Free Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) by Ian Tregillis Page B

wasn’t here. I knew that I— he —carried it with him. So I’d have to get it later. But I knew I’d be returning, depending on how things went at the Admiralty tonight. I was destined to spend the night bouncing back and forth between the Admiralty and my house like a badminton shuttlecock. A wearying thought. But time had grown very short, and it was crucial that my counterpart, the other Raybould Phillip Marsh, made that rendezvous with the U-boat.
    Time to leave. And I started to, but had to duck back into the shelter when the kitchen door creaked open. Liv had come home.
    She called, “Love, are you about?” Just as she had always done. Back when she had still loved me. Back when her voice was still a dulcet soprano.
    I opened my mouth to answer my wife—it was natural, the most natural thing in the world—but only caught myself as the first shivers of pain rattled through my ruined throat. She wouldn’t recognize the rasp of my voice. Liv would never know me as her husband, by sight or sound.
    Even the illusion was lost to me. I couldn’t pretend—from a distance, for a few moments—to be her lover.
    More than anything at that moment, I wanted to be Cyrano de Bergerac. To speak to my lady from hiding. To let her think that I was somebody else. But it was not to be. So I huddled in the shelter while she called again.
    “Raybould? Are you home?” I wondered if she had heard me rifling through the shelter. Had she heard me rap my head? I leaned toward the finger-width gap in the Anderson door, straining to listen past the thudding of my heart and the faint tattoo of rain on the garden walk. “Hmmmph,” she said, and closed the door. I recognized another creak a moment later; she had opened the window above the sink. I crept forward, still listening.
    Liv said, “Your father drives me mad some days. Sooner or later we’ll get burgled because he can’t see fit to close a door properly.” She paused for the sound of running water. Then she added, “Or mend a leaky faucet.”
    She was talking to Agnes. Oh God. Agnes.
    I nudged the shelter door and peeked through the gap with one eye. Liv’s auburn hair bobbed through the kitchen as she tended to the stew.
    Agnes began to cry. I froze with my hand on the door. That sound. That wonderful sound. There was a hole in me where Agnes had been. But it shrank a little as my daughter wailed and her mother soothed her.
    “Shhh, shhh, baby girl.” Liv sang a lullaby.
    I closed my eyes, swaying to the sound of her voice.
    Home. I was home again, my beloved wife and daughter just a few feet away. I could be with them in seconds. I could do it. I could approach Liv. I could tell her the truth, tell her her husband had finally returned from the longest journey. She’d know it for truth; I could convince her. I could whisper things only her husband knew, touch her in ways only her husband knew.
    I could. I would. I would have my family back. I would take them back, and damn my doppelgänger. He didn’t deserve them as I did.
    I’m coming, love.
    Still swaying to Liv’s voice, I opened my eyes, reached for the door—
    And glimpsed myself in the shaving mirror. Glimpsed my ugly beard, my ruined face, my sunken weary eyes. Saw myself as Liv would see me: a wretch, a horror, a burned madman in an ill-fitting husband costume.
    And what of him? What of he, that other me, the other Raybould Marsh, the one Liv called husband and love? My homecoming would never be complete as long as he walked this world. Could I do that? When it was over, my mission completed, could I push him aside and take his place?
    I wanted to believe I could. Wanted to believe it wasn’t a fool’s vanity.
    I had turned back the years, but was the damage reparable? What bridge could span the vast gulf of years that separated me from the man I had been?
    The gate didn’t squeak because I tugged up on the hinge slats as I pushed it open. A trick I’d learned in the postwar years, coming home from