“How did it happen?” I ask.
“Slowly. It was the guilt, Oliver,” she says. “The guilt was killing him. Why did you think he stopped visiting?” There’s a note of desperation in her voice, but I have no pity for her. There’s no room for that. No room for anger either. Only a catastrophic sense of loss. Filippa is still talking, but I hardly hear the words. “You know how he was. If we felt everything twice, he felt it all four times.”
“What did he do?” I demand.
Her words are tiny. Barely audible. “He drowned,” she says. “He drowned himself. God, Oliver, I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you when it happened, but I was so afraid of what you might do.” I can tell she’s no less afraid now. “I’m sorry.”
I am wretched. Destitute.
Suddenly it seems there is a fourth person in the room. For the first time in ten years, I look at the chair that had always been Richard’s and find it isn’t empty. There he sits, in lounging, leonine arrogance. He watches me with a razor-thin smile and I realize that this is it—the dénouement, the counterstroke, the end-all he was waiting for. He lingers only long enough for me to see the gleam of triumph in his half-lidded eyes; then he, too, is gone.
“So,” I say when I have just enough strength to speak. “Now I know.”
I don’t speak again until we bid goodbye to Colborne at the Hall. The day is over now, night falling as we walked back through the woods to seal us in a world of darkness. There are no stars tonight.
“Oliver,” Colborne says when we find ourselves standing in the shadow of the Hall again. “I’m sorry today ended this way.”
“I’m sorry for a lot of things.”
“If I can ever do anything for you … Well, you know how to find me.” He looks at me differently than he ever has, and I realize he’s forgiven me, finally, now that he knows the truth. He holds out one hand, and I accept it. We shake. Then we go our separate ways.
Filippa is waiting for me by the car. “I’ll take you anywhere you want,” she says, “if you promise I won’t have to worry.”
“No,” I say. “Don’t do that. We’ve worried enough for a lifetime, don’t you think?”
“Enough for ten.”
I lean on the car beside her, and we stand there for a long time, staring up at the Hall. The Dellecher coat of arms stares back down at us, in all its delusional grandeur.
“Oh, is all forgot?” I ask. “All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?”
I wonder if Filippa will recognize the line. It was hers, once, in the easy days of our third year, when we all thought ourselves invincible.
“We’ll never forget it,” she says. “That’s the worst part.”
I scuff my toes in the dirt. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though.”
“What?”
“If you knew all along, why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“God, Oliver, isn’t it obvious?” She shrugs when I don’t answer. “You all were the only family I had. I’d have killed Richard myself if I thought it would keep the rest of you safe.”
“I do understand that,” I say, privately thinking that if it had been her, we probably would have gotten away with it. And really, it could have been any one of us. “But me, Pip? Why couldn’t you tell me?”
“I knew you better than you knew yourself,” she says, and I can hear ten years of sadness in her voice. “I was terrified you’d do exactly what you did.”
My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can’t look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I’ve inflicted—like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.
“How are Frederick and Gwendolyn?” I say, grasping at something easier to talk about. “I forgot to ask.”
“Gwendolyn’s just the same,” she tells me, with a shadow of a smirk, which fades as soon as it appears. “Except I think she keeps the students at a bit of a distance now.”
I nod, don’t comment. “And Frederick?”
“He still teaches, but he’s slowing down,” she says. “It took a lot out of him. Took a lot out of all of us. But they wouldn’t need me directing if it hadn’t, so I guess it’s not all bad.”
“I guess not,” I say, a hollow echo. “And Camilo?” I don’t know how it started, but I have my suspicions about Thanksgiving of our fourth year. How distracted we were, not to notice.
She gives me a small, guilty smile. “He hasn’t changed at all. Asks about you every two weeks when I come home.”
In the short pause that follows, I almost forgive her. Every two weeks.
“Will you marry him?” I ask. “It’s been long enough.”
“He says the same thing. You’d come back for that, wouldn’t you? I’d need someone to give me away.”
“Only if Holinshed officiates.”
It’s not as firm a promise as she wants. But she won’t get that. James is gone, and I’m sure of nothing now.
We stand side by side for a little longer without speaking. Then she says, “It’s getting late. Where can I take you? You know you’re welcome to stay with us.”
“No,” I say. “Thanks. The bus station would be fine.”
We climb into the car, and drive in silence.
I have not been to Chicago in ten years, and it takes much longer than it should for me to find the address Filippa reluctantly wrote down. It is an unassuming but elegant town house, which murmurs of money and success and a desire not to be disturbed. For a long time before I knock on the door I stand on the sidewalk, staring up at the bedroom window, where a soft white light glows. It’s been seven years since the last time I saw her, the only time she visited, to tell me I wasn’t fooling anyone. At least, not her. “That shirt in the locker,” she said. “It wasn’t yours, not from that night. I ought to know.”