Chapter Text
She arrives in Tonbridge later than she knows she should—it’s going on half-seven which is probably a rude time to show up at someone’s door unannounced—but River’s been avoiding her for too long and she’s had enough of it.
The house is bigger than she’d imagined. It is Tonbridge, and River always referred to it as a house and not a cottage or a flat, but somehow it still surprises her. She stops her car down the drive a bit and stares at the house and large gardens, barely visible in the dim light. How did she never know River was a posh boy? Readjusting her perception, she presses the gas and creeps the final yards toward the house. She hesitates for a just second at the front door before knocking.
There’s no quick answer but there are lights on and she’s pretty sure River is here with his grandfather, so she knocks a little harder. A moment later River opens the door.
“Louisa,” he says, his face showing his surprise as he wipes his hands on a kitchen towel.
“It’s later,” she says, pushing past him into the house.
“What?” He steps aside to open the door wider.
She glances around the entry, taking in the homey feel of it, then turns to him. “That night on the embankment. You asked if we could talk about it later.” She takes off her jacket, punctuating the fact that she’s staying a while, then bobs her head to the side once. “It’s later.” She tips her head back and forth. “Or quite a bit past it, but as you’ve been avoiding me, here I am.”
River glances up the stairs; Louisa’s eyes follow. There’s no sign of the OB. River looks back at her and Louisa cocks an eyebrow at him. She can see the moment he resigns himself that this is going to happen.
Pitching his voice low, he says, “Yeah, okay, but for the record, I haven’t been avoiding you, I’ve just been…busy.” He gestures to the stairs before taking her jacket and hanging it in the small entry closet. “Are you hungry? I was just getting dinner,” he says over his shoulder as he heads deeper into the house.
“I could eat." Following him, she finds herself in a large, bright kitchen. There are copper pans hanging from a suspended rack and knives attached to a magnetic bar. Jars line the back of the counter filled with familiar and unfamiliar things. An ancient, green Aga stove sits in the middle of the large space like its holding court; across from it is an old wooden table with a small stack of newspapers in one corner. It’s a lived-in room but not messy. Everything looks to have a place.
There are signs of activity: a pan sits ready on the stove, on a cutting board is a squash cut in half, a large chef’s knife lies next to it. Louisa blinks. “You’re making dinner? Are you cooking?” She doesn’t mean it come out sounding as incredulous as it does, but, what the hell?
“Yeah, I just said.” He threads the kitchen towel he’s been carrying through the handle of the Aga.
“You said you were getting dinner. I assumed that meant ordering in, not that you were cooking.”
River gives her a look. “I’m a grown man.”
“I mean, sure, but I always just imagined you ate takeaway all the time or lived on ramen noodles.”
River scoffs. “I’m not Lamb.” He picks up the knife. “I’ll have you know,” he says, pointing it briefly in her direction, “that I’m a very good cook.” He uses the knife to deftly peel away the skin from the apparently already cooked squash.
She leans on the counter across from him to watch him work. It’s mesmerizing in that it’s so profoundly unexpected that she can’t turn her eyes away. “Did your grandmother teach you?” she asks. She finds herself wondering not for the first time about his grandmother.
He flicks his glance to her for a brief second. “Yes,” he answers. “And the O.B. They both cooked and neither suffered fools in the kitchen.”
“So, what’re you making?”
“A squash and mushroom curry.” He’s chopping the soft squash into neat, uniformly-sized cubes, now.
Louisa’s eyebrows shoot up.
“What?”
“That sounds…complicated.”
River huffs. “I just told you I can cook.”
“Pics or it didn’t happen.”
River gives her the look again as he picks up the cutting board to scrape the cubes into the waiting pan. It sizzles and a plume of fragrant steam wafts upward. Setting the cutting board back down, he winces.
Louisa’s heart thumps in her chest. “What’s wrong?” she asks, standing upright.
River stops. “What?”
“Why did you wince?”
“I didn’t”
“Yes, you did,” she starts to move around the counter toward him, “I saw you.”
There’s something about the idea of River being hurt that has begun to make her uncomfortable. The first time it happened, after everything with Min, she’d not given him much thought, really. It was more that he looked like a sad puppy that needed tending to and she couldn’t leave him out on the street alone.
