“I got on with being poor, and with the bookshop, and I got on with bloody Libra kidnapping me and then all that mess in February. I do what needs doing right now, and that works. And now you want me to look ahead and plan and promise and think about forever, about the rest of our lives, and I don’t know how to think about that sort of thing. I don’t know what I’ll think. And—ah, hell.” He didn’t want to say this. He needed to. “What if I can’t do it?”

“Can’t do what?”

“What it is you want of me. The things you should expect. Being the sort of man someone could have a future with. Christ, Kim.” His chest heaved suddenly. “What if I’m not right?”

“Oh, Jesus.” Kim reached for his hand, an urgent motion. Will couldn’t look at him. “Where did that come from? You’re right if ever a man was right.”

“I’ve killed four people since November and I don’t care. Does that sound right to you?”

That gave Kim a moment’s pause. “I didn’t say you were a vicar. Look, you were trained. The army trained some things into you and some things out of you. That doesn’t make you wrong. Damaged, perhaps, but aren’t we all?”

“Maybe I needed the things they trained out of me.” His shoulders felt solid with tension. “Maybe they couldn’t have trained them out of other people. I know they couldn’t. There were men who never fired their guns, plenty of them. They’d go over the top but they couldn’t make themselves kill, not even from a distance. The Army picked out the ones like me for a reason.”

That was the truth of it, the thing he hadn’t wanted to face. The reason he kept the Messer, carved by a man he’d killed, so he never forgot who he was. He’d been almost relieved that his mother hadn’t survived to see him come back, because he wouldn’t have wanted her to look at him and see a stranger. Even worse, what if she’d recognised her boy in the man he’d become? What if the war had merely peeled back the outer skin and shown what was already there?

Kim was still gripping his hand. His fingers felt hot, or maybe Will’s were cold. “I want to be sure I have this correctly. You learned to cope by taking things as they come. If you live one day at a time, you can’t fear the future or brood about the past. Whereas to look to the future, to decide where you want to go and what you want to be, you have to consider where you are, and who you are. And that’s disturbing you. More than I’d understood, and more than you saw coming.”