✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

115. My Triumphant Return

The most stressful few days of my career ended with a round of congratulations and thanks from a whole selection of people; all of them rich, and the majority either powerful, famous, or both. These were the movers and the shakers, and they loved my work. Even Kernigan found me, sitting in the park and watching the celebs from a distance, and thanked me for my contributions to an event that he had truly enjoyed. He promised me again that I would get exactly what I had hoped for, and that was a whole weight off my mind.

As the celebs started drifting away, one or two at a time, I could finally relax. Bracewell had been very firm that cleanup was not my responsibility. She said that she'd seen the number of times that I had popped up to help with some unexpected drama from the Hollywood crowd late at night, early in the morning, or at a whole range of different times; and that she was certain that I was now tired enough to hand the reins over to one of my subordinates. So Ken Heeling was in charge of the teams tidying up the site and restoring the parks, courtyards, and conference rooms of Upper Ashfields to their usual state, while Jessop and Carter were chosen to handle any last queries from the guests who were still on site.

I walked back to my car, ready to go home and see how much my baby had missed me. But there was someone waiting for me before I got there. As I got closer, I recognised the profile of probably the last person I had expected to see again, Tyler Walthamstone. It looked like it could have been the start of even more drama; but he was just begging me not to share anything with his legions of fans. And this time he had something to bribe me with: He promised that he could get his hands on a copy of the movie before it was actually available. That sounded like a significant bribe; and the kind of thing that would probably have kept me from sharing incriminating photos online, if I had actually taken any.

Was it immoral to accept something that was probably itself illegal as an encouragement not to do something I'd never had any intention of doing in the first place? Probably. But I consoled myself with the thought that he should have learned to keep his door locked; or to avoid indulging those particular fantasies when he was supposed to be working. It would have been so easy for him to control himself; and I liked to think that I was teaching him an important lesson in maturity.

And then, home. Or not. Because this was the first day in a while that I wouldn't be working from first light until late in the evening, or even all night. And so it was my first opportunity in some time to do some shopping.

I had ordered a wedding dress already. Maybe that was a little presumptuous; I didn't even know how long our engagement would be. But it had seemed like the right thing to do, when everything was going so well. It was almost like the universe itself was giving me subtle hints, telling me what I should be doing. It would have been senseless of me to refuse. But now that I had the dress, I had been reminded that there were other details I needed to story out. And things that I needed to do sooner, at that. Because I only needed the dress before our wedding day, but I would need a ring long before that.

It wasn't actually as hard as I might have expected. I could probably have found a reputable jeweller in Greater Ashfields, if I had looked, but I remembered a recommendation that a distant friend had made some time ago, and when something reminded me of that, I thought that it seemed a good time to trust my instincts. I took the back way out of Upper Ashfields, and followed quiet roads for ten minutes until I reached the junction I was aiming for, and merged into four lanes of traffic all cruising along slightly above the speed limit.

Moistville wasn't the quickest place to go shopping, nor was it one that I would normally have thought about. But it had a whole shopping centre dedicated to traditional craftsmen, where most of the businesses had been passed down in some family for a century or more. I knew a lot of people in town; or I had once upon a time. I'd spent one year here when I was at university, and gotten to know a lot of people in the area. That was when I'd fallen in love with the scenery in this part of the world, and decided that I wanted to live around here after graduation. But when I thought back to the wonderful people I'd met in a placement year at Moistville, I wondered how many of them would have moved on already. How many of them would have graduated. Because that was the big deal with this place. Although they talked about their pride in local culture, the whole town was really Moistville University, in the same way that Upper Ashfields was SYL Incorporated. The city centre had lecture halls and student residences, linked by a complex spiderweb of pedestrian paths hanging in the air above the streets. There were bars and coffee shops along every street, and no restaurant could succeed unless it offered either a break from work or an opportunity for students to snack while they completed their assignments. Almost the whole town was built around academic timetables, stores whose primary customers were students mixed in with all their residences and university buildings. The particular street I was aiming for was the only real exception to that rule.