She’d been more sympathetic when he’d sat down next to her in the coffee shop across from Chieftain and she’d seen the bruises on his face, but it hadn’t bothered her, per se. But then he’d hugged her in the car and it was sweet and awkward and something had shifted in her perception of him. In that single gesture he’d stopped being ‘the guy she tolerates in the office’ and become ‘the guy who apparently cares about me.’ And when the grenade went off in the facility and she’d seen him lying there looking entirely dead, she’d realized that she apparently cared about him, too. ‘Friends’ might have been too strong a word to use when they entered the facility, but they sure as hell were comrades in arms by the time they left it. And ‘work-friends,’ at the very least. That one person at your day-to-day grind who you rely on to make things just a tiny bit less awful.
When River had been presumed dead the week before, it hit her hard that he’d become one of the most important people in her life, even if the mourning only lasted a few hours. And when she thought she was about to watch him get his head blown off by a grenade, all she could think was: absolutely not. It wasn’t until much later, when she’d been alone in an interrogation room at the Park, that her hands had started to shake and she’d nearly thrown up with how close they’d both come to dying down there on the embankment.
Now, in the kitchen, River backs away from her approach, palms up placatingly. “Louisa, I’m fine.”
Scanning him as she moves, she sees it—purple skin peeking out from the end of his right sleeve. “Your wrist.”
River takes another step backward but his escape is thwarted by the counter behind him. “I told you, I’m fine.”
They have an eight-second standoff before River sags and holds out his arm in her direction. She takes his hand gently in hers and peers closely at his wrist. “It looks painful,” she says, carefully turning it to get a full look.
“Nah,” he says. He extracts his hand and bends his fist back and forth, apparently to show her that it’s fine, but his effort is undermined by the fact that it’s still swollen and has diminished range of motion.
She rolls her eyes and grabs his hand again. It’s eerily similar to how it looked after he’d come back from Upshott—right after Min had died. An old sadness washes over her but she pushes it aside; she’s mostly past the deep despair that used to hit her when thoughts of Min were conjured. “See, it’s fine,” River says.
The skin around his wrist is badly bruised and there’s a ring of uneven scabs around most of it but it’s healing. It must have been bleeding that night. She feels guilty for missing it when they’d been sitting in the Dogs’ car, but it had been dark and there had been a lot going on. There is a fresh split in the scab where a small drop of blood is welling, probably from flexing his wrist too much as he cooked. She grabs paper towel from the roll and folds it a couple times before pressing it firmly to the spot. She gets a fleeting sense memory of bandaging River’s wrists that night at her apartment.
“You should probably keep it wrapped to remind you not to move it around so much.”
“It’s fine,” he says again.
“We saw the CCTV that night,” she tells him. “Of that bastard coming for you.”
“Did you?” he says, eyes flicking to hers and then darting quickly away.
He’s embarrassed, she realizes, but all she's ever thought about that night is what bollocks it took for River, cuffed to the car and staring down Patrice’s gun barrel, to reach out and slap it away. Louisa had been sure that in the next second she was going to watch River’s brains explode against the vehicle, but instead Patrice had shot the chain that tethered River to the car.
“Who are you?” a voice booms from the doorway, startling them both.
Louisa drops River’s hand and turns toward the voice. River’s grandfather is standing in the doorway in pajamas and robe, slippers on his feet. She takes a small step backward, not afraid of him exactly—he’s 80-something years old and looks frail as a kitten—but he still strikes an imposing figure and this is his house. She opens her mouth to answer but River puts a light hand on her arm as he turns to the old man.
“Granddad, it’s okay,” he says calmly. “This is Louisa. I work with her. I’ve told you about her before.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “I’ve never met you,” he says, accusatorily.
“Uh, no, sir. We haven’t met. But we saw each other once? At Slough House?” She smiles, trying to look as unthreatening as possible.
“I don’t remember you,” he snaps.
“I—” She shoots an anxious glance at River, unsure how much to say to him about that dreadful night.
“It’s okay, Granddad. She’s Service. She’s my friend.” His voice is gentle and patient.
