“Fine,” she says. She steps all the way outside, closes the door behind her. “Satisfied?”
“Not yet.” He walks down the steps to his bike, takes something off the back. Brings it up to her. It’s a helmet. “Put this on.”
“What? You’re crazy.” There’s no way she’s getting on the back of that bike. Not with him.
“Come on. You know you want to.” He smiles at her. It’s an entirely charming smile, the first real one she’s seen from him. She bets that smile gets him a lot. “And you know I’m not going away unless you do.”
“God, has anyone ever told you that you’re impossible?”
His smile gets wider. “I’m Irish. It has been mentioned.”
She sighs and accepts the helmet. If she’s lucky, they’ll wreck and she’ll be put out of her misery.
She puts the helmet on but struggles with the snap under her chin. Christopher comes closer, so close they’re almost touching. Then he reaches over and deftly fastens it with one hand.
Holly doesn’t like being this near to him. It makes her aware of things other than how miserable she is, and she doesn’t want to be aware of anything else. But Christopher doesn’t seem to care. He shrugs off his jacket, slides it over her shoulders. The jacket is heavy and smells of leather, of gasoline. It hangs on her, but its weight and warmth are comforting.
She doesn’t want to be comforted.
“Where are you taking me?” she asks abruptly.
“Consider it a kidnapping. Go with it.” He swings a leg over the bike, puts on his own helmet, pats the seat behind him. “Don’t think. Just do it.”
So she does. It’s a relief, for once, to be told what to do, to shut her brain off and let someone else take the lead. She sits as straight as she can on the bike. But the evening is growing cool, and she’s so tired. At last she succumbs and rests her head against his back. He’s a very good driver. She watches the street through half-closed eyes as he weaves in and out of traffic. She wonders, briefly, what he did in the war, what it was like for him coming back. And then she realizes with a start that, for a moment, she’s forgotten to feel afraid or despondent. Oddly enough, she feels safe.
They wind up near the Thames. He stops the bike so they have a view of the river. They don’t talk, simply watch the boats go past. It’s one of those quintessential English summer nights that seem to go on and on. The sun is starting its descent, but the sky is still bright, the air heavy and liquid. She’s taken her helmet off, but her head is still on his shoulder. She doesn’t move. She’s surprised to find that she doesn’t want to.
For years after Robert died, she couldn’t bear to look at couples in love. A woman leaning her head against a man’s shoulder, a husband leaning in for a kiss, was enough to make her incandescent with rage. Why them and not her? Eventually the rage turned to sadness. Now she finds she can watch couples without envy. Leaning against Christopher, she can almost imagine being a part of one again.
It’s Christopher who breaks the spell.
“A boy died today,” he says. He doesn’t turn around to look at her.
She sits up stiffly, leans away, but Christopher keeps talking, easily, conversationally, as if he hasn’t noticed.
“If we catch him, the dealer will go away for a very long time. Maybe forever.”
Forever is a very long time, Holly thinks, and has to bite her lip to keep the hysterical laughter in.
“I couldn’t find the connection,” Christopher muses. “I know there’s a link between this drug and your company. I know we are looking for the same man. But what I couldn’t figure out is how your daughter fits into all of this. And then I remembered Maria and what she called her: the angel of miracles. So tell me, Holly Darling, what’s so special about your daughter’s blood? And before you lie to me again, understand I’m going to find this Peter. And I don’t really care at this point how I do it.”
He looks at her. “The kid who died? He was your son’s age. He played football, had a right good foot. Not good enough to go pro, probably, but enough to play through university. His mother hasn’t gotten out of bed since it happened. His father punched a hole through the wall so hard he broke his hand.”
Holly shivers. She thinks of Eden, her face at the atrium, the terror in her eyes. And Jack. An hour ago, she herself couldn’t get out of bed, the fear of losing them weighing her down so heavily. But both of her children are, at this exact moment, still breathing. Unlike the child of this other poor mother.
She’d like to lay her head back down and weep. She’d like to steal Christopher’s bike, to ride off somewhere where every decision, every word she says, doesn’t decide who lives and who dies. Someplace far away. Or maybe someplace long ago, back when it was easier to tell truth. Instead she calculates, deciding what she can keep safe and what she has to give up. It’s like entering the cage with a panther—so long as there’s something else to eat, you may be safe. But eventually the food supply is going to run out and then he’s looking at you. She thinks of all the things she’s done wrong, all the things she could answer for.
“Tell me what you know. Last chance,” he says.
“It sounds crazy.”
“I’ve seen some crazy things,” he says. “The trick is, once you realize you don’t know anything, the crazy is easier to accept. Just tell me. Everything.”
And surprisingly, Holly does. Because she’s exhausted, worn out by grief, by the fear she saw in her children’s faces when she reached for them. Because she’s tired of carrying this story alone. And because, when she looks at Christopher, she sees something in his eyes that tells her he also knows what it’s like when all your choices are terrible ones but you still have to choose.
She keeps her arms folded, her gaze on the water ahead. She starts on that long-ago day when everything changed, the day when she lost it all. The day of the crash. Every other loss since then has merely been fallout.
* * *
She begins in cool, measured language—the road was slick, the treads on the tires worn—but Christopher is good at asking questions. Soon she’s recounting details she’s kept locked away for years. She tells him of being trapped in the front seat, her legs pinned, of hearing the twins screaming. She tells how she could hear Isaac’s breaths grow slower and slower, further and further apart, until at last she couldn’t hear him anymore. Jack was still crying, sobbing, but she couldn’t reach him, and finally he went quiet too. She must have passed out, and when she woke up, it was in the hospital. She knew they were all dead. When they told her Jack had survived, she climbed out of her hospital bed to go to him. Since she couldn’t stand, she tried to crawl. After that they sedated her. When she woke, she tried again and again, until finally they wheeled her bed next to his. She tells Christopher of the agonizingly slow hours that turned into slow days, waiting to see if her son would live, not daring to wonder what type of life he would have if he did.
She doesn’t say Robert’s name once. The sounds he made before he died are what she wakes to on her darkest mornings. Robert is stored so tightly in her heart that if she mentions him, it will split and crack her in half. She’ll never be able to go on.
When her story reaches Peter, she leaves out anything that sounds too insane, like the tinkle of tiny bells, the flickering golden light outside the window, or how Peter got up to that window in the first place. She leaves out any mention of magic. She focuses instead on what he already knows—Peter’s charm, his magnetism.
“I thought he was a hallucination,” she tells Christopher. “A hallucination brought on by despair.”