“Oh.”
I could picture her rambling around in an empty apartment, nothing to distract her from Richard’s death. Our holidays weren’t so different, probably—hours of reading and staring at the ceiling, isolated from siblings and parents so unfamiliar that they might as well have been a different species. Of course, I’d had the windfall of James’s company, and she hadn’t been so lucky. An impossible apology glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth.
She folded her arms and said, “I’m going to bed unless you’ve got something to say.”
I didn’t. I desperately wanted to, but my mind was blank. For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.
She waited, watching me, and when I said nothing, her mask of apathy cracked for a moment and I saw the quiet disappointment underneath. “Well,” she said. “Goodnight, then.”
“I—Meredith, wait.”
“What?” she asked, the question dull and tired.
I shifted my weight, uncertain, unsure, cursing my own ineloquence. “Do you, um, want to sleep alone?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want to sleep with me or would you rather sleep with James?”
I glanced away, hoping to hide the rising warmth in my cheeks. When I looked back again she was shaking her head, one corner of her mouth tugged upward, caught between pity and disdain. She didn’t wait for an answer—just turned and walked down the hall again. I watched her go, mental gears whirring and churning out weak, inadequate replies until she was gone and it was too late to say anything at all.
I lingered by the fireplace, debating whether to go after her—barge into her room, then throw her against the wall and kiss her until she was too out of breath for such harsh words—or just retreat to the Tower and try to sleep. I was too much a coward for the former, too restless for the latter. Unable to commit to either course of action, I reached for my coat instead.
The night was so cold that stepping outside felt like a slap in the face. I set off through the trees, shoulders hunched up to keep my ears warm, watching the ground for roots and rocks that might trip me in the dark. I reached the dock almost without realizing where I was. My feet had brought me there automatically, as though there were no other logical place to go. By night the lake was black and as still as a mirror, five hundred stars perfectly reflected on the surface. There was no moon—just a small round gap in the field of stars where the moon should have been. Alexander sat on the dock by himself, legs dangling over the water.
I walked to the end and stopped behind him. He must have heard me approach, but he didn’t react, just sat staring out at the lake with his hands folded between his knees.
“Can I join you?” I asked, and my words emerged in a cloud.
“’Course.”
I sat beside him, and for a moment neither of us spoke.
“Smoke?” he said, eventually.
“Yeah, I could use one.”
He reached inside his coat without looking, then passed a spliff to me and fumbled in his pockets for a lighter. He flicked a flame to life and I inhaled as deeply as I could, the smoke scorching hot in my throat.
“Thanks,” I said, after my second pull, and passed it back to him.
He nodded, eyes pointed forward. “How’d it go?”
I assumed he meant my conversation with Meredith.
“Not well.”
We sat in silence for a while, the smoke and our breath swirling and mingling as they drifted out over the water. I tried to push Meredith out of my head, but there was no safe distraction. In every corner of my mind, doubts and fears crouched on all fours, prepared to spring and sink their teeth in me at the slightest provocation.
“Colborne was in the Castle,” I said, without really planning to. I hadn’t told any of them what I’d overheard, but it was dangerous knowledge to have, and I didn’t trust myself with it.
“When?” he demanded.
“Yesterday.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No, but I heard him talking to another cop. Young ginger guy. Hadn’t seen him before.”
Alexander swallowed a mouthful of smoke, and it unfurled from his nostrils in a distinctly dragonish way. “What were they talking about?” he asked, with a diffidence that suggested he didn’t really want to know.
“All … this.” I made a loose, unspecific gesture that included the lake, the dock, and both of us.
“You think he suspects something?” Alexander asked. To someone who didn’t know him so well, he might not have sounded scared.
“He knows we lied. He just doesn’t know about what.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
He sucked on the spliff and the end flared orange, a single bright ember in the bleak Illinois wilderness. There wasn’t much left but the roach. He passed it to me; I took one last drag and stubbed it out.
“So what do we do?”
“Nothing, I guess,” he said, and that empty word, “nothing,” made me clench my fists in my pockets. “Stick to our story. Try to keep our wits about us.”
“We should tell the others. He’s just waiting for one of us to slip up.”
He shook his head. “They’ll start acting funny if they know.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, wondering how much danger we were really in. I thought of meeting James in the bathroom the night of the party. By some unspoken agreement, we hadn’t mentioned it to the others. It was trivial, unimportant. But the possibility that we weren’t the only ones keeping secrets made my heart drum a little faster. If we’d all lied to one another the way we’d lied to Colborne—I couldn’t finish the thought.
“What do you think happened to him?” I asked. “After he left the Castle.”
“Dunno.” He knew who I meant. “I can’t imagine he just stumbled around in the woods.”
“Where were you, anyway?”
He gave me a shifty sort of look and said, “Why?”
“Just curious. I missed everything that happened after I, uh, went upstairs.”