“We don’t know that for sure. We hardly know anything. You’re wasting a huge opportunity, and it’s stupid, and I know you’re not stupid, so what is it? What are you afraid we’ll find in there?”
Nerve struck. Never let it show. “Daniel,” I say reasonably. “You’re a vegetarian, yes?”
He shrugs. “Yeah.”
I look down at his feet. “Do you wear leather shoes?”
“No.”
“Is it because you don’t like the taste of meat? You don’t think leather shoes are comfortable?”
He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “One, we could end world hunger with the feed used to keep breeding animals for food. And two, the idea of contributing to an animal’s suffering just so I can have a cheeseburger makes me sick.”
“I feel the same way about my father’s research. I don’t want to use the product of so much suffering just so we can maybe, possibly, use the product of that suffering to achieve something else.”
“Your metaphor doesn’t work,” Daniel says, crossing his arms. “But let’s run with it anyway. I’d use medicine tested on animals if Mara was sick and I thought there was even a ten percent chance it would heal her.” He leans back. “What would you do?”
“I’d heal her myself.”
“And what if you were normal, Noah?”
There. There it is, in his voice.
“What if you were just a normal person and Mara was sick, dying, and you couldn’t heal her yourself but thought there might something out there, some way that you could?”
I get it, then. It’s not just curiosity. Daniel is normal, but instead of the blessing that that is, he feels cursed. He feels helpless. Helpless and scared.
He looks to Jamie for backup, which, after Stella’s revelations, I’m more certain than ever he won’t get. Jamie was there, after all. And he’s here, now, anyway.
Footsteps on the stairs, bare and uniquely Mara’s. The three of us look up; her hair’s wet and she’s wearing an old faded T-shirt, once orange, now the colour of peach sherbet. Her toes, nails painted black, always, are visible through the glass. Her eyes meet mine, and everything else fades to dullness.
“I’ll think about it,” I say to Daniel, hoping that’ll end the conversation. And that he and Jamie will miraculously leave.
“Think about what?” Mara cocks her head, a wolf catching a scent.
“I want Noah to grant me access to the archives,” Daniel says.
“Wait, he won’t?” Mara turns on me, unfairly tempting as she stands there in mismatched, damp clothes, her hair still wet. “Why not?”
Hope dies. “There’s more paper, more files, more everything than we could sort through in a year,” I say, resigning myself to the fact that this conversation is still happening. “So how will it even help us?”
“Because there’s a system, and I figured it out,” Daniel says, his voice tinted with gotcha, not pride. “Jamie and Mara and Stella—they looked where I told them to look.”
Jamie finally speaks up. “True.”
“So you don’t have to worry about people breaking in and using stuff against us.”
Daniel’s hooked onto this idea and he’s never letting this go. “All right. Listen. I haven’t even had time to look through all of the paperwork my father’s solicitors sent over.” I realise that said paperwork is likely here, in the flat—in the same room as the trunks from the manor house. I could ask for their help going through them . . . but I’m not sure I want that, either. Did I even lock up my mother’s things? Christ.
“I can help look,” Daniel offers.
No going back now, alas. “Actually, I’d rather you didn’t.” That gets everyone’s attention. “There’s . . . family stuff.” Mara’s expression changes, and I need to choose my words more carefully than I have been. “Things of my mother’s I had sent over. I want to be the one who sees it all first, all right?” I’m not above playing the dead mother card.
Daniel lifts his eyes to the ceiling, nodding. “Fine.”
Because it works.
“All right, then,” I say, reluctantly abandoning Duck Hunt. Jamie makes a sad face. “I’ll go up and look for the correct paperwork,” I say, improvising as I go. “I want to change the key code for the building and make sure there are safeguards in place so you’re not followed, or anything like that. Want to take over for me?” I ask Daniel, indicating the gun.
“I’m gonna go to Sophie’s. But I’m going to text you every day—multiple times a day—until you get it done. Bye, sister,” he says to Mara. She lifts her hand in a limp wave, and Daniel walks out.
It takes Jamie less than a second to do the same. He stands, the plastic gun clattering to the floor.
Mara arcs an eyebrow. “Where are you going?”
Jamie looks from her to me. “Elsewhere. Rapidly,” he says, already backing out of the living room.
“Because?”
“Because I’m abstaining from this particular argument. You kids have fun, though!” He whistles the Hunger Games theme as he climbs the stairs.
“Ass,” Mara comments. Then, “What’s going on with you?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you do, but, fine, I’ll play. One: Why don’t you want us in the archives? Also, you didn’t tell me you had your mother’s stuff sent over from England.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Seriously?” She looks murderous, and I have to work not to laugh.
“All right, in reverse order: I don’t tell you everything, and because nothing good will come of anything my father was involved in.”
“You’re not him, you know,” she says, her voice softening.
Sometimes I wonder if she can read thoughts. “I know.”
“No, you don’t. But, Noah, that research, it’s not like the One Ring.”
“Not where I thought you were going to go, but, all right.” I take a step toward her, winding a curl of her hair around my finger, then tugging it. Two little lines appear between her brows, and she bites her lip. A few minutes ago I would’ve attacked her. But now . . .
“I should go and do what I promised Daniel I’d do.” I move to leave, but she doesn’t let me off that easily. She never does.
“You think that even if we try to use that stuff for good, it’ll end up corrupting us somehow.”
“And how exactly do you know what I think?”
“Because I know you.” She searches my eyes. “And I know my brother. And I know you know my brother. You trust him with that stuff, but you don’t trust yourself.”
“What about you?” I ask, aiming my voice at her as I ascend the stairs. She slides away from it even before I ask my next question. “What if there’s something in there that you could use against someone you think deserves it?”
A look, direct, unyielding. Honest. “I wouldn’t do anything without asking you first. I promise.”
The thing is, I’m not sure I believe her. Not anymore.
25
CONFIRMED DESPERATION
I CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND me when I get to the office. Just looking at the boxes from my father’s solicitors and accountants brings not only his will, but the letter he included with it to mind.
Don’t let her death be in vain.
Those fucking words. My father is dead, entombed an ocean away, but his efforts to twist my life into one after his own image live on. The professor alone, I could’ve ignored, and have ignored, but my father worked through him or he worked through my father or—
I kick over a banker’s box of documents, and just barely resist the temptation to trash the room. Mara’s downstairs, but I can feel her presence there; that watchfulness, those expectations.
The air is close and stale in here, tiny motes of dust visible in the shaft of light from the room’s only window. It looks over onto the cobblestone street below. I desperately want to walk out, and just keep fucking walking.