“Then what?” Lena’s tone is impatient. I think fast.
“He goes, ‘It’s nothing to worry too much about—it’s just something I’ve been needing to tell you for a long time, since I got back from visiting my parents in London.’ Remember, they were there for a few months, living in a hotel while his dad was leading some kind of training program?” Lena nods, motioning for me to continue. “Then I asked him what it was, and he just told me to stop asking questions, that I’d know in a couple of weeks.” There’s a lot I’m not telling Lena. But it’s nothing she needs to know. Charlie is dead now. And maybe it’s for the best. Charlie’s death is an awful thing. Still, I’m not the grief-stricken girlfriend I’m pretending to be.
“We should go.” Lena’s voice breaks into my thoughts. It’s strained and louder than before. A few people are looking our way again. “We should go to England and figure out what he was up to. We can blow apart his lies. Surely there’s a lot you know that I don’t, and same thing the other way around.”
I pause before answering—I’m not sure what she’s asking me to agree to. “Go where? What exactly are you suggesting?” I’m not comfortable forming the “we” of it.
“You should come back to London with me,” she says slowly. “I, for one, want to know who else Charlie was fucking. We can go to all the places where he hung out. What was he doing when he went back there? Seeing friends? We can drop in on them, ask some questions. I knew him when he was in high school there. I know all of his friends there—they’ll talk to me.” She looks truly excited for the first time since we arrived at the café, and I wonder again whether she thinks she’s going to track a living, breathing Charlie down and confront him herself. “We find out what he was hiding,” she goes on. “School doesn’t start back up for me till the last week of August. It’s probably the same for you, right?”
I nod in response to her question. It’s tempting . . . but not for the reasons Lena’s mentioning. I only care a little about what Charlie was hiding. I’ll be happy to put him in my past, to move on from this and have a normal life again. But I do need to know whether my secret—a secret no one in the world knew except Charlie—is safe. Only when I find and destroy the journal will I truly be able to move forward without fear.
It’s horrible the way his death brings me a small measure of comfort. It makes me wonder who I’ve become. There was a time when I thought I might love Charlie. When I met him I thought, Here is someone I could be close to. I used to wonder what he might mean to me someday. I never would have thought that one day I’d face his death and feel only emptiness and relief.
Lena interrupts my train of thought. “What if . . . ?” she trails off, refusing to meet my eyes. “What I’m about to say is totally crazy,” she qualifies. “But I can’t stop thinking it.” I press my lips together and wait. “What if he faked his death? What if he’s alive?”
I stare back at her, incredulous. “Do you know what you’re saying?” I ask. “Staged his death and, what, somehow caused a plane to explode in midair? What about the jacket they found with his blood on it?”
She clamps her mouth shut and her cheeks turn red.
“Listen, Lena,” I say in a softer tone. “I get that it’s hard to let him go. It isn’t like I haven’t hoped the same thing.” I’ve actually hoped for the opposite, but Lena can’t know that. “Of course, I hoped it more so when I didn’t know the truth about you,” I amend. She lets out a bitter laugh and I flush. “But what you’re saying is nuts,” I force myself to finish.
Lena’s eyes darken. Am I the only one concealing something?
“You’re right,” she says finally. “He’s dead. But this thing you say he was going to confess to you and never did. I want to know for sure what he meant. Are you in?”
“No,” I tell her, my heart pounding. “I can’t go with you.” Part of me wants to. I know I’ll never feel truly safe until I have my journal back. Another kind of girl might take Lena up on her offer—follow her boyfriend’s ghost to London like some sort of female crusader team. But I can’t do it. I don’t have the money, for one. And I came to the memorial service for closure. I thought I wanted it. But all this trip has done is thrust me into a spiral of panic and guilt.
“Why don’t you just dig around online?” I ask. “Email his friends, try to figure it out that way?”
Lena shakes her head. “No way,” she says. “It’s too easy to lie in emails. People feel more accountable when they’re faced with a real human.”