Free Wilderness of Mirrors by Ella Skye

it.”
    Heat flared beneath his already hot skin. “You’re comparing my relationship with your son to the – ” Nigel couldn’t even think of the proper way to say it. “To the way that man handled me?”
    “Nigel, please.” Her face had gone white. “I didn’t mean it. I know you’re not Dylan’s father. It’s just, you’re important to him. Important to us. Father might not have shown it, but he ca–”
    “Don’t say it,” Nigel interrupted. “Not aloud. Think what you’d like, but that man cared nothing for my mother or for me. I don’t know why he bothered.” He dropped his leg and stood, pain swimming up to the back of his eyeballs. The room tilted and he tried to pop his ears to stop the buzzing.
    Kate was up too. “Don’t go. I’m sorry…I don’t know why I said it. I’m just upset about Will. Where are you going?”
    Nigel lurched across the room and grabbed the handle leading toward the back stairwell. “For a walk.”
    He let the door close behind him, knowing full well it was akin to a slam.
Fuck.
What the hell had he been thinking coming here? It brought out the absolute worst in him.
    He swung down the long corridor, one hand brushing the oak paneling. How many times had he done the very same thing, hoping the blisters would distract him from his father’s tirades. There were seventy-eight bumps between here and the stairs. He counted them down as he went, aware that if he didn’t find a plaster soon, he’d be bleeding from his thigh and chest along with his knuckles.
    The smell of furniture polish on old wood and slightly damp oriental carpets pervaded his senses.
How can you live here, Kate? It’s like being stuck inside a too-big coffin.
A dog barked and he wondered if David was back from wherever he’d gone. Perhaps he could find him and cop some gauze and tape.
    But the barking ceased and only the dim surge of workers’ voices slipped under the miserable layers of cold air. He put his hand on the newel post and began a slow trudge. Halfway to the top, he paused to catch his breath. There was a curved niche in the wall’s plaster. Inside it sat a red Chinese vase.
    A tinge of recognition touched his mouth.
    Jesus, it had probably been here – hiding along the back stairwell – since the day he finished putting it back together. What would that be? Nearly thirty years ago?
    He had scaled Barkley’s slate roof to see if the library’s Ming would mark the patio the instant his wretched grandmother poured tea. When it did, with Rolex precision, Lady Emily had succumbed to a shriek ill fitting a woman of her position. The vase had detonated with a suitably sharp sigh of history gone to ruin, and that, at least, had given him pause to unearth a grin.
    A ghost of that rare childhood indulgence flitted over his mouth. So he rubbed it away, as if it might take with it the pain in his leg.
    After the death of the vase, he had been forced to listen to Lady Emily’s lecture on the rarity of copper-red underglaze vases made between 1368-1644 A.D. Then he’d picked through the manicured lawn with tweezers, sprawled upon the study’s carpet mesmerized by the porcelain carnage, and decided to repair it piece-by-piece, bit-by-bit, until the vase was reborn.
    His mother had wanted the repaired treasure returned to the library. His grandmother was for the kitchen bin. After a fiercely civilized battle of tongues, the niche on the upstairs landing became their Israel. Perhaps because his grandmother had interpreted Nigel’s yearlong reconstruction endeavor as repentance.
    The fact his mother had known better, and still argued for the original place of honor, was not lost on Nigel.
    A loyal woman, his mother.
    He summoned her image. Imagined the hint of a smile regarding his current predicament. Three decades hence, she would have been unsurprised.
    He touched the vase, brows suddenly knitting. He’d done a damn fine job putting it back together, but there wasn’t a single crack along