The O.B. studies her for a long, uncomfortable moment before he grunts and turns more fully to River. “No girls overnight. You know the house rules.” His voice is gruff.
Louisa suppresses a grin but she can see the fair skin on River’s neck flush pink.
“Yes, Sir. She’s just staying for a little while. I promise she’ll not stay the night.”
The old man turns his hawkish glare on her for a moment. “Alright then.”
“I’m making a curry,” River tells his grandfather. “Would you like some?”
The old man hesitates and then says, “No, no I…perhaps just some tea and toast, please.”
“Okay. Would you like to sit in here with us? Or I can bring it to you in your room. Or the study?”
The O.B. casts a wary eye at Louisa. “I…” a shaky hand adjusts his glasses. “I’m tired. In my room if you don’t mind.”
“Come on, I’ll take you back up.” He turns to Louisa and gestures with his head to the sizzling pan. “Could you…turns those in a minute?”
“Sure,” she says, relieved to have something to do besides make the former Number Two at the Park suspicious.
River disappears up the stairs with his grandfather while Louisa tends to the squash. She looks around the kitchen, still trying to reconcile the River who grew up here and apparently cooks, with the man she knows at Slough House.
The morning after everything happened, Louisa had just gone for another coffee and when she’d returned, she could no longer hear River or Lamb’s muffled voices wafting down from above. Ascending the stairs, she found Lamb apparently asleep with his feet on his desk and no sign of River. Damn it. She’d intended to finish their conversation—confront River about running off on his own all the time.
“You’ve just missed him,” Lamb said, not opening his eyes or moving an inch.
“Did he go home?”
“How the fuck should I know?” he barked, then after a small pause, said, “It’s a safe bet he went running back to the O.B.’s.”
Louisa had pushed out a frustrated breath and stalked back down to her office, dumped the coffee, and gone home.
Two days later, when she got to the office, there was a file folder on her desk with a note in Catherine’s handwriting on the front: ‘Right in the shredder when you’re finished.’
Opening the folder, Louisa found a sheaf of papers that were River’s debrief with Lamb from two days before. She’d read through the document three times trying to absorb it all. No one she’d ever met had more of a shit hand dealt to them than River Cartwright. Christ.
Her plan for the day had involved tracking down River and having that conversation, but given everything she’d just read, she decided to let it lie for the moment. River no doubt had a lot he was wrestling with; their conversation could wait.
Almost a week had passed before she’d decided the wait was over and impulsively driven to Tonbridge.
Five minutes later River’s back in the kitchen.
“Is he alright?” she asks, stepping aside and returning control of the hob to him.
“Yeah, yeah, he’s fine. He just gets easily agitated.” He pulls the pan from the burner before flipping on the kettle.
“I’m sorry if I made things worse.”
“You didn’t. That’s just how he is now.”
He looks so sad that a part of her wants to pull him into a hug, but she doesn’t because he’s obviously lost in his thoughts and it doesn’t feel like something he’d welcome.
While he’s fussing with the bread and the toaster, he asks, “Could you put the squash on that plate and then maybe slice those mushrooms while I get this for him?”
“Of course,” she says, happy to have something to do. She moves around to the cutting board. There’s a bowl next to it, in which there seems to be a variety of different kinds of mushrooms, things that she’s maybe seen in the shops but had never even thought about purchasing.
By the time he’s got a tray prepared for his grandfather, Louisa has chopped the mushrooms. “What’s next?” she asks.
A small crease appears between his brows when he spies the mushroom, and he says—with apparent reluctance—"Uh, put them in the pan to sauté and then… mince the shallots? I’ll be back down in a minute.”
“Sure,” she says.
River pauses at the door and turns to her. “Mince means to cut them very small.”
“Funny.”
While River’s off tending to his grandfather, Louisa picks up the knife and starts mincing the shallot. She looks at the squash on the plate and their ordered uniformity and is surprised all over again that River can actually cook. They’ve grown closer over the past couple of years, but looking at the squash she realizes there are so many things they still don’t know about each other.
