How to Find Your Way Home by Katy Regan

Author:Katy Regan [Regan, Katy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2021-12-03T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Stephen

When Stephen was in prison he would dream, almost weekly, about the time when they had been a normal family; a time when they would eat together, a six-year-old Stephen sitting on a cushion at the dining table so that he could reach, the TV burbling in the background, a little Milly in her high chair. A time when his dad would kiss his mum when he came in from work, and she would kiss him back; when Stephen might catch his parents laughing at something while they were driving somewhere, and he’d watch the cats’ eyes on the road until his eyes were heavy, and then he’d fall asleep in the dark quiet of the back of the car, his mind blissfully blank.

As is the case with most dreams, it would be the feeling, the emotions of that dream, rather than the events themselves, that would linger long after Stephen was woken by the turning of the key in his cell lock at 7.30 a.m.: happiness, yes, but mainly safety, belonging.

Towards the end of his four-year sentence and for a short time after release, Stephen became preoccupied with getting that feeling back. To be part of a family again – his family. Not only did he want it, but he believed he could have it. His mother had only come to see him once in prison, but she’d written every week without fail. The letters contained little of substance: she’d tell him how the damn squirrels had been digging up the lawn again, or how the washing machine was on the blink. She never asked Stephen how he was; she never asked him anything, but she’d taken the time to write regularly, and Stephen hung on to that fact. He apportioned hope to it – too much hope, as it turned out.

The depth to which he’d missed his mother over those four years inside had come as a shock. It had been primal, the longing arriving with no warning, like a wave, knocking him for six. He’d be sitting eating his breakfast, or lying awake at night, listening to Hobbs, his cellmate, snoring as if he’d never put a foot wrong in his life, and find suddenly he yearned for her smell, her touch. He yearned for her as an infant might yearn for their mother – which was, he worked out in the many hours at his disposal, because the version he truly missed was the version from his infancy. Of that short time from zero to eight; that time until Mitch Reynolds entered their lives. He’d spent his entire life being homesick for that mother, hoping to get her back.

Especially now, lying in his sister’s spare room, his mind clear and free of booze.

Stephen had ticked off each day of his incarceration and yet, when he’d walked out on that crisp, blue-skied day in the November of 2004, he’d done so with £60 in his pocket and absolutely no plans. He had not expected Alicia to be waiting for him and she wasn’t.

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