Lillian’s POV

When I finally got up to see him, Tyler was in a peaceful sleep, lying on his side. The roll of duct tape tied on the landing, so I fetched it, ripping off a length, and stretched it round and round his wrists until they were held securely together behind his back.

Then I went downstairs and double-checked the locks and the bars on the windows. I made sure the front door was bolted as well. The door on the riverside was also Chubb-locked and bolted. I had taken extra precaution of closing the curtains, something I rarely bothered with, since we only looked out onto the path and the rive, and drew the blinds in the kitchen shut. From the outside, the house must have looked closed up, as if we had gone away. I stashed the chloroform bottle that the other two girls had used earlier in the kitchen drawer, handy for dropping into Tyler’s glass if the need arose.

Tyler was awake when I returned to him. He complained that he still ached all over. 

“What happened to my hands?” he asked, a look of alarm on his wan face. I wondered whether the illness along with the cocktail of drugs he had been feed had played havoc with his memory. Perhaps he didn’t recall anything about being strapped up in the basement. If that was the case, it was a good thing. Neither of us wanted to remember that.

I sat down on the bed and looked at him, with all the compassion I felt in my heart.

“Tyler, I think I trust you. But this first time you come upstairs, I’m taking a small extra precaution. When you’re shown me, you aren’t going to try anything foolish, you can come up or down hands free. I promise.”

“I’m going? Where to?”

I smiled. “To the kitchen. Please don’t look so frightened. We’re going to spend the afternoon together, I’ll cook and you can talk to me.”

“I’m still here?”

“In the River House, yes. You’re still here. It’s alright.”

“But I’m going home, aren’t I? You’re going to let me go. You said so.” 

I stroked the hair off his forehead. “Of course you’re going home,” I said. “Soon, now I think. Very soon.” 

The afternoon was near perfect. Tyler sat at the table, his hands behind the kitchen chair, while I cooked. I put the green and white blanket around him to keep him warm. Refilled his hot-water bottle, which I rested on his lap under the blanket. I put 99.5 on the CD player: and we listened to the country tunes of the radio station. They were playing ‘She’s in love with the boy.’

I made him a hot toddy: whisky with lemon, honey and hot water. I took the precaution of giving him a plastic tumbler, instead of a glad, even though he couldn’t hold it and had to take sips, as I put it to his lips. I didn’t think he would do anything impulse now. Something had changed between us. He understood that I was nursing him back to health. That I really did not want any harm to befall him.

I turned the piece of chicken over in flour for a casserole we would share if he had an appetite later. I sliced shallots, fried them in olive oil and added bacon. I glanced over at him, while I cooked. I supposed I was expecting to see him, as he was that first day, relaxed, his feet lolling against the table leg, as he drank his wine. So it was a shock to see the tears rolling silently down his face and plopping into the plastic beaker. The tears streaked downward in long glistening threads dripping off his upper lip, and, when he saw me looking at him, his chest started to heave.

“Oh Tyler,” I said, and moved towards him.

I wiped his face and bathed it with a clean flannel and gave him water to drink.

“Tyler, look, you’ve been very unwell. But you’re getting better now. Please don’t cry. I’m here to look after you. To make everything right.” 

Eventually his sobs subsided, he took a huge breath and gave me a weak, sheepish smile. 

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I feel so ill.”

It was getting warm in the kitchen. Now he started to writhe about a bit, saying that he felt hot. He shook off the rug I had put round him and then asked me to take off his hoodie. This wasn’t easy with his hands tied up as they were. I told him, I would roll up his sleeves instead. I was aware of everything about him, as I turned back the cuffs. His broad wrists with the prominent wrist bone. A spearhead of light along the valley between the radius and the ulna. There was a veil of sweat on his forehead. Beads of perspiration in the crease of his elbows. 

“You can’t just take it off? I’m really hot. Burning.”

I would have loved to undo his wrists, lift his hoodie off his head. But even though he was so weak and compliant, I didn’t dare risk it.

When I had rolled up his sleeves, I continued to stir sauce and grind pepper. 

“Are you okay now, Tyler?”

“Yes, that’s better.”

After a long while, he asked, “What’s in all those jars?”

I followed his gaze. “Marmalade,” I told him.

“That’s what you were making the day I came here.”

“Yes. I make it every February, as my mother did. It’s traditional. The smell….it’s a smell I love, though it makes me feel sad too.” 

“Some of my memories feel sad sometimes. Not because they were sad, but because the time’s gone. It’s not being able to go back.”

I turned and looked at him. At last he was talking more like he did that first day. We’re getting somewhere again.

“What is your earliest memory?”

He thought for a while. I examined his face, as he did so. It’s thinner, no doubt about it. But there is something else, something wary in his expression that was never there before. His eyes darted about. It was as if he didn’t miss a thing, as he had to stay alert every second. I didn’t like it. I wanted him to relax.

“Swans on the river. My dad used to bring me in a pushchair, I guess. We used to throw bread to the swans. He told me they belong to the Queen. Do they?”