Louisa can cook. The basics. She grew up with three siblings in a small flat with a small kitchen and her mum would chase everyone out when she was cooking—no room for kids to be underfoot. So she never learned at home. She started cooking at uni; was self-taught, buying a couple basic cookbooks at a resale shop and following the directions. She has a respectable repertoire of simple dishes she can cook and that actually taste decent. She’d never been so adventurous as to try to make a squash and mushroom curry, though. She’s not 100% sure she likes the idea of it, but she’ll be polite about it, of course.
River is gone for considerably longer than Louisa expects, and when he finally returns, he looks stressed and exhausted.
“He’s rather terrifying, isn’t he?” Louisa says. River huffs, but there’s a sadness in his eyes that makes her immediately regret saying it.
“Not really.” River takes the knife from her and uses his hip to bump her aside. She scowls but when he starts mincing the shallot far more quickly and expertly than she managed, she figures it wasn’t the wrong call. “I was never afraid of him. He could be stern growing up, but never mean.”
Louisa raises any eyebrow. “No girls in the house overnight?”
River smirks. “I thought I was being clever one night and snuck my girlfriend in through the window which was on the opposite side of the house from them, but he knew; of course he knew. He was banging on my door before I could even kiss her.”
He seems lost in the memory and she grins to herself imagining a teen-aged River in a school-boy uniform hustling a girl out the window. “How is he?” she asks carefully. “I mean, generally.”
River hesitates, seems focused on his chopping. “He’s very confused most of the time,” he finally says. “Frightened sometimes, I think, though he never says as much. He still has lucid moments but less and less often.”
He rinses his hands in the sink and dries them before leaning back with his arms crossed. “I’m beginning to feel a bit like a prisoner here. I don’t want to leave him alone because I’m afraid he’ll do something or wander off. I can’t even run to the shops to get food without panicking.” The guilt he feels is palpable when he says, “I’ve been in contact with the Park’s facility. I, I think I’m going to have to make the move soon.” He shakes his head, looks away, out the window into the dark.
“I’m so sorry.”
River shrugs and keeps staring out the window as he confesses, “I promised him I never would, once, a couple of years ago. He said he’d rather I put him down than send him to one of those places.” He finally brings his eyes back to meet hers. “But I don’t know what else I can do.”
“Could you have someone care forhim here?”
“I’ve thought about it but I don’t think so. He’s canny, and capable of sneaking away, no matter what kind of minder he has. He’s gotten past me a couple times and I only found him because I knew where he’d be heading. He needs to be in a secure facility, where he can be locked in and watched 24/7, but God, he doesn’t want that.” He shakes his head. “He’ll never forgive me.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
He sniffs a little, and looks at her. “Yeah, thanks.”
It’s quiet in the kitchen for a few moments, except for the sound of the food, sizzling in the pan.
Figuring there’s no time like the present, Louisa leans against the counter across from him again and says, “So. How are you? What with your dad trying to kill you, and your grandfather killing your brother, and you, you know, shooting his face off.”
River grimaces. “Don’t sugarcoat it or anything,” he mumbles.
She waves a dismissive hand. “You don’t want me to. Come on, then. How’re we feeling about the fact that your dad’s a psychopath?”
His brows climb upward as he stops chopping for a second and looks at her. “We?”
“Well, just, you know…trying to be a team player.”
River huffs and his eyes return to the cutting board. He’s finished chopping so he scrapes the shallots onto the fat blade of the knife and then pushes them off into the pan with his finger and stirs them with the wooden spoon. She can’t read anything in his expression, which is unusual—usually he’s an open book. He drizzles some EVOO into the pan with the mushrooms and shallots and stirs, then adds some spices she doesn’t recognize. Except for the one that’s obviously curry.
She’s beginning to think he’s not going to answer when he finally says, “It’s…a lot.” His voice tight and he’s avoiding her eyes. “I mean, I hate him. I really hate him and given half a chance, I’d probably kill him. I wish had, when he gave me his gun.”
She doesn’t even consider saying that he doesn’t mean that, because she knows he does. She’d felt the same way when Min was killed, might have killed Arkady at the hotel if Marcus hadn’t stopped her.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I’m not like him,” he says immediately, then shrugs. “Plus, there were a couple hundred people there to witness it if I had.” He stirs the ingredients in the pan. He’s still not really looked at her. “Knowing everything I know now, I want to even more, but…”
“But you’re not like him,” she fills in, and as much as she thinks the world would be a better place without Frank Harkness in it, she’s glad that the man didn’t have the effect of turning River into a cold-blooded murderer.
