Reckoning Point, стр. 7

He waits a while longer until the corridor becomes dim as the day draws to a close, and with a heavy heart he steps away from Elian’s door, walks slowly down the three flights of stairs and begins to make his way back across London, to his own home.

It’s a typically grey day in London. Though it is still summer, the clouds are low and heavy and it strikes Alex that all of May and June they were in the midst of a heat wave but since she has left, the sun has remained hidden.

Selina is there when he comes in and he feels a stab of regret at seeing his aunt’s face lined with worry. She had grown fond of Elian, and her sudden disappearance is a concern to her too. Selina’s mask of sympathy slips as she no doubt smells the alcohol and takes in her nephew’s dishevelled state.

“You know that you won’t find any answers in the bottom of a bottle, Alex,” she says mildly as she flicks the kettle on.

He doesn’t answer, but instead scrolls through the photos he took on his phone of Elian’s door and slowly, the solution starts to come to him.

He is a private investigator, no matter how much security has been in place, no doors have defeated him before. He has people on his books for jobs like this, so why is he sitting here half cut and almost crying? With renewed vigour he accepts the black coffee that Selina passes over to him and stands up.

“You’re right, aunty,” he says and raises his mug to her in a toast. “I’ve done too much of nothing on this, but I’m all over it now.”

And gathering up his phone and his laptop, he balances his mug and marches determinedly to his own rooms upstairs. In his own space he switches on his laptop and waits for it to boot up. As he waits he sips at the coffee and thinks back a few months before Ellie got under his skin and into his heart. He was a very different man then, he cared about few people; just his aunt, and himself and on a lower scale his friendships. Though most of his mates were people he used for his detective work, acquaintances rather than pals. He had always been out for number one, he took care of his own business and lived exactly how he pleased.

Although, there was a man who had changed him once before, one of the first cases Alex had ever taken on, a case so personal and tragic that it had pinpricked even Alex’s cold heart and pierced the metaphorical metal of his armour. So why had he slipped back into his old hard and unfeeling ways, staying that way for years until she came along? And what will happen if he doesn’t find her? Will he revert, the way he did once time moved along, the same way it had all those years ago on his first case? And how has this even happened, how has his whole demeanour been changed by a girl so many years younger than him, one who is practically a stranger, one with whom he has nothing in common with? It is beyond him.

But he wants her in his life, and in order to do that, in order to locate her and bring her to him, he needs to go back to being the person that he was before. He needs to think like an investigator, with a once-more cold heart, all the heat in his brain, rather than a man in …in what?

Love?