I’m so sorry about before. Maybe it’s best if we meet somewhere public, and then we can go talk? Come to Tom’s party—I’ll be there. J x
It was stupid to be unnerved by it—the template was literally right there, in the hundreds of samples I’d sent just this school year—and still I was. The initials (E, J) were easy enough to copy, and the one-or-two-x sign-off was standard practice for any email you sent in Britain. But the long-short sentence combo, the statement that ended in a question mark, the dash—they were all things I did all the time and hadn’t realized until now.
There wasn’t any clue there, at least not that I could tell. Nothing to learn except this wasn’t a slapdash job. They would have taken at least a few hours to learn how to convincingly sound like me.
It had to be Lucien. Who else could it be? But I’d seen firsthand what you got from forming conclusions before you had the facts. You dragged in Moriartys, Milo Holmeses, you threw your weight around trying to make your guess right. You ended up with a friend shot dead in the snow.
On my phone, a text popped up in my international app. I was grateful for the distraction. I’ll see you soon, Shelby said. Checking out that school, then headed to Dad’s house. Lots to tell. Hear you’re in trouble again. Shock-er.
I sent her a line of vomit emojis and a see you soon.
I still had time to kill, so I did my best to begin a response paper for AP Euro on one of the school computers. It was hard to feel focused. If I was suspended for stealing in the spring of my senior year, it didn’t matter what grades I got; I wouldn’t be going to college anywhere.
I felt a weird sort of calm about it. Maybe it was fatalism. Maybe it didn’t matter if it was. I was good at writing papers—not amazing, but good enough—and we had been reading about the causes of the First World War, and I found myself getting into the rhythm of it, laying down sentences, rearranging them, contradicting myself, and then stopping to figure out what I actually thought.
I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice Kittredge was sitting next to me until he leaned in and breathed, hot and disgusting, into my ear, “You were looking for me? Because I have a lot to say to you.”
Sixteen
Charlotte
I HAD MADE THE CALL. I WAS WAITING FOR A RESPONSE. I was receiving three text messages a minute from my Sherringford source, saying Why aren’t you responding? Where are you? Don’t you even care?
I was too anxious to go inside, too anxious to stay put. I paced up and down the steps of the building where I was staying, and I thought, Lucien could find me here, I’m only one degree removed from DI Green, he knows I work with her, I am an idiot for staying in this flat. I thought, There are places in America where no one could find me; I thought I could change my name and move out to Oklahoma. I would be safe, I thought. Safe. Safe, safe, safe. Moriarty had paid for two other plane tickets; I didn’t have their names on the reservation, I hadn’t known how to look it up. Phillipa, I thought, and perhaps another henchman, another tattooed man to hunt us through the woods like deer.
Why was I feeling all of this now? Was this what happened when you carved a door into the dam—that the water eventually blew it out, came rushing through?
I wasn’t safe. I had never wanted so badly to be safe. I had been chasing this man for so long, and now I would give anything to be in Switzerland with my mother, accepting whatever comfort my mother was capable of giving me.
But if Lucien Moriarty didn’t already know where I was staying, he would if I kept on causing a scene, in daylight, dressed as myself. I was making a spectacle of myself. Already an elderly woman had stopped to ask if I needed help. Did I need to make a call. I was fine, I assured her. I was just locked out and very badly had to pee.
That excuse had a ninety-eight percent success rate. She nodded, then walked away.
I ran through Latin declensions in my head; I started listing the bones in my legs out loud, first alphabetically and then by size; I named the stars I knew by heart. A long, unrolling scroll of data in my head. Things I knew. Things that could be put into tables, and lists, and studied. Things that you learned that wouldn’t change, no matter how the world did.
I’m changing, I thought suddenly. I had wanted to, and so I was. Last year I would never have behaved this way if I knew Lucien Moriarty was coming.
What would I have done?
Smoked, for a long time. Considered Watson’s capabilities. Thought about what I could stand to lose. I would have gambled big on a plan to snare Lucien and leave him helpless, using my brother’s money and my father’s connections, and after I saw him hung I would have washed my hands of it completely. Put him in a black box. Sunk him to the bottom of the sea.
That was, of course, before August’s death.
Again I was thinking about it. I never let myself think about it, and now, in the last twenty-four hours, I had to create a litany to keep myself in the present. What safeguards did I have left? I went back through my list. The quadratic equation. Fermi’s paradox. Numbers and letters, in concert, balanced. I thought about—
I thought about the day that August Moriarty knocked on my bedroom door the day after my fourteenth birthday.
I was in bed. I was in bed quite a lot, after that stint at rehab. I’d gone back to my old supplier the moment I’d returned home, and then tried, unsuccessfully, to cut myself off. It had been a week. The symptoms were the same as they always were. There was a strange comfort to the nausea, the burning, the accompanying black mood. I knew them like they were old friends.
“Charlotte,” he’d said, then knocked again. “Ah. Do you mind . . . coming out? So I can meet you? I realize this is rather awkward.”
I was still in bed. I was spending rather a lot of time in bed. “Yes,” I told him, and rolled my face back over into the pillow.
“Yes, you do mind? Or yes, this is awkward?”
“I’m—” What was the word I wanted? I had read it in a book once. But I was blurry. The walls were raw. The walls of my head. I was having some trouble with it, the thinking. “I’m indisposed. Come back tomorrow.”
A sound, like him putting a palm against the door. Then the door opening.
“Oh,” he said. “Do you want some light?” And before I could protest, he’d gone into a flurry of motion—flicked on the lights, pulled open the blinds, retrieved my blanket from the floor, and folded it up at the foot of my bed.
I heard all of this, rather than saw it. I still had my face pressed to the pillow.
“Charlotte.” I finally turned to look at him. He had a lock of blond hair that curled up and away from his face, like a decoration. Later I would find it beautiful. “Your parents aren’t here?”
“No,” I said, then realized that might be a lie. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“And you’re ill?”
That was a simple explanation. I took it. “Yes.”
I watched him come to a decision. “If this is to be our first day, then we’ll have a first day.” He fidgeted for a moment, looking at me (I did look back, though I’m sure I had all the affect and charm of a wall clock), and then looking around the room. Idly, with a finger, he scanned the bookcase that housed my library.
“When I was ill, I used to like to have someone read to me,” August said, quietly. Then: “Do you like to be read to?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. What did he have in mind? A calculus textbook? That seemed difficult. “I can try to find—”
“Ah.” His finger had stopped. “How about this?” he asked, pulling a volume from the shelf.
“I can’t see it, so I can’t offer an opinion.”
“Hush,” he said, but kindly. “I’ll just sit in this chair, then, and we can begin here. You’ll find it illuminating, I’m sure.”