Her eyes slid from mine to the floor. She sat there, huddled in a ball, staring at the floor until I couldn’t bare it any longer.
“Come on, Maia. Please?”
Every second that passed made her seem more and more unreachable. Then, when I was beginning to think I should just give up and leave her alone for a while, she looked over at me. Fresh tears gathered in her eyes.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Her voice was so heartbreakingly small, I found myself holding my breath. I tried to call on the sensible gene, the one I supposedly had and Vinnie had supposedly missed out on. We couldn’t both drown here. One of us needed to stay focused.
“What do you mean?”
A tear slid down her cheek, followed closely by another. She wasn’t sobbing, not this time. These tears were the silent kind. I honestly didn’t know which was worse.
“I think I’m going crazy,” she whispered, as if sharing a secret with me. One she wasn’t sure she should be sharing.
I was overcome with a blinding case of knight-in-shining-armour-complex. I wanted to fight off whatever was hurting her – to grab a sword and stab it, killing it and burying it so it would never hurt her again. Vinnie would’ve had a field day if he knew.
“What makes you think that?”
She sniffed, wiping away the tears that had fallen with the back of her hand. She looked like she was hanging onto a ledge by her fingertips. I was scared to move, to say the wrong thing in case I sent her toppling over.
“Remember when I told you about the near-death experience, or whatever, at the beach the other day?” she asked. “It happened again.”
My heart raced. I had no idea what to do with that. Had I missed something?
The last threads of self-control tightened, then snapped. Her face dissolved, contorted with sheer agony. That was the final straw. I scooted forward, reaching for her as she dropped her knees and crawled into my arms.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but we’ll figure it out,” I mumbled, thinking aloud.
She nodded into my shoulder, holding on tight. Then the sobbing started. It was silent, but her whole body shook with the intensity of it. My brain whirled as I tried to work out what could possibly be happening here. It wasn’t just seeing Em’s things in the wardrobe, that much was clear.
God, I used to hate it when Em cried. It always made me feel so useless. All I could do was hold her and hope like hell it was enough.
I felt just as helpless then, with Maia in my arms.
After a while, she sniffed, pulling away from me. I let her, smoothing the damp hair away from her face. Her cheeks were flushed and wet.
“Talk to me,” I said. “And let’s see if we can work it out together.”
She took a shuddering breath and sat back. Tucking her hair behind her ear, she sniffed and stared blankly at the floor. I didn’t want to rush her, but whatever this was, I was keen to get to the bottom of it.
“I wish I knew,” she said quietly. “When it happened at the beach, I thought it was a one-off. Some kind of near-death thing. It freaked me out, but I could live with it. But this time… “
“What happened this time?”
Despite my curiosity, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to that.
She looked up at me, losing about ten years in the process. “I opened the wardrobe, and I saw all of her things in there. I saw the box and I just… I opened it. I was looking at the photos when it happened again.”
A near-death experience, when she wasn’t near death? A chill crawled up my spine. There had to be a rational explanation, surely. I wished Bridget were here. She was better at this stuff.
“Tell me what happened.”
She sighed, anxiously rubbing the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other. They were both shaking.
“I was just sitting there, looking through the photos. Then it was like… I don’t know. The room disappeared, and I saw us – at least, I think it was us. It could’ve been you and her, I’m not sure, I couldn’t tell. It was really quick, like lightning quick.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
“It happened so fast, I can’t really remember now. Maybe it was more like a feeling I got, rather than what I actually saw.”
My brain whirled in circles as I tried to hang on and keep up. “Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
She stared at her hands. “Not that I can remember.”
I sighed. A leaden sigh, one that hurt my lungs. What the hell was going on here?
“Do you think this had something to do with Em’s stuff, in the wardrobe?” I asked. “I’m sorry it was still there. I should’ve shifted it when you moved in, that’s my fault. I’ll get rid of it all, move it down into the basement or something.”