“Why are you doing this to me?” she said softly, in a voice that was not like hers at all. “If I can’t handle this, well, then I can’t. Why do you keep pushing and pushing me? Why does it matter so much to you? Why is it so important to you, Richard?”

As if she had spoken into his thoughts. And Storm knew that his misery showed in his eyes for an answer. His failure. His hypocrisy. All this talk about honesty, about airing secrets. And he had never even found the courage to tell her that most basic truth. To say to her: I’m dying. My love is as selfish as anyone’s. I need you to be free in your mind so you can give yourself to me and I won’t be alone for this. I need you to break out of your past so I can feel I’ve done something for you, so I can feel I’ve left a life I love behind.

He reached out and put his hand against her cheek. And she—to his surprise—closed her eyes and leaned into it, took hold of it with her own. It just about broke his heart.

“All right,” he said, swallowing hard. “Listen. Listen. There’s something I have to tell you …”

“Sophia!”

In the rising wind, the call seemed to come from a great distance. But, looking back across the field, Storm could see movement through the screen of beeches. Sir Michael was standing at the door of the house.

“Sophia!”

Calling her.

She glanced up at Storm. Their eyes met quickly. He tried to speak again, but couldn’t. She patted his hand and drew away without a word.

Storm stood alone under the low clouds with the wind trails appearing in the grass all around him. He stood with his hands in his trench coat pockets. He watched as Sophia ran off towards the house.

Then, with a sigh, he turned away. Turned away, and confronted, for the first time, what had been behind him all this while.

There, beyond the sinuous silhouette of an elm, stood the abbey ruin, sullen, black and grim. An ominous and melancholy apparition: the broken wedge of a chapel wall, the slanting monuments of its ancient churchyard. The faltering illumination, laced as it was with the running cloud shadows, gave to the entire scene a floating quality, weird and dreamlike.

Eesh, thought Storm, his heart like a stone.

And, as if compelled, as if driven by the wind, he began to move across the field.

Towards the abbey. Towards its ancient graves.

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