The Everlasting (33 page)

Eventually he went upstairs. He stood beside their bed for a very long time, looking down at his sleeping wife.

The next morning, sitting in the garden chair Nina had occupied just the afternoon before, Helen asked him something. “Is there anywhere special you'd like to go, babe?” The implication was understood without ever being vocalized.
Anywhere special you'd like to go before you die?

He pretended to think about it, scratching his chin and looking out at the oak tree in the field. It had been dead for a long time, but he had known it all his life.

He had not told Helen that Nina had come. There was no need.

“There is somewhere,” he said. “Been thinking about this for a very long time. Think you have too. Somewhere to leave the sheets and our notebooks, with all those ideas in them.”

“Weird ideas,” Helen said.

“Weird,” he agreed, and a shiver went down his back.
So weird. Equations and poems, fractions and
spells, songs and directions, a map and the way to elsewhere
.

“So?” she asked.

He blinked the ideas away. “Edinburgh,” he said.

“You're sure you can find it again?” she asked quietly. She was so strong, so fit, and Scott was truly going to miss her.

“No,” he said. “Not sure at all.”