Page 87 of That Defining Moment

He sat with the silence for a moment. The room was so thoroughly soundproofed that he could hear his own pulse in his ears as he thought about how to start.

“My father was fourteen,” Lysander said, “seven months pregnant with twins, and struggling to breathe because my brother — who has always been the more inconsiderate of the two of us — was sitting on his lungs. So the staff at his care home cleared out a storage cupboard, put a bed in it, and moved him in there. For his own good, they said. To keep the other kids from having a go at him.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Hamish knew the morning was ruined the instant Cassian picked up the cereal box.

There was a sound a nearly empty box of Lucky Charms made when Cassian shook it, a thin rattle of a few marshmallows and bits of cereal knocking about the bottom, that Hamish had learned to dread in the eleven days since Diwa had introduced Cassian to the stuff.

Cassian tilted the box towards the light and peered inside, and his face performed its whole repertoire of expressions in sequence: the lift of anticipation, the pucker of doubt, then the slow drawing in of every feature as he confirmed what the rattle had merely implied. He shook it again, harder, as though the cereal might materialise with a bit of encouragement.

Hamish leaned against the counter with his coffee and waited for the meltdown.

He hadn’t slept. Lysander had walked out of their bedroom somewhere around eleven, barefoot and furious, and the mattress had stayed cold on his side all night. Hamish had lain there in the dark waiting for the door to open, and it hadn’t. At some point the birds had started up outside and he’d given up on the pretence, come downstairs, and made coffee that was doing nothing for him. He was running on fumes and bad temper.

“Hamish.” Cassian held the box high. “It’s finished. There’s none left. I only had one bowl of it yesterday and now it’s all gone, and this is the one with the little purple horseshoes that go soft in the—”

“I can see it’s finished, Cass.”

“But there’s none left.”

“That does tend to be what finished means.”

Cassian set the box down on the island. His bottom lip had begun its slow migration outward, and Hamish recognised the shape of the next ten minutes with total clarity: the negotiation, the doctrine, the escalating grief, the eventual production of some catastrophically unsuitable alternative that Cassian would reject on grounds of texture. On any other morning he’d have handled it. He’d have trickled ungodly amounts of honey over longganisa with his own hands if that was what it took. This morning his patience had been spent in the small hours on a man who’d called him a coward, and there was nothing left in him that could see him through this.

“There’s plenty to eat in the pantry,” Hamish said, and heard the flatness in his own voice.

Cassian’s head came up.

“Are you cross with me?”

“No.” Hamish rubbed a hand down his face. “No, Cass, I’m not cross with you.”

Cassian’s eyes had gone wide and careful, working out whether he was upset enough to press the issue. Hamish, who did not fancy Cassian’s chances if he chose this exact moment to pitch a proper fit, opened his mouth to head him off at the pass.

“Right, what’s the crisis?”

Lysander was in the doorway.

He was in yesterday’s t-shirt and boxers. He looked wrecked, and also, Hamish registered, entirely unbothered.

Hamish waited for Lysander’s gaze to swing to him and reignite their fight. Instead, Lysander crossed to the island, took in the abandoned box and Cassian’s general air of tragedy in a glance.

“The Lucky Charms are gone,” Cassian informed him.

“Okay.” Lysander plucked it off the counter and dropped it in the recycling without ceremony. “Let’s walk to Proving Ground and get you something else, then.”

Cassian’s grief evaporated in an instant. “I’m having the bun with the currants,” he said. “And the pastéis. Can I have four?”

“No. You’ll make yourself sick, Cass.”

“I ate twelve before I threw up the last time.”

Lysander steered him towards the hallway with a hand between his shoulder blades. At the doorway Lysander paused. He didn’t turn all the way round. He tipped his head back over his shoulder, not quite far enough to meet Hamish’s eye, and said, casual as anything, “You coming, then?”

He waited on the front step with Cassian while Lysander went back upstairs to put trousers on.

Cassian sat on the second step watching the street come to life. A woman walking a greyhound received a wave so enthusiastic that her dog startled sideways into a recycling bin.