River sets down the wooden spoon, lowering the heat on the hob. “D’you want some wine?” he asks.
The abrupt change of topic startles her. “Uh, yeah, sure.”
“Red? White?”
“Red’s good.”
River crosses to the corner of the room to a wine rack she hadn’t noticed and pulls out a couple before settling on one. This River is like an alien to her—cooking, choosing wine, so comfortable in his skin, like he never is at Slough House. She doesn’t know what to make of it.
He opens a cupboard and grabs two stemware glasses from a high shelf and sets them on the counter. As he’s uncorking the bottle, he says, “I’m so…” pausing, he clenches his jaw, “pissed off that Frank is back out there.”
“Yeah, we all are. But how are you dealing with the fact that he’s your father?”
River’s head jerks up. “He’s not my father,” he snaps, anger creeping into his voice.
“River—”
“He’s a narcissistic bastard who seduced my mother to manipulate my grandfather. A sperm donor, that’s it. If I had a father, or a father figure, it was my grandfather. As far as I’m concerned, the world will be a better place if someone puts Frank into his grave,” he says, echoing her thoughts from a moment before.
“And Bertrand?” she asks hesitantly.
River looks away and immediately starts chewing his thumb. Louisa has seen the crime scene photos, seen the mess River made of his half-brother in his grandfather’s tub. His face was obliterated, but Louisa’s also seen the passport River had taken off the body and it was shocking how much River resembled him.
River drops his hand from his mouth and picks up his wine glass. “He was here to kill the O.B. and I needed time to get him safe,” he says with a hard edge. “I’m not going to apologize for what I did.” He takes a long swallow of wine and then reaches for the bottle, adding more to his glass.
“I don’t mean that,” she says. He’s distracted and not paying attention to the pan so she picks up the wooden spoon and stirs it around a little. It does actually smell divine. “I mean, he was your half-brother, wasn’t he? Just, it’s all really fucked up, isn’t it? I guess I’m just wondering how you’re doing.”
“I’m fine,” he says, the words clipped.
“I don’t believe you.”
He takes the spoon from her and stirs. “It was…weird, seeing his face.” He stops and shakes his head, then looks her in the eyes. “But he was there to kill my grandfather. That’s all that matters.” There’s nothing but steel in his voice.
“Fair enough,” she concedes. She can tell there’s a lot going on inside his head but he’s not ready to talk about it. She’ll let it rest for a bit then circle back around later. Leaning over toward the pan, she says, “Smells good.”
“Yeah, it’s just about done.” He seems relieved to move on from the subject. “Could you lay the table while I finish this up?”
“Sure.”
He points to where she’ll find the plates and silverware and by the time she’s finished he’s setting a bowl of rice and one with the curry on the table.
Louisa pushes the last bite of her dinner into her mouth and sits back. “That was fantastic. Oh my God.” She’d been stunned upon first bite and gushed about it and then quickly tucked in and ate everything on her plate and then took more. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast so she was indeed hungry, but also, it tasted amazing.
“You say that like you’re surprised. I did tell you I can cook.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really believe you.”
River makes an exasperated sound.
“So.” She leans in and rests her crossed arms on the table. “How are you doing? Really.”
River sighs and sets down his fork, leaning back in his chair. He rubs his hands up and down his face a couple of times, then he looks at Louisa. “You know I’m starting to regret letting you in.”
“Come on, River,” she says, not unkindly. “You can’t keep it all bottled up, you’ll turn into Lamb. You must be feeling something about it all.”
He takes a quick drink of wine, polishing off the glass, and Louisa is remined of the night in the train station when he’d said, “He’s m’ dad,” and her jaw had nearly dropped to the floor.
River bites his thumb and stares at the table for a minute before dropping his hand into his lap. “Besides furious? I honestly don’t know. Horror, satisfaction, guilt, curiosity, loss, nausea about the loss, morbid fascination, betrayal, schadenfreude. Where would I even start?” He refills his glass and takes another deep drink.
“Anywhere you like.”
