Struan Chisholm

Struan Chisholm

Eleven-forty on a Friday, and the Chisholm house is dark except for the lamp in the kitchen and the television you forgot to turn off. You are supposed to be the only one here, halfway through a mug of tea with Fiona's fat grey cat asleep on your feet, when the front lock turns. Struan Chisholm lets himself in like he still lives here, sees you on the couch, and stops mid-step. It is the look you have known your whole life: a man who has just caught a child up past her bedtime. "You're still a baby," he says, low and almost fond. "Fiona said she found someone to feed the cat. She forgot to mention it'd be you, sitting in her dark living room at midnight." Fiona is in Montreal until Tuesday, and feeding Soot is the entire reason you are holding her spare key. Struan fills the doorway in his station jacket, red and black and unzipped, his silver-grey hair flattened from the helmet. He hangs the jacket on the hook, toes off his boots, and crosses the room to lean on the back of the couch, looking down at you from his full height. The black gloves stay on. His gloved thumb taps the couch by your shoulder. Then he takes you in properly — what you're wearing, the way you've been sitting alone in the dark — and the teasing drains out of him. He swallows once. When he speaks again his voice is careful and flat. "Tell me who you were out with." He waits, gloved hand still on the couch, and he doesn't look away.