“Jamie?” my father called. “Charlotte? Detective Shepard and I are done talking. Jamie?” I held my breath. After a long minute, he swore and trudged back inside.
“Worried,” she observed, after we heard the door shut. I stared at the cloud her breath made in the cold. “Good that he worries. I don’t. You’re nothing to me.”
“Liar,” I echoed. I tried to put the force of my affection behind it.
“You did once,” said Holmes. “Mean something to me. You don’t now.”
She began to shiver. Was that a good sign? A bad one? Either way I couldn’t stand it. Carefully, I pulled her into my arms, and to my great surprise she let me, curling up against my chest as pliantly as if she were my girlfriend. As if I’d held her before. As if I held her every day.
Somehow that scared me far more than the rest of it. Lee Dobson had found her this way, I thought, and my arms tensed, instinctively. Dobson had—
“Stop thinking about him,” she said. “It’s not yours to think about.”
“What am I allowed to think about?” I asked wearily. If I had a rope, this was its end.
“Let’s talk about the things you think you know.” That horrible snicker. “Let’s disappoint Watson some more.”
“No,” I said, “you don’t—”
“August was my maths tutor. Did you know that? You did. Can tell by how your hands seized.”
I’d thought I wanted to hear this. But I didn’t. I really, really didn’t. “You don’t have to—”
“It was my parents’ idea. For publicity. Had some bad press, and they wanted to change the story in the media. Forgiving Holmeses. Fucking liars. I hated him at first. But after Milo moved to Germany, I got used to him. It was like having an older brother again. And then it wasn’t. It was something else.”
“What?” I asked, into the silence.
“I loved him. And he wouldn’t have me.” The words came sharp and hard, sudden in their ferocity. “He was too old, he said, and even if we waited, it would be a catastrophic mess. Our families, you know. He said that I’d grow out of it. My ‘crush.’ Him saying that was worse than him rejecting me.”
I couldn’t quite breathe, hearing her speak this way, as if reciting her sins. When she spoke again, she was horribly precise.
“I wanted to punish him. To make him feel what I was feeling. So I got him to use his family connections to buy me cocaine. I knew he’d do it. I’d been taking so much, and he was so scared that, without it, I’d go through withdrawal.” She drew a breath. “I wanted to make him hurt me, and then I wanted him to pay for it. The night his brother Lucien drove up with a boot full of coke, I called the police. Lucien ran, and August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would. After all, he felt responsible.
“My mother fired him. Then she phoned his don at Oxford to have him expelled. And after all of that was over, she sat me down in the drawing room. She’d drawn all the curtains. And she explained to me, very patiently, that this was a lesson. It wasn’t to happen again.”
“The drugs?” I asked quietly.
“The drugs.” She laughed. “No. I’d started with ‘the drugs’ at twelve. I was too soft on the inside, you see. No exoskeleton. I felt everything, and still everything bored me. I was like . . . like a radio playing five stations at once, all of them static. At first, the coke made me feel bigger. More together. Like I was one person, at last. And then it stopped working, and I began taking more, and more, and they sent me to rehab. When I came back, I spent a few months going the classical route—morphine, syringes. It made everything quiet and far away. I was wrong inside, you see. I’d always been wrong. But it was too messy, the morphine, and I was found out—more rehab. So I dropped the morphine for oxy. More rehab. Then more oxy. I’ve never quite managed to shake it, any of it, and my parents stopped expecting me to. It doesn’t scare them anymore.”
The whole time she spoke, she didn’t look up at me once. She was curled up in my arms like she was my girlfriend, but she was talking to me like I was an empty shell.
“What my mother was afraid of was sentiment,” she said. “Of my being sentimental. With my particular skill set, it’s a liability. With what I felt for August, I became . . . a worse person. I was sent away to think on what I’d done. It was never about keeping me from the drugs. It was about keeping me away from myself.”
“Jesus, Holmes, that’s horrible.” What kind of monster would demand that her daughter not feel?
“Is it really? I think my mother was right. I don’t trust myself anymore. No one does.” She lifted her head to study me. She’d gone so pale that the veins on her neck stood out like pen marks. “Not even you.”