River’s shaking his head even before she finishes. “Honestly, there’s just…so much, I can’t sort it all through in my head. Mostly I have so many questions that I’ll probably never get answers to.”
“Have you…talked to your mother about it?”
River scoffs, shaking his head. “God, no.”
She thinks better of pressing him after the reaction River had had on the subject the week before in the car. “What about your grandfather?”
He sighs. “I’ve tried, a few times when he seemed more lucid, but he always says he doesn’t remember.”
“Do you believe him?”
River gives a small shake of his head, lips pursed. “I don’t know. I want to. You know, mostly I’m so…furious that Tavener just let him walk away.”
“Lamb said he had dirt on the Park, things Taverner never wants to see the light of day.”
“So…what? He has a lifelong get-out-of-jail-free card? He just gets to go about killing people and ruining people’s lives with no repercussions? He wanted me to join him. Did I tell you that?”
It’s rhetorical, so she doesn’t respond. She does know, though; she’d read it in the debrief that Catherine had given her.
“He wants to, to start over, start building a new group of assassins, and he wanted me to be one of them.” River laughs, a bitter thing with no humor in it. “He genuinely seemed to think that I’d just leave MI5 and join his merry band of killers. What the hell did he see in me that he thought there was even the remotest chance I’d do that?”
“Nothing. The guy is obviously delusional, River, you can’t let him get under your skin.”
“He’s already there, isn’t he? It’s repulsive that half of the genes I carry are his. It makes me want to, to, to peel my skin off.” He visibly shivers.
“River, you said it yourself, he was just a sperm donor. There is nothing about you that’s like him. Nothing.”
“What about the fact that I want to kill him?”
“But you wouldn’t do it, would you? It’s not unreasonable. He put you and people you love through a lot of shit. He killed people you care about. You’re allow to be angry about that. You’re allowed to hate the man.”
“Yeah,” River says, biting his cheek and looking past her through the window into the dark.
It’s quiet for a moment and she lets him brood while she sips her wine—if anyone deserves to, she supposes he does. But only for so long. When her glass is empty, she says, “Thank you for dinner. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
His eyes shift to her and his features relax. “Want some more?”
“God, no, I’m stuffed. I’d take more wine though, if you have it.”
“Sure.” He stands with his plate and reaches for hers.
“Let me help,” she says, starting to stand herself.
“No, no, it’s fine,” River assures her. “Don’t need any help.”
Louisa has a sudden flash of memory.
“What can we do to help him?” she’d asked Lamb that morning in Slough House, wiping away the last of the apparently unwarranted tears.
“Nothing,” Lamb had barked, clearly annoyed by River taking off on his own but never admitting it. “If he wanted help he would’ve asked for it.”
She stews in the memory as he pulls a new bottle of wine from the rack and goes through the process of opening it. He returns with it and refills her glass before sitting to refill his own.
The thought of that morning at Slough House has churned up a sudden anger in her, deep and roiling. “You never do, do you?”
He stops, the wine bottle hovering over his glass, his eyebrows up. “What?”
“Need help,” she clarified. “You think you never need help from anyone.” The words come out sharp. Sharper than she intended. Or possibly not—she’s running on pure emotion, not sure what she intended.
River turns and glances around the kitchen before circling back to her; his brows are furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
Swift, hot anger flashes through her. “I’m talking about how you always run off on your own. On the embankment that night, you asked if we could talk about it later. Well, it’s later.” It’s the other half of why she’d come here tonight, to have this conversation. She hadn’t realized how angry she was about it until now.
“Louisa…”
“Yeah, no. Don’t ‘Louisa’ me, River.” Her voice has risen and she knows she should be quieter because of the OB but her emotions are spiraling and she can’t control it.
He’s eyeing her carefully as he pours himself a last splash of wine and sets the bottle on the table. “I don’t always run off—”
“Yeah, you do, Min. You run off by yourself and—" She cuts herself off when her brain catches up with her words. Ah, shit.
There is utter silence in the room.
“Louisa—”
“Oh God.” She squeezes her eyes shut and she drops her face into her hands.
“It’s—”
She snaps her head up. “Don’t.”
“—okay.”
