“Wild?”
As she spoke, she left long pauses between her sentences. “Or hungry. Like I’d been kept in a room for years, and given enough food and water to survive. Then I was brought out to a buffet, and there were all these people there who had been eating for years. I knew that I wasn’t one of them. I was hardly even a person. I was . . . I just wanted. I was starving, but it had made me sharp. The world was too soft, too complacent. I hated it for that.
“This isn’t right either. Maybe I was being held underwater. Maybe I held myself there. When I met you, I’d been thinking I was at the end of it all.” She drew her knees up to her chest. “The end of me, I suppose. I think it was true, that I was at the end of whatever that self was. But I had to go off and end it myself, do you understand? Alone. I wanted . . . by the time I saw you again, I wanted to have found my way back to a beginning.”
I didn’t understand her at all. I thought, I’ll never know anyone better than I know her.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. Her dark hair fell down around her face. “I should have told you what I was planning. I panicked. August was dead, and everyone else had scattered, and there were weapons in play, and you weren’t safe. All I could think was, If I can get Watson to DI Green, he’ll be out of harm’s way. She’ll know what to do. I skipped all the other steps and went straight there. I get so impatient, but I was wrong, and I . . .”
“You let your brother walk.” I tried to keep my voice firm.
Holmes shook her head rapidly. “He would have walked anyway. You couldn’t arrest him, then. Maybe you still can’t. Not with his money, not with his team of lawyers. Milo got sued maybe twice a week. He had a crisis team on twenty-four-hour call, he would eat the Sussex constabulary for breakfast. And now—I don’t know. Maybe he’ll see justice for it.”
“I hope so. If not, there isn’t going to be anybody left to hold responsible,” I said. “For August.”
“There will be. I might have started this, but I’ll finish it with putting Lucien away. And even if he wasn’t the one to kill August, I’ll still consider that case closed. Maybe I’m the one responsible for him dying. But I was . . . I was a child, and I hadn’t been given a compass, and I made a terrible decision. I thought I’d get him fired from being my tutor. I don’t think that makes me responsible for his death. Maybe that makes me a bad person.” She straightened her shoulders “But I . . . I don’t think I am.”
“I don’t think you’re a bad person.”
“You did.”
“I don’t anymore,” I said, and found that I meant it.
“I want to be good,” she said. “I want to be good without being nice. Can I do that?”
I smiled, despite myself. “I like