 “Only unmarked mute swans. And only those who live here on the Thames. Or on its tributaries.”

“And the smell of Marmite on the breeze. When I smell Marmite even now, it reminds me of here. The river. Before everything changed.”

“It’s not really Marmite. It’s yeast from the brewery. But that smell is one of my earliest memories too. Some people object to it. I like it. And the swans are still here of course. They disappear sometimes. But they always come back.” 

“Yes, but it’s not how it was then. I’ll never be that little kid again. Some things are gone forever.” Tears welled up in his eyes once more.

“That’s not true, Tyler.” I put down my knife, and leaned on the table, looking into his eyes. “I used to think that, but I don’t anymore. Things don’t go, the past isn’t gone, and time is not linear as we imagined it to be. It loops and spirals and plays amazing tricks on us. It’s something I’ve come to know recently. I wish I’d always understood.”

I moved around the table to his side. I leaned over him and I looked right into his lovely, pale face, into the eyes that had sunken during his illness. They were beginning to brighten again now, and I whispered, putting all the passion I felt into me words.

“You came to me. You came just when I needed to know that the past was not gone. You showed me that I had a second chance and that I need never go through that kind of loss again.” 

He didn’t reply, just stared back at me, and for a while, he seemed to look deep into my soul. We were as one. 

There was a peaceful calm, as the light faded outside and I returned to my cooking. Tyler and I were quiet in each other’s company. We didn’t need to talk.

Later, I wasn’t sure how much later, because the time had started to play tricks again and the day slipped away in seconds, Tyler said, “I need to lie down, I’m not feeling well again.”

“Let’s go through there. I’ll light the fire and you can lie on the sofa.”

I rolled down the sleeves of his hoodie. Wrapped the rug around him and led him to the living room. He lied on the sofa and I began to build a fire in the grate, with none of the sense of foreboding the room usually evoked. As if, now Tyler was with me, I believed that all those aspects of the past that haunted me, however indefinable, have been erased. But something, perhaps his feet lolling on the sofa, the awareness I had of his body supine and inert, ignited it all. Not just the feeling, but every little detail, the picture in the corner of my eye that usually slid aside each time I tried to focus on it.

It was illuminated, as I put a match to the kindling in the grate, and it brightened as the flames took hold.

An early spring day, the light failing outside, I pushed open the door. There was some kind of table in the center of the room. Candled threw enormous shadows up against the walls. Grown-ups in black, their head bent. I knew what was on the table; they did not need to move apart. I could see between them the shiny wooden box with its polished brass handles. But I could not go closer. And no one asked me to. 

No one spoke to me. I stood alone in the doorway waiting for something, a movement, a word. The heads stayed turned away from me. The smell was enough. That had not lit the fire. The room was colder than the river itself.

The phone started to ring. It was on the table next to the sofa, where Tyler lied, half asleep. Or at least I thought he was half asleep. He sat up so abruptly at the sound, I wondered now whether he was only pretending. I was on the other side of the room. It took a couple of seconds to come out of my reverie, to register that he was using his chin to knock the handset off its cradle, that he was speaking into the mouthpiece, “It’s me, Tyler Marchand--Please-- Help me!” he shouted.

I was across the room, my finger ramming down the mute button, before he was completed with the four little words that could take him away from me forever.

“How could you?” 

“What?”

He cowered back away from me on the sofa. 

“Tyler, I brought you upstairs. Now you do this to me.” 

“I don’t understand. What did I do?”

“You were going to try and leave me.” 

“No!” I picked up the phone without thinking.

I took a long, deep inhalation, walked once around the room, my hand running through my hair. This must not turn nasty. I sighed. I sat down next to him on the sofa. I put my hand gently on his knee. “Okay. I’ll overlook it this once. Let’s forget it for now. But it’s time for you to go back downstairs to the basement. You can’t stay here any longer. Come on. Up.” 

I was trembling, as he went ahead of me, out of the room. I was shocked that he continued to fear me. But whether it was because he was still feeble, or because he was sorry for upsetting me, he went forlornly, his hands still taped securely behind his back. His head was bowed and he didn’t confront me, as we descended the stairs.

Once he was locked in again, I didn’t bother to look at the caller ID of the phone. In fact, it wasn’t there. Mikayla or Sydney had disposed of it. They were standing there, shaking their heads. I knew I was going to hear an earful from them

“What were you thinking, Lilly?” Mickey spat at me.

“I just wanted to try to cheer him up!” I tried to defend my actions.

“And in the process almost lost him!” Sydney snapped.

“I know.” I looked down at my feet. “I’m sorry.”

Sydney walked over to me and put an arm around me. “Just be more careful, okay. Don’t worry Mickey’s going to take care of the problem tomorrow. Right now, we need to make sure he doesn’t try anything like that again!”

I nodded. I was beginning to feel really badly. The half of me that wanted to released him was surging again and it was on the verge of breaking into my mind. But Mickey and Syd weren’t about to have it. I also wondered what Sydney meant by “Mickey’s going to take care of the problem.” It wasn’t good...for Tyler.