The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 12: Return
I left before lunch because my mother had begun packing food for me as if Leuven had no bread.
She stood at the kitchen counter with foil, paper napkins, a plastic bag from the bakery, and the serious expression of a woman preparing provisions for a siege. Two sandwiches were already wrapped. A third waited open on the cutting board, cheese laid carefully over buttered bread. The kitchen was cold despite the radiator. Morning light sat grey against the window and made the Christmas candle look embarrassed to still be there.
“You do not need to make so much,” I said.
“I know.”
She added another slice of cheese.
My father was in the living room. I could hear the television, though it was too early for him to need it that loud. He had not said goodbye. He had said, from behind the paper, “Back to the big city, then,” and when I answered yes, he made the small sound that meant he had done his part in the conversation and expected the house to call it enough.
My mother wrapped the third sandwich.
“Are you sure you have everything?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Your scarf?”
“In the bag.”
“The blue one?”
“Yes.”
“The other one is warmer.”
“I have the warm one.”
She looked at the bag as if it might betray us both. “Good.”
I wanted to say a dozen things. That I should have stayed longer. That I should have left earlier. That the line about the washing machine had been true and still ugly. That the house had made my skin feel too tight. That I did not know how to help without making more weather around her. All of it pressed up at the back of my throat and became nothing useful. Instead I took the sandwiches from her hand.
“Thank you.”
She nodded. “You will eat on the train.”
“I will.”
“Do not just say that.”
The faintest smile touched her mouth. It vanished quickly, but it had been there.
“I will eat one on the train,” I said. “The rest I will hide in my room and pretend I am independent.”
“Good,” she said. “That sounds more honest.”
From the living room, my father laughed at something on television. My mother’s shoulders changed by a fraction. The morning narrowed around that sound. I put the sandwiches in my bag.
At the door, she touched my sleeve and then seemed to regret the boldness of it.
“Text when you arrive,” she said.
“I will.”
She looked at me. “Do that one too.”
“I will.”
I stepped toward her before she could decide whether the house allowed it. She held me briefly, one hand flat against my back, the other caught between us. She smelled of soap, coffee, and the kitchen. Then she let go. My father did not come to the hallway.
Outside, the air cut cleanly into my lungs. The sky was low and pale. The street looked smaller than memory and more stubborn than reason.
I walked with my bag over one shoulder, the weight of the sandwiches against my hip, the lottery ticket still folded in my wallet. I had not checked the result. By then I could have. Newspapers existed. Radios existed. Teletext existed in houses where fathers did not own the remote like a minor throne. I had avoided all of it with a discipline that looked better than it was.
There would be time later. I left the ticket where it was.
Lizzy was waiting near the corner before the road bent toward the station, hands in the pockets of a dark coat, hair loose in the wind. For a second I thought I had imagined her. Then she lifted one hand.
“My mother told your mother,” she said when I reached her.
“That sounds illegal.”
“It is Christmas. Mothers have emergency powers.”
She said it lightly, but her eyes moved over my face with less lightness than the joke deserved. I had known her before Leuven, before Marieke, before the notebook began to acquire new columns. Her scarf was crooked. One cheek was pink from the cold. She had put on boots meant for walking and not for being seen walking. The ordinary care of that almost hurt.
“You did not have to come,” I said.
“No.”
She looked down the road toward the station. “That is why it counts.” We began walking.
The first minute was easier than it should have been. The bag shifted against my shoulder. Gravel clicked under our shoes where the pavement had cracked near a driveway. Someone’s Christmas lights still blinked in a window with the defeated persistence of decorations after the day itself has passed. Lizzy walked beside me with the old rhythm, close enough that our sleeves brushed once, far enough that neither of us had to make that mean anything.
“I thought you might come by,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean I actually thought it. Not in the polite way.”
“I almost did.”
She glanced at me quickly.
“There he is,” she said, and then her mouth tightened. “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For being pleased before thinking.”
“It is all right.”
“No,” she said. “It is not. I don’t always know which James I am talking to.”
She had not made it pretty. She looked annoyed at herself for saying it, and more annoyed because it was true.
“Neither do I,” I said.
She gave a small sound, half laugh, half breath. “That is not comforting.”
“It was not meant to be.”
“Look at you. New James has terrible bedside manner.”
“He is first year. Standards are low.”
“That is not true. Everyone expects medical students to become smug immediately.”
“I am behind schedule.”
She smiled then, properly, and the cold morning loosened a little.
At the next street we crossed without needing to speak. She knew the station route. She knew where the pavement dipped after rain, where the bakery van parked badly, where an old woman always swept her step though no dirt had dared settle there in years. Walking with her required less translation than being anywhere else in that town. That was part of what I had almost gone to her for.
