Chapter 6: What Was in the Tin

Lucan's POV

I told myself I was only going to look.

Ilse's cottage sat at the bottom of the clinic garden, and at ten that night the windows were dark.

She was on the late shift at the clinic, forty yards up the hill, with a lamp lit and a pup with croup in the cot.

I watched her through the glass for a full minute.

She laid a hand on the child's forehead and smiled at the mother.

She had looked exactly like that at her husband's funeral, and at every council meeting since.

I had never once thought about what her face did when nobody was reading it.

The cottage was Alpha property.

Every house in the valley was, and I had never used the key on one before.

I let myself in and stood in the dark.

It smelled like her, lavender and clean linen.

I had spent six years trusting that smell.

I started with the kitchen, because that was where I would have kept papers if I were careful.

Nothing.

Then the bedroom, and the dresser, and the shelf above the bed.

Under the bed, behind a box of winter blankets, my fingers found the edge of a biscuit tin.

I pulled it out and lifted the lid.

It was full of paper.

I took out the first sheet and held it up to the window.

It was lined, torn from a pad, and covered in a single word, over and over, down every line.

Sorry.

The tail on the y was a little too long in the early ones, and by the bottom of the page it was right.

I turned it over.

The back was the same, with the word sorry.

I tried the next sheet.

Then the next.

There were forty or fifty of them, dated in pencil in the corner, and the earliest was from March.

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