It took an effort to fill his lungs. “Uh. Wait. When we talked in spring—”

“On the way back from Etchil,” Kim said. “I remember every word of that conversation. You asked me what I wanted, what we both wanted, out of this, and I couldn’t give you an answer then, except to say I wanted you in my life somehow.”

“Yes, and we agreed we’d keep on and see where we go. We agreed that.”

“We did. And I dare say we could have carried on doing so if my brother had restrained himself, but he didn’t, and now there is that brick wall across the road. And the only way I can see around it is this one, but if you don’t even want to go around it—”

“It’s not I don’t want to.”

“Then you do want to?” He held up a hand before Will could reply. “Ugh, no, pretend I didn’t say that. I don’t mean to harass you into a response. But you need to understand that for me, the ‘just keeping on’ was becoming a lie of omission. I don’t want to ‘just keep on’. I love you, and I want—I have been hoping—to put things on a different footing between us. I might have been too much a coward to broach that for a while yet, but Chingford’s criminal idiocy has forced my hand.”

“You need to know. I understand that. But...”

He stalled there. Kim said, “Will, talk to me. If this is something I can’t have, I don’t want to carry on hoping for it. That would be...painful.”

“Yes, but—”

“But you wanted to know where we might be going. You asked me. Where were you thinking that might be?”

“I don’t know! I wasn’t thinking about forever!”

That landed with the dull thud of a mortar shell. Kim’s face stilled. “Right.”

“I mean—Look, I just don’t know!” Will said almost frantically, against the muscle-clenching sensation of impending disaster. “How the hell should I know? I didn’t expect any of this to happen. I bloody didn’t expect you, and I never thought you could—we could—”

“You didn’t think a future was a privilege our sort could claim? Or is it that you want something else? Because if your hopes for the future are entirely different, that’s your right, but I’d rather like to be informed!”

His voice rose and cracked on that, and Will knew why. Kim thought he was conventional at heart, and had more than once hinted he might want to return to the respectable life—the steady country existence, the wife and children—he’d grown up expecting.