“I almost came,” I said, “because I would not have had to explain the house to you.”
Lizzy’s mouth moved, not quite a smile.
“No,” she said. “You never did.”
“And because I was angry.”
“At me?”
“No.”
She nodded, looking ahead. “Then I am glad you didn’t.”
The sentence was brave enough to sound almost casual. Her mouth tightened after she said it, as if the words had not landed where she expected.
“Are you?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I think I should be.”
We walked past the bakery. It was closed for the holiday, the metal grille pulled down, the window dark behind it. I remembered summer there, her paper bag, the first time she had said I looked awake. It had seemed like a beginning then. It had been. But beginnings do not tell you what they will ask for later.
“You would have come before,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And I would have liked that.”
I looked at her.
“I still would have liked it,” she said. “That is the annoying part.”
“I know.”
“You say that differently now.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Before, when you said you knew, you mostly meant you had heard me and were arranging yourself into something harmless.”
“That is a long diagnosis for someone who claims not to know which James she is talking to.”
“It is not a diagnosis. I am complaining.”
“That is healthier.”
“It feels less impressive.”
Lizzy looked ahead.
“It suits you,” she said.
For a while we only walked. The bag pulled at my shoulder.
The station appeared at the end of the street, grey and practical, its clock wrong by two minutes as it had been for half my childhood. A few people stood near the entrance with bags and holiday faces, all of them returning from something or to something, none of them knowing they were part of mine. Lizzy stopped before the doors.
“You can still come another time,” she said.
“When I am not angry?”
“When you are less dramatic about being angry.”
“I will try.”
“Do that.” She looked down at my bag. “Your mother packed food.”
“She threatened me with sandwiches.”
“Good. Someone has to.”
The train was announced over the speaker, distorted and bored. People adjusted bags. A child complained about cold. Lizzy moved first and hugged me before I could decide whether to offer it. She was cold from the walk, hair against my cheek, arms tight for one second too long and then gone. The old James would have turned that second into proof. I noticed the danger and the tenderness and did not know what to do with either. She stepped back.
“Text when you arrive,” she said.
“My mother gave the same order.”
“She is sensible.”
“You are both forming a committee.”
“We always had one. We just forgot to tell you.”
The train doors opened behind me.
“Lizzy,” I said.
She looked up.
“Thank you for coming.”
Her face did something small then. The old expectation passed over it, the reflex to make a joke, to turn the moment soft enough to survive. She did not take it.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
I boarded. Through the window, I saw her fold her arms against the cold. She did not wave until the train began to move. Then she lifted one hand and held it there too briefly for sentiment and too long for nothing.
I ate one sandwich before Mechelen because I had promised my mother and because hunger had begun to feel like one more thing I should not turn into strategy.
Leuven after Christmas looked like a city holding its breath between obligations.
The streets were thinner. Many students had gone home and not yet returned; those who remained moved with the pale, hunted look of people who had discovered exams were not a rumour. Cafés had half their chairs stacked. The library windows glowed too warmly from outside and too cruelly once you entered. Bicycles stood chained in wet rows. The bells continued with their usual indifference.
My room smelled of cold dust and old paper. I opened the window for five minutes, though the air made my hands ache, then closed it and unpacked. Sandwiches in the small cupboard. Shirts on the chair because I had no patience for the wardrobe. Anatomy notes on the desk. Exam schedule pinned under the lamp. Wallet in the drawer, then out again, then back in my coat pocket because no location felt less absurd than another. The ticket stayed folded where it was.
I tried to study lymphatic drainage and failed with remarkable consistency.
The words sat on the page in perfect obedience. Thoracic duct. Right lymphatic duct. Cisterna chyli. The body I had once known under field dressings and hospital lights was not the body the exam wanted. The exam wanted diagrams, names, borders, branches, the kind of memory that fits into boxes. Old experience gave me weight, context, smell, fear, consequence. It did not label the page for me.
I read the same paragraph four times and retained only the shape of my mother’s hand above the candle.
After an hour, I stood so quickly the chair scraped the floor and someone below thumped the ceiling in protest.
“Sorry,” I said to the room, because apparently I had begun apologizing to architecture. I put on my coat and went out.
The kiosk near the square was open. Its owner had one of those faces that suggested he had been disappointed before I entered and would remain disappointed after I left. Newspapers were stacked near the door, some with Christmas headlines already stale, others with football, accidents, weather, politics, all the daily machinery by which the world proves it has no interest in personal revelation.
I bought a paper and a pack of mints I did not want.
Outside, under the shallow awning, I opened to the lottery results because my hands had decided before I allowed myself to admit it. The numbers were printed small.
