I take a seat on the sofa next to Emma, who doesn’t acknowledge me, but neatly places a red jack on top of a black queen. I’m not even sure why I’m here, except that somehow this seemed like the only place I could tolerate.
“We all miss you downstairs,” I babble. “Especially Nick. And even though we don’t actually know each other, I think I miss you, too, because you’re the only other person who could possibly understand how I got myself in this position.” I put my face in my hands. “Although you would be so mad at me right now, and you would be right. I’ve ruined everything. I didn’t mean to. I was trying to protect him from worrying about me the way he worried about you, and instead I made everything worse. I should have just been honest with him. That’s how we ended up together in the first place.”
I let out a sob. Emma looks up abruptly and peers at me, in what feels like a moment of actual, present eye contact.
“Do you think forgive and forget is a real thing?” I ask. “Because I did, until today. I’ve made the biggest mess, Emma, and the worst of it is that I could always see so clearly why this happened but I just now realized it doesn’t matter. Everyone has reasons. Murderers have reasons. But the people they killed still stay dead. You can’t just erase an action. Once it’s done, it’s written into your history. It’s always there. And I think what I did is carved into Nick and I can’t ever replace the piece of him I cut out. I let this break me, and then I broke him, too.”
Emma studies me again, longer this time, then flips over a card that proves to be useless. I wish that she would turn to me and say something apt or comforting, but she doesn’t. She is not miraculously cured at exactly the moment that I need her to be. She does not win her solitaire game. Emma is lost, and chances are she always will be.
But seeing what that looks like reminds me that I am not lost. Not yet.
“I may never see you again after tonight,” I tell her. “But I want you to know, wherever you are in there, that Nick is the best thing that ever happened to me. I regret a lot of things, but I will never regret him.”
Something moves in my periphery, and I look up to see Nick standing in the doorway. I still sometimes forget how gorgeous he is, and then it will hit me hard, like a wave breaking against you when your back is turned. I don’t know what, if anything, he heard. I lean over to kiss Emma’s cheek, then cross the room to face whatever it is that Nick is going to say. Which, for a bit, is nothing. Ten seconds are an eternity when they’re full of dread.
“You look beautiful,” he says, his voice catching. “The whole time we were downstairs, that’s all that was in my head. That’s the worst part, I think. Even now, you are perfect to me.”
“I was never perfect, Nick,” I say. “And not for nothing, I’m wearing like ten pounds of fake hair.”
His face is so sad that it wrenches me. “Would you have told me?” he asks softly.
“Yes,” I say, emphatically. “Yes.”
“I don’t mean today,” he says. “I mean ever.”
I am not sure what to say. Mostly because I’m not sure, period.
“I like to think I would have,” I begin slowly. “If I’d come out of that night with any lingering doubt, then of course, but…” I shrug. “I would have struggled with it, and I might have hated myself for it, but I genuinely might not have told you. Because I would have been scared of losing you over something that ultimately meant nothing, and I probably would have been right.” I stretch my hands wide. “That’s the truth. It’s unflattering, but I owe you nothing less.”
Nick studies me for a second. “Thank you,” he says. He picks at a spot of peeling paint on the doorframe. “It’s hard not having anyone to talk to about this. You and Freddie…” his voice trails off. “Do you think Freddie and I will ever be the same?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But it’s what he wants, more than anything.”
He closes his eyes. “We’ve spent so much time together, the three of us, the same as always. At home. In Spain, at Father’s birthday party,” he says. “All I can think of is whether he was looking at you in your bikini the same way I was.”
“But I was looking at you.” I want to reach out and touch him, but I cannot until he is ready. “Look, I fucked up, Nick. There’s no way around it. If I gave you the impression today that I was trying to wriggle out of anything, I’m sorry. I just wanted to explain what I was feeling when the whole thing happened, so you could understand how it’s possible that I could love you so much and still get caught in a moment like that. But maybe I should have just thrown myself on your mercy. Maybe trying to explain it made it worse.”
“I don’t want you to beg, Bex,” he says. “I just feel like I don’t have enough time. Like I’m being forced to make a choice about something I haven’t even begun to process.”
“Then don’t choose. Not now,” I say. “Take until the last minute if you want.”
“I need about a year,” he says dryly.
“I wish we could rewind a year.”
“I wish we could rewind eight years and never leave Oxford,” he says. “Just you and me and Devour.”
I look at him for a second. “I think that’s our problem,” I say. “When things got tough, we never figured out how to fix it without retreating into our Oxford bubble. We need to figure out a better strategy. We’re not the same people we were then. This isn’t the same world.”
“I know that’s probably true,” he says. “But I liked us then. I hope we’ll always have bits of who we used to be.”
“We will, Nick,” I promise. “I mean, some of this is still my own hair.”
With a wry smile Nick reaches out and touches it, then lets it slip through his fingers. “Well, I sincerely hope the people we are now can do this next bit together.” My heart soars for a second until he adds, “We have to talk to Clive. Present a united front, and all that.”
Thud.
“Do you think that’ll help?” I ask, trying to cover my disappointment.
“It might not, in the grander scheme,” he says. “But on a personal level, for how I feel right this second, it might do me a world of good.”
“I do have a few choice words for that asswad,” I say thoughtfully.
Nick grins before he can stop himself. “Now there is the Bex I remember from Oxford.” He cocks his head toward the hallway. “Let’s go grill that bastard.”
It is a stay of execution. I’ll take it.
Chapter Four
We don’t have to wait long for our confrontation. When we reach the hallway between the private living quarters and the staterooms, Clive is arguing with an unmoved PPO Twiggy, as Stout rounds the corner. Twiggy is, in fact, trying to direct Clive back to the party with rather more force than is strictly necessary, and that’s how I know that while Nick probably couldn’t to take Clive off the guest list, he’d wasted no time putting him on the Shit List.