Things went black.
When I woke, I found myself blinking up into fluorescent lights. Holmes’s tear-streaked face was hovering over mine. She seemed genuinely upset, and for a second, I thought there’d been another murder. I struggled to sit up on my elbows.
“Oh, baby,” she sniffed, shoving me back down on the bed with a touch more force than was necessary. “I thought you’d never wake up!”
I completely failed to catch on, at first. But then again, I had hit my head. “Where am I?” I tried to ask, but it came out more like a woof.
Holmes burst into tears, putting a hand to her mouth. Her nails were painted a bright red, and she smelled like Forever Ever Cotton Candy. Then I noticed she was in a polka-dot sweater. With a bow in her hair.
Apparently, she’d been working on her caring-girlfriend routine.
I thought I was going to be sick, but then, it might’ve been the concussion; I was fairly sure I had one. Everything was out of focus, in a doubled sort of way, and the only solution I could think of was to sleep. I shut my eyes, satisfied that I’d fulfilled my end of our makeshift plan. I had an injury that was bound to keep me in the infirmary for at least a day. Enough time for Holmes to poke around.
Somewhere across the room, a voice said, “Oh, you two are too much,” and I snapped my eyes open again. From the little supply station, Nurse Bryony beamed at us. “Do you know she hasn’t left your side for the past three hours? You blacked out for a bit, and then you were drifting between asleep and awake, and the whole time she just sat and held your hand, fretting. Poor thing.”
The accent was American, but the cadences were faintly, unmistakably English. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. Or was it in my head? This time, if I ignored the halos I saw around all the lights and the soft little hum in my head, I could almost pay attention.
“How long will he be here?” Holmes asked, laying her hand against my cheek. “We have dinner reservations for tomorrow in town. It’s our two-month anniversary.”
Her fingers were cool and soft against my face, and I found myself leaning into her touch. Then I froze. “Sorry,” I whispered to her, mortified.
“What are you apologizing for?” she asked, her voice surprisingly rough-edged. With her other hand, she brushed my hair back from my face.
The nurse cleared her throat, cutting into my confusion. “I’ll keep a close eye on him. It’s not bad enough to send him to the hospital, but I still don’t want to take chances. You might have to reschedule your plans, just to be safe.”
Holmes smiled down at me. She wasn’t Hailey. She was something much more insidious. Charlotte Holmes without the edges, all combed and clean, well loved and loving in return. I knew it would be gone tomorrow, all of it—the gentle way she touched me, the glitter of her undivided attention, the bows and the perfume. It would all go back into her costume box, and she would be the real Holmes again.
Because this wasn’t real, even if she spoke to me in what sounded like her real voice. “Do you hear that? You should be fine,” she said.
I shouldn’t have wanted it the way I did.
I was beginning to go, I could tell, and I knew I would wake up back into our old life. The lights winked at me; they liked the secrets I told them. But silently, I reminded myself, secrets are best when kept to oneself. They began blowing out, one by one, like candles. “Good night,” I told Holmes, pulling her hand to my chest, and then I was awash in sleep.
“WATSON,” SHE HISSED. “WATSON, WAKE UP, I’VE GOT TO GO. Night check’s in ten minutes.”
The room was dark, but I could see light coming in from under the door, where the nurse’s desk was. Thankfully, it seemed my head had cleared enough to form coherent sentences. “Did you find anything?” I asked. Or tried to ask. It came out cotton-mouthed.
Holmes handed me a glass of water with an impatient look. I was right; she was herself again, and I suppressed a flare of disappointed guilt.
After a gulp, I repeated my question.
“She went out for a smoke, and I picked the lock on the medicine cabinet. There’s a store of protein powder in with the other prescriptions, for Gabriel Tinker, according to the tag, but the canisters were all empty. I tasted a bit of powder I found in the cabinet, and it seemed innocent enough.”
Tinker was the rugby team’s fly-half, the one who’d been sleeping on the field. “You tasted it? Why couldn’t you take it back to your lab and examine it there?”
She looked affronted that I should even ask. “Efficiency.”