.
Gabriel covered his mouth.
Clara stared at him, alarm replacing annoyance.
“What happened?”
Twenty-five years happened.
Three children.
A fourth on the way.
A marriage.
An affair.
A premiere.
A hand she had almost reached for.
A life she had built beside him while the world convinced him it belonged to him.
Gabriel looked at the girl who had not yet got him through the door.
Then at the locket she had not yet lost.
Somewhere downstairs, his father shouted that the bus would not wait for actors, future famous or otherwise.
Gabriel’s heart stopped.
His father.
Daniel.
Alive.
Clara took one step into the room.
“Gabe?”
Gabriel looked toward the stairs.
Then back at her.
His whole life existed ahead of this morning.
Every beautiful thing.
Every terrible thing.
Every choice he had once made without knowing it was a choice.
Clara reached for his hand.
Gabriel looked down at her fingers.
Twenty-five years from now, she would pull that hand away from him in a premiere room because he had taught her not to trust what it promised.
Today, she took it without hesitation.
“Come on,” she said softly. “I’ve got you.”
Gabriel closed his eyes.
Of course she did.
She always had.