“I’ve come at a bad time,” I said. “I should leave.”
“It isn’t that.” James dropped the letter back onto the desk and paced away, moving like a cat. He did not glance at me again. “Paul shouldn’t have sent you here, to see this—to see how I live. I never have women here. You can see why.” He pulled a kettle from the cupboard and turned on the water in the tiny sink.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.
He made a noise that was not quite a laugh. “There’s plenty wrong with me, Ellie.”
“Fine, then,” I said, suddenly angry. “There’s plenty wrong with me, too. There’s plenty wrong with everyone since the war ended. Everyone who’s still alive, that is.”
He put the kettle on the stove, unlit, and paused, his back to me. He put his hands on the counter, his shoulders hunched, his head down, and there was a long moment of silence. When he spoke, his voice was calm again, but the pain in it had not abated. “Do you ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes,” I answered, thinking of living in my mother’s house, wearing my mother’s dress.
Still he did not move, did not turn. “Some days I wonder if I’m going to wake from a dream and find myself in the trenches again. If everything that has happened since the war has happened to a stranger, a man I don’t know.” He seemed to be forcing the words out, and I watched him, entranced. “The war,” he said slowly, “is my most vivid memory. Do you know that? More vivid than my childhood, more vivid than law school, more vivid than any woman. How is that fair? I tried to blot it out with drink for the first few years, until Paul found me, though it never worked. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my men in those woods.” His knuckles went white on the edge of the counter, his arms flexed, his head bowed. Every line of his body spoke of pain.
“Tell me,” I said softly.
“I was an officer,” he said, though I thought perhaps he would have spoken even if I hadn’t asked. “I was in charge of those men. We were ordered to take the woods, to clear them out—it was tactical. So we advanced. But no one knew there was a machine gunner.” He lifted one hand and rubbed it over his face. “My men were mowed down. All of them. It took maybe ten seconds. I saw it happen, and I will never unsee it.”
“Fenton,” I said.
James shook his head. “There was nothing special about Fenton, not before that day. He was just one of my men. He was the only one besides me who made it alive past the tree line, that’s all. We didn’t make it far into the woods before we fell. I was only shot behind the knee, while the rest of them were dead in the grass. Except Fenton, who died on the ground next to me. He’d been ripped open, nearly split in half. It was a miracle that he ran as far as he did.”
And then the German had come for his souvenir. I was chilled, shocked—but not as chilled and shocked as I should have been. Part of me had seen it, smelled it. Part of me had lain on the ground, listening to the screaming. I knew.
James straightened, ran a hand through his hair. Finally he turned and looked at me, his features etched in the cloudy light from the window. “When Paul found me, I realized, what did it matter? All the drink in the world couldn’t make the war go away. Why not face it head-on, then? Talk to the grieving, the mad, the deluded. Why not look for the answers to life and death? It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I threw myself into it. I exposed the liars, the ones who prey on the families of the men who were butchered just like my men were. It was satisfying, a little like I was avenging my men in the only way I knew.”
“And then Gloria came along,” I said.
James shook his head. “No. Gloria’s power was amazing, it’s true, but finding her was a little like an astronomer claiming to discover the North Star. It was incredibly obvious to me, as experienced as I was, that I was dealing with the real thing, almost from the first moment. The one who bothered me—the one who still bothers me—is you.”
“We’ve been over this, James.”
He pushed away from the counter and came toward me. “It wasn’t just that I was fooled, that there was a true medium under my nose and I didn’t see it. It was that it had to be you.” He came close and brushed his fingertips over my cheek, his gaze taking me in. I held my breath. “I knew perfectly well that you were awake that night, you know, when I put you to bed on the sofa. I knew it all along.” When I sighed, he smiled. “I’ve told you, you’re a terrible liar.”
You’ll never find a man to take you unless you lie to him—do you know that? said Gloria’s voice in my head. “I was drunk,” I told James, “and rather pathetic. I wanted you to like me.”
“It always bothered me, what happened,” he said softly. “I told you that. But I tried not to think about it. And then Gloria died, and there you were in Trafalgar Square, and I was reminded . . .” His fingers traveled to my hair, touched the blond ends where they curled over my ear. “I spotted you right away. I told you it was a lucky guess that I found you at Ramona’s, but I lied. I followed you. I didn’t even know why, not really—it was just instinct. I knew that whatever was going to happen, I only had to wait. And then you had that vision.” He looked into my eyes and his gaze cleared. He was so close I could feel his breath on my cheek, see the warm shadows in the hollow of his throat. I could smell his familiar shaving soap. “What did you come here for, Ellie?” he asked me.
Words tumbled through my disordered mind, but I couldn’t speak them. I could only look at him for a long moment. He was right—I was a terrible liar, and all the longing I felt must have shown in my face. I curled my fingers over his wrist, pressed my fingers into the warm pad at the base of his thumb.
“I want to meet the Dubbses,” I said.