The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Twenty

Five Years Later

Christmas in the mountains was kind of beautiful.

My father had moved here during the time where I dropped off the map, settling down in a large cabin just remote enough that I almost hadn't been able to find him there, and it was perfect. Matthew had moved away a year after I returned, but his room was upstairs on the third floor, the highest spot in the house, overlooking the drop of the mountain. Mine was on the ground floor, facing the road. Perhaps, in the year I had been gone, I'd had enough of daring adventures.

I returned to Valerie having made contact, out of treatment and into formal training to become a real psychiatrist, someone there to help others and not to analyze them. She was living in Britain, somewhere quiet around Brighton. She was happier. Really, that's all that mattered.

She also had welcomed me with knowledge about Meade, who had apparently attempted to call me, only to be told the phone was no longer in service. He had spent a lot of time wandering around Asia, and he spent another year or so doing much of the same before he was happy enough to come back. But he did come back. So I guess that was something.

At first, my father was furious with me. Furious and relieved, if a lot furious, but I had reached the point where I could understand him. I didn't feel angry back at him, I didn't feel like he didn't understand. I was clear-headed enough to know his point of view, and to sympathize with it.

I spent exactly one year wandering through mainland Europe. I went back to Barcelona and retraced so many of the steps I took, on my own and with Caitie in disguise, La Rambla teeming with just as much life and laughter as I remembered. I spent a couple of weeks traveling down the coast of Italy, and then back up; I must have spent three days sitting by the riverside in Vienna, and then another three in opera houses. I followed the Danube through Budapest, and then broke off at Belgrade, heading south to Greece, where I stood on the Parthenon's ruins and looked out at the city around it, and I retreated to the small island of Ikaria and spent a few days on the beach, teaching locals French for Greek lessons in return. I went to Sofia, Bulgaria; I went to Brasov, Romania; I went to Warsaw, Poland. I went everywhere I had never gone before and I talked to people I otherwise wouldn't have met. I walked until my head was so clear that I didn't realize it had even been weeks, maybe even months, since thinking of Helford.

And then I turned around and went home.

My father had moved to Switzerland once the Helford scandals had simmered and he was no longer needed, dragging Matthew along with him. He made a new home for all of us in the mountains, a safe haven that we could all return to. And return we did.

I stayed here with my father, working from the remote cabin, for about a year and a half before the itch to keep adventuring was too much to ignore. I took a job in Bruges and stayed there for a while, leaving only when Meade resurfaced, but I just recently relocated to Berlin; the new plan was basically hopping around until I found the place I belonged, hoping that someplace would eventually feel right to me. But, once a year since I returned, there was one time where we all converged at the same point.

Christmas had always been a bittersweet time of year for my father and me due to our decimated family but, lately, it's been filled with so much cheer and family of sorts that it couldn't have been bitter even if it tried.

"No, no, no," Matthew asserted, narrowing his eyes at Meade. He held his fork, with green beans speared on the tip, like a pointing finger, stabbing it at the other man to make a point. "Arsenal is absolutely not going to be top of the table. Say it with me now—Liverpool."