“It was just a slip. I didn’t mean anything by it.” She can almost convince herself that’s the truth, but a wave of familiar grief is already rolling over her and her eyes are filling.
“I know.” He says it quickly, nodding his head.
Patronizing bastard, she thinks, anger flashing again. “No, you know what? I did mean something by it.” She takes a deep breath through her nose and lets it out slowly, trying to get her emotions under control. River opens his mouth to say something but Louisa holds her hand out, palm up, to stop him. “Just…give me a minute.”
“Sorry,” River says, ducking his head.
She blinks her eyes rapidly and takes a couple shaky breaths, then takes a long drink of her wine. Wisely, River doesn’t say anything.
When she’s got more control of her voice, she says, “Min took off, that day. We were following the Russians and they got in a cab and he rode off on his bike at full speed through London traffic and he, he could have been killed, and it terrified me.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
She’s not sure if he’s acknowledging her feelings about her concern for Min, or if he’s apologizing for taking off without a word.
“He took off and he could have been killed and I was so…angry at him. We argued about it later and then he went off on his own again and he was killed. And now you keep running off—“
“One time, Lou—”
“One time?” she says, her voice rising again. “That’s bullshit, River.” She slams her hand on the table. “You ran off at Stanstead when Taverner told you to stand down. You followed Hobden without telling anyone and got your head cracked and Sid followed you and died.” River flinches at that. “You ran off after Catherine’s kidnappers, alone; you absolutely would have gone to that facility on your own if I hadn’t forced myself along with you. And you ran off to France alone and then almost got blown up by a grenade. Do the math, River. Nothing good ever happens when you go off on your lone-wolf bullshit. When are you going to understand that and start trusting us?”
“I trust—”
“You didn’t trust us! You ran off to France by yourself. And worse, you intentionally made us believe you were dead—”
“It was just to buy some time—”
“Yeah, well, in the meantime, we thought you were dead. It was horrible and all I could think was that it was my fault because I pushed you to come here that night. And you want to know the worst thing about it? I cried, River. In Slough House. In front of Ho.” Tears have sprung to her eyes again and she wipes them viciously. “Christ, I cried in front of Ho,” she says through the tears. “Do you have any idea how much you owe me for that?”
He looks contrite but also like every man she’s ever known when confronted by women in the throes of strong emotion: paralyzed with fear.
With tears still coming, she says, “You can’t keep running off on your own, because one of these days, River, you really are going to be killed and I…I can’t live through that again!” She uses her middle fingers to wipe under her eyes from the side of her nose across her cheekbone. Her fingers come away black with mascara. “Christ, I must look a mess. Is there a loo I can use?” She’s embarrassed for her mini breakdown and can’t quite bring herself to look at him.
“Yeah, yeah, of course.” He quickly stands and so does she, just as the O.B. yells for River from upstairs. River’s eyes look toward the stairs.
“I’m sorry, I’ll get out of your hair,” she tells him, grabbing a tissue from the box on the counter and wiping her nose.
He places a light hand on her arm. “I’ll just be a minute, please don’t leave.”
She’s suddenly exhausted and not sure she has more fight in her for one night. When she doesn’t respond, he says again, “Please.”
He looks so earnest that she finds herself saying, “Alright.”
“Good. Come on,” he leads her toward the stairs then points to the right. “The loo is just around there.”
“Thanks,” she says, skirting by him. She hears him ascend the steps as she’s closing the bathroom door.
When he gets to his grandfather’s room, the O.B. is clearly agitated. He worries that he’d heard their conversation downstairs but it turns out he’d just had a nightmare. It takes River nearly twenty minutes of soothing to get him to settle and back to sleep. But he can’t deny that he’s happy to have the time to think through how to respond to Louisa.
When he finally makes it back down to the kitchen he half expects that she will have left, but she hasn’t; she’s leaning against the kitchen counter eating a slice of cake. The washing up has all been done.
Louisa looks caught. “You were taking kind of a long time and…there was cake.”
He’d bought it at the shops the day before because lemon cake is his grandfather’s favorite. But when he’d offered a piece, the O.B. had scrunched up his brows and snapped that he detested lemon cake.
River waves her off. “Have at it,” he says and stands across from her, leaning on the old Aga.
“Listen,” he says, “I did call you.”
She stops with the fork halfway to her mouth. “What?”
“I had Catherine’s phone and after Patrice snatched me and took me to Frank, I did try to call you but Frank caught on to what I was doing and basically…” He chews at his bottom lip, lost in the memory of the jolt of pure fear he’d felt when Frank had said he hoped River wasn’t too attached to whomever he had called. His blood had run cold and he’d disconnected immediately; the thought of something happening to Louisa because of him had terrified him. He flicks his glance back to her. “He would have killed you, alright? And I wasn’t about to give him the chance and I won’t apologize for it.”
She looks like she’s about to argue the point but before she can he quickly follows up with, “But I am sorry, for making you think I was dead. Mostly, though, for making you cry in front of Ho. That’s, yeah, that’s really bad.”
Louisa lets out a small strangled laugh and the remaining tension that hung in the room finally disappears. “Yeah, you’re going to owe me for a long time, like the rest of your natural life.”
River nods agreeably. “Yep. Got it. What’s that going to cost me?” He snaps his fingers. “Daily coffee from the shop across the street for a month.”
“You heard the part where I said the rest of your natural life, right?”
River huffs and smiles, cuts himself a slice of cake and puts another one on Louisa’s plate.
“Please tell me you didn’t make this cake, too. I’m not sure my world view is ready to be so completely turned upside down.”
“I did not make the cake,” River assures her.
“Thank God,” she mutters before taking a bite of her second piece.
They eat in momentary silence, forks lightly clinking on the porcelain china now and then.
“Look,” she says eventually. “Please just, don’t go running off by yourself anymore. Slough House may not be much, but we have your back, every one of us. Even Lamb.”
River snorts his skepticism.
“He does. He covered for you with Flyte and kept your granddad safe. He’s shite at showing it but he’ll do whatever it takes to protect his joes.”
“Yeah.” River pokes at the yellow icing on the cake, his stomach suddenly souring at the memory of Louisa telling him she wanted to be done with Slough House by the end of the year. He wishes he could say the same but he knows that the only way he’ll ever leave the service is if he’s finally actually fired or in a body bag. “I don’t…I don’t know how I’ll be able to just carry on like before. You know you're the only thing about Slough House that makes it vaguely worth getting up in the morning.”
“A ringing endorsement,” she says, her expression confused.
“Sorry, it’s just—” Impulsively, he puts down his plate and steps close to Louisa, telegraphing his intent. She rolls her eyes but acquiesces, setting down her own plate so River can tug her into his arms. “God, I’ll miss you.” He can’t stop himself from planting a kiss on the top of her head. He’s realized recently that she’s the best friend he’s had in ages and the thought of not seeing her nearly every day leaves him feeling suddenly, breathlessly, bereft.
She pulls back suddenly. “Why? Where’re you going?” She looks almost panicked.
He blinks at her. “Not me. You. You said you wanted to leave Slough House.”
She waves him off and slides back into his arms. “Oh, yeah, never mind about that. Catherine talked me out of it.”
“She did?”
“Yeah, she said I’d be bored to death and she’s not wrong.”
“Oh, thank God,” River says, giving Louisa one brief tight squeeze, then releasing her.
“She’s back, by the way.”
“Who? Catherine? She came back to Lamb?”
Louisa nods. “Mmhm.”
“Is it wrong of me to feel happy that she’s back suffering Jackson’s abuse?”
“Probably, but I feel the same.” She looks at her watch. “God, better go. I don’t want to get caught in the house after curfew.”
“Cute.”
She’s smirking as he walks her to the front hall and retrieves her jacket from the closet.
She slips it on then turns to face him. “When will you be back?”
River reflexively glances toward the stairs and grimaces. “I’ve just…got to get him sorted but then…yeah, I’ll be back soon. Maybe a week?”
“I like my coffee with cream and no sugar.” She gives him another smirk.
“Yeah, yeah, good to know,” he says, as if he hadn’t marked her coffee preference months ago. He gives her a playful shove out the door and she laughs as she goes. River watches until she’s in her car before he closes the door. He’s nearly buoyant with relief as he heads up the stair to check on the O.B.