Where the Memories Lie

 

 

I followed him into the kitchen. Lucas sat there nursing a coffee, although judging by the half-empty whisky bottle on the table, it was laced. We’d need shares in a distillery at this rate. His usually tanned skin was pale and shiny, as if he was one of those lifeless wax dummies at Madame Tussaud’s.

 

‘I’m so sorry about Charlotte,’ I said to him.

 

He sighed. Ran a hand over the back of his neck. ‘Yeah. We’re all sorry. Don’t know if that’s going to do her any good, though.’

 

‘Is she OK?’ Anna asked him.

 

He laughed. It sounded bitter. ‘She’s up in her room. She’s looking forward to seeing you.’

 

Anna galloped out of the room as fast as her legs would carry her.

 

‘Where’s Nadia?’ I asked.

 

Where the Memories Lie

 

Lucas pointed through the open bi-fold glass doors out into the garden. At the end was a wooden bench overlooking their pond.

 

Nadia sat with her back to us, smoking.

 

‘She’s started smoking again?’

 

‘Me, too.’ Lucas picked up a packet of cigarettes on the table and dropped them back down.

 

‘That’s not going to help.’

 

‘Thank you, Nurse.’ He shrugged.

 

‘Want a drink?’ Chris tilted his tumbler in my direction.

 

I looked at it. ‘No. And you should give it a rest, too. How much are you drinking at the moment?’

 

He wouldn’t meet my gaze. ‘Who cares?’

 

‘You just missed Ethan,’ Lucas said.

 

My heart jolted in my chest. I’d accused my husband of murder.

 

I hadn’t trusted him. Hadn’t believed his explanation. Automatically, I’d believed the worst of him. How could I ever have thought he was capable of something like that? I was a horrible person. Would we ever be able to get back from that? Jagged shards of remorse ripped at my heart.

 

There was no time to think about it now, though. I pushed the thoughts into a corner of my mind to deal with later and walked outside towards the pond. There was a swell of dark clouds moving in. The wind danced on my skin. A summer storm was on its way.

 

The end of the heat wave.

 

I sat next to Nadia. She kept her eyes fixed on the water, blow-ing out a line of blue-grey smoke before throwing the butt on the grass and squashing it with her sandal.

 

I pulled the necklace out of my pocket and held it out to her in my palm. ‘Do you remember this?’

 

She looked at it. Frowned. It took a while, maybe half a minute, for the light of something to spark behind her eyes. I thought it 275

 

Sibel Hodge

 

was recognition, but I couldn’t be certain because her gaze whipped away from me.

 

She took another cigarette from a packet resting on the bench, even though she’d just put one out, and lit it with a shaky hand. She inhaled deeply. ‘No, I don’t recognise it. Why?’

 

‘Don’t lie to me, Nadia. Anna found it when she was going through your things for the car boot sale. She found it in the magic box Tom gave you for your twenty-first.’

 

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She flicked the ash off her cigarette a few times. ‘Anna must be mistaken. There was nothing in that box. She must’ve got it from somewhere else.’

 

I leaned forward and gripped her arm. ‘Chris said Katie was wearing this the day she ran away. How did you get it?’

 

I prayed to be wrong again. Wanted with all my heart to be wrong.

 

‘I don’t know anything about it.’ She shook my hand off and laughed, but I knew that laugh. I’d heard it many times over the years. It was higher than usual, a tinkling sound she took on when she was nervous.

 

I gripped her arm again, harder this time. ‘Nadia. Do. Not.