“I know,” Holmes said. “I wish that made a difference.”
Get Leander and get her out of there. Please, I wrote, and I powered down my phone, but even still I couldn’t keep myself from staring at the screen, like some reassurance would appear there by magic.
“Wash your hands of it for now,” she said, watching me. “Trust them. Your father. Leander. They’ve handled worse. And I know your sister. She’s strong.”
“Okay,” I said, because it was awful and it was true.
“Okay,” she said, and then, “Jamie. Can we talk?”
“Yeah,” I said, “of course,” because we hadn’t yet, not really.
She fidgeted a little, flexing her hands. “There’s a bedroom upstairs,” she said, finally. “If you want some privacy.”
“Oh.” The back of my neck went hot, then freezing cold. “Oh. Okay.”
“Not ‘oh,’” she said, the rebuttal automatic, and then, “I mean. Not necessarily ‘oh.’ Not ‘oh’ unless—dammit, Jamie, I am trying very hard here, can we please just go upstairs.”
There was more house here than I’d realized. The room we’d been given was at the end of a long corridor, the floorboards chalky and warped, the walls paneled too in dusty white. All the other rooms were shut up, unused, and there was a musty smell in the air, like no one had opened a window all winter.
Our bedroom had the same haunted feeling. The bed was piled high with white down and linen, and there were chairs and a dresser, but they were covered in dust sheets. I wanted to snap them off and shake them out, see if there was anything below them worth salvaging. I didn’t, though. They were beautiful as they were.
Holmes didn’t care about that. Not that kind of beauty. “Someone might have bugged the room,” she muttered, and immediately started dismantling it piece by piece, beginning with the bed. Once she’d finished feeling up the mattress, I flopped myself down on it and watched her work.
It was the first moment I’d had alone with her in over a year.
I found myself looking for signs of change, ones I could see. Her hair was the same length, give or take, dark and straight down to her shoulders, her eyes still the same unfathomable gray. She was taking apart the dresser, now, removing each drawer to examine them, and she moved with the furious intensity she always had when we were on a case.
Like a missile, made of pylons and metal and rocket fuel, deadly and unstoppable, fired off to hit a tiny target thousands of miles away. That precise. That incredible.
I stopped myself there. A year of beating my head against a wall, alone, cursing her, mourning August, awash in guilt and shame. An hour together in Manhattan, and I caught myself admiring her?
Really?
I felt myself begin to shut down.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, flicking the sheet off the last chair. It kicked up a storm’s worth of dust.
“Nothing,” I said, coughing. “Do you need help?”
“I’m almost done.” She dug her hands underneath the cushion. “Wait—no. Hold on.” Frowning, she examined the thing in her palms. “I think that’s an actual bug.”
“Maybe wash your hands, and—”
“Right.”
I saw, when she returned, that she’d also made some effort to wash out the bottom half of her dress. “I think it’s unsalvageable,” she said, standing awkwardly by the bed. “I feel badly. I took this from the house where I was staying.”
“Where were you staying?” I asked, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Ah,” she said, gathering back up the sheets and pillows in her arms. She dumped them unceremoniously on top of me. “I don’t—that is—do you remember Detective Inspector Green?”
It was hard to forget her. She’d been the one to arrest Holmes for killing August Moriarty. “I do,” I said, neutrally.
“We’ve known each other for so long—no. I mean, yes, she was the Jameson emeralds, but I—her sister—”
“You’re staying in her sister’s place,” I said, sitting up.
“Yes.”
“By yourself?”
“I’ve been going it alone now for some time,” she said, with an airiness that was obviously false. “But Leander’s with me now—I didn’t know if you knew that.”
“I didn’t. But it makes sense, since you showed up together tonight.”
“Of course.”
“I’m not stupid, Holmes,” I said, and she recoiled. Why did I lob that one at her? Why was all this suddenly so hard? We could put down our worst nightmare in a restaurant bathroom and then escape across New York bloody City in the dark, but I couldn’t talk to her alone in a quiet room.
“I never thought you were stupid,” she said. “Not ever. Which you know.”
I’d been trying so hard to stay in the moment, to meet her where we were now. But her defensiveness—which you know—dragged it out of me. “I wasn’t worth it,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “You decided that I wasn’t worth telling the truth to. You couldn’t even tell me where you were going. The police took you away, and you walked off without saying a word. You were gone. A year went by, Holmes. A year! For all I knew, you were—you were dead.”
“You’re my friend,” she said, crossing her arms. “My only friend. If I would’ve told anyone what I was doing, I would have told you. But I thought that you would trust me.”
“You don’t get to pull that one,” I told her. “We chased Hadrian and Phillipa across Europe because you lied to me. I should have trusted you after that? Leander was in your basement. You knew about it. You didn’t tell me. I should have trusted you after that?”
“Yes,” she said, automatically. Then she winced. “No. No, of course not. But can you blame me for not thinking clearly after what happened to—?”
“To August,” I said. “Well, you were thinking clearly enough to give me orders.”
She gave me a despairing look. “Not good ones.”
“Clearly not.”
Holmes shifted her weight. “Anything else?”
“Well.” I pulled my knees up to my chest. “I— That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“I had— There’s been so much I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve made so many mistakes. I feel . . . I feel almost like you’ve ruined me.”
“Watson—”
“Or maybe I was like this all along. I didn’t know why you put up with me, for so long, and at first I thought, I’m not as smart as her, I’m just her sidekick, that you wanted me around because I—I admired you. I couldn’t hide it, I felt it so much. I just didn’t know what you wanted from me. What you got from the two of us together. And then you left, and I—I think I got lost, somewhere. I don’t like myself anymore. I used to. Like myself. At least a little. And I’ve just been behaving like a monster.”
“You think I’ve done that to you?” It was an honest question.
“Maybe,” I said, and swallowed, and said the thing I’d been thinking ever since Lucien Moriarty dragged me out of that bathroom stall. “Holmes, I don’t know if we’re going to get out of this one alive.”
Her eyes were shining. “I know.”
I forced a laugh. “Any final words?”
She shrugged a shoulder.
“Holmes—” I pulled it off, the comforter, the sheets, all those mountains of white, clearing a space beside me. “Come here,” I said, then winced. “I mean. If you want to.”
She sat down gingerly at the edge of the bed. “Jamie—”
The word hovered in the air.
“I’m sorry,” she said, all at once.
“For what?”
“I’m—I’m sorry, Jamie.”
I waited. Sometimes I could read her as clearly as though her thoughts were scrolling across the sky, and sometimes she was the most unknowable creature in the world.
“When I met you, I was still . . . I hate this.”
Words are imprecise, I remembered her saying once. Too many shades of meaning. And people use them to lie.
Holmes had this look on her face like she was trying to drag something up from the basement of her heart.
“Try,” I said.
“I was . . . I think the only way to describe it is wild.”