After coffee, the group began to break up—Owen disappearing quietly without a good-bye, and Lars taking a loud leave with a joke about Chloe. Bullmer was still nowhere to be seen, nor was Anne.
“Come for a snifter of something in the bar?” Tina said to me as I placed my empty cup on a side table. “Alexander’s going to have a tinkle on the baby grand in there.”
“I—I’m not sure,” I said. I was still pondering what Owen White had told me over coffee about Solberg’s break-in. What did it mean? “I might turn in.”
“Ben?” Tina purred. He looked at me.
“Lo? Want me to walk you back to your cabin?”
“No need, I’m fine,” I said, and turned to go. I was almost at the door when I felt a hand catch at my wrist and turned. It was Ben.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “What’s going on?”
“Ben.” I glanced behind him at the other guests, laughing and chatting obliviously as the stewards cleared up around them. “Let’s not do this here. Nothing’s going on.”
“Then why were you acting so weird all through dinner? You saw me saving you a chair and you deliberately ignored me.”
“Nothing’s going on.” There was a painful pressure in my temples, as if the anger I’d been suppressing all night was taking its toll.
“I don’t believe you. Come on, Lo, spit it out.”
“You lied to me.” It burst out in a furious whisper, before I could consider the wisdom of the accusation. Ben looked taken aback.
“What? No, I didn’t!”
“Really?” I hissed. “So you never left the cabin when everyone was playing poker?”
“No!” It was his turn to glance over his shoulder now at the other guests. Tina was looking across at us, and he turned back, lowering his voice. “No, I didn’t— Oh, no, wait, I did go and get my wallet. But that wasn’t a lie—not really.”
“Not a lie? You told me categorically no one left that cabin. And then I find out from Cole not only that you did leave, but anyone else could have left, too, while you weren’t there.”
“But that’s different,” he muttered. “I left, God, I don’t know when, but it was early in the evening. It wasn’t round the time you were talking about.”
“So why lie about it?”
“It wasn’t a lie! I just didn’t think. Jesus, Lo—”
But I didn’t let him finish. I pulled my wrist out of his grip and hurried away, through the doors and into the corridor, leaving him gaping after me.
I was so busy thinking about Ben that as I rounded the corner near the upper-deck toilet, I almost tripped over Anne Bullmer. She was leaning back against the wall as if steeling herself for something, although whether to return to the party, or make her way back to her cabin, I wasn’t sure. She looked extremely tired, her face gray, the shadows around her eyes darker than ever.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I gasped, and then, thinking of the bruise on her collarbone, “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
She smiled, the fine skin around her mouth crinkling, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes.
“I’m fine, I’m just very tired. Sometimes . . .” She swallowed, and her voice cracked for a moment, something in the cut-glass English accent slipping. “Sometimes it all just seems too much—d’you know what I mean? Such a performance.”
“I do,” I said sympathetically.
“If you’ll excuse me, I am going to bed,” she said, and I nodded and turned to make my own way back aft, down the flight of stairs that led to the rear set of cabins.
I was almost at the door of my suite when I heard an angry voice from behind me.
“Lo. Lo, wait, you can’t make those kind of accusations and walk away.”
Shit. Ben. I felt a strong urge to slip inside my cabin and slam the door, but I made myself turn to face him, my back against the door.
“I didn’t make any accusations. I just said what I’d been told.”
“You pretty much implied you’re suspecting me now! We’ve known each other more than ten years! Do you realize how that makes me feel—that you could accuse me of lying like that?”
There was genuine hurt in his voice, but I refused to let myself soften. It had been Ben’s favorite tactic in arguments, when we were together, to divert the discussion away from whatever was annoying me to the fact that I’d hurt his feelings and was acting irrationally. Time and again I’d ended up apologizing for the fact that I’d upset him—my own feelings completely ignored, and always, in the process, we’d somehow wound up losing sight of the issue that had provoked the disagreement in the first place. I wasn’t falling for it now.
“I’m not making you feel anything,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I’m stating facts.”
“Facts? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Ridiculous?” I folded my arms. “What does that mean?”
“I mean,” he said hotly, “that you’re acting completely paranoid. You’re seeing bogeymen behind every corner! Maybe Nilsson—”
He stopped. I clenched my fist around my delicate evening bag, feeling the solid bulk of my phone beneath the slippery sequins.
“Go on? Maybe Nilsson . . . what?”
“Nothing.”