1. 5. 10. 15. 23. 29.
Bonus 19.
At first there was no feeling. That was the worst of it. No heat, no triumph, no rush of music from the sky. The numbers were simply there, black on cheap paper, the same ordinary ink used for football scores and cinema times. I looked at them as if the act of looking could make them rearrange into something less obedient.
I took the ticket from my wallet. The paper was softer now at the folds.
1. 5. 10. 15. 23. 29.
Bonus 19.
I counted again because numbers are supposed to become safer when repeated. They did not.
A bicycle bell rang close enough to make me flinch. Someone brushed past, muttering an apology. The kiosk owner was watching me through the glass with professional suspicion. I folded the newspaper once, then again, badly. The ticket went back into my wallet. My wallet went into the inside pocket of my coat. My hand stayed there over it, palm flat against my chest, as if the paper might escape if it understood what it was. The sixth number had changed the weight of everything.
I began walking without deciding where.
The square opened ahead of me, grey stone under grey sky, students crossing with bags and scarves, an old man feeding pigeons as if the future had not just committed a crime in my pocket.
I knew, in a distant administrative way, that there had been several winners. The number in my head, carried from old newspapers and old barracks conversations and the irritating precision of a memory that never saved a man from the right pain, was a sum in that range. More than enough to make the building possible. More than enough to make every careful explanation look suspicious if handled badly. More than enough to turn a young man stupid.
I had imagined winning before I bought the ticket. Imagination had been clean. The fact was not.
The fact had paper fibres, claim procedures, witnesses, accounts, signatures, dates, questions, and the sudden need not to behave like a boy who had found a treasure chest under his bed.
I went back to my room and locked the door.
Then I took the ticket out again and laid it on the desk beside the anatomy notes.
The lymphatic system waited under the lamp, patient and useless. I counted the numbers a third time. Then a fourth.
At the fifth count, I laughed once, a small unpleasant sound. Recognition came first, sharp enough to stop me before happiness could arrive. Foreknowledge had always been dangerous in theory. Now it had become something that could be folded into a wallet and lost in a wash.
I found a clean envelope, put the ticket inside, wrote nothing on it, then put the envelope inside the old physiology textbook I was least likely to lend to anyone. The page looked less like a system than panic that had found stationery.
The phone rang while I still had the textbook in my hand. Van Acker.
I looked at the name until the ringing almost stopped. Then I answered.
“Yes?”
“My wife looked at your offer,” Van Acker said.
He sounded as if his wife had made him read poetry aloud in public.
“And?”
“She laughed.”
“That is a beginning.”
“It is not the beginning you want.”
I sat at the desk. The textbook lay under my hand with the envelope hidden inside it. The anatomy notes lay open beside it. My coat was still on. I had forgotten to take it off.
“What number does she prefer?” I asked.
“Two eighty-five.”
“That is close to the asking price.”
“It is below the asking price.”
“By enough to buy bad curtains.”
Van Acker made a noise like a cough and a laugh had met in a damp basement. “You have become funny since the inspection.”
“The inspection was instructive.”
“The building stands.”
“The roof disagrees. The wiring is older than some of the tenants. The back drain is an argument with rain. The boiler is a prayer.”
“You sound like Peeters.”
“I paid Peeters.”
“Then you should know property is not for nervous men.”
“I am not nervous.”
“No,” he said. “That might be worse.”
I looked at the hidden textbook. A sum in that range sat near my left hand, invisible and useless until made legitimate.
“Two seventy-eight,” I said.
Van Acker went quiet.
When he spoke again, his voice had less theatre in it. “That is a student number.”
“No. It is the building number after roof, wiring, and plumbing. I am not paying for wiring twice.”
“My wife will call you unpleasant.”
“She has not seen the inspection report.”
“She has seen my face after reading your offer. Similar effect.”
“Two seventy-eight,” I said. “Subject to financing, notary review, and the inspection points already listed. I can provide updated proof of seriousness in January. Not a fantasy. Not a promise made over beer. A file.”
“A file,” he repeated, as if the word amused and offended him.
“Yes.”
“You are twenty.”
“I have noticed.”
“Boys your age buy stereos.”
“I have thin walls.”
Another damp sound. This one might have been amusement.
“I will tell her,” he said.
“When?”
“When she has finished saying I told you so about the roof.”
“That could take days.”
“Marriage is a long document.”
I nearly smiled. “I need an answer before the second week of January if you want this to stay quiet and without agents.”
“I know what quiet costs.”
“So do I.”
He did not answer that at once. For a moment, through the line, I heard ordinary sounds from his side, a door, keys, perhaps a woman speaking in another room.
“Two seventy-eight,” he said again.
“Yes.”
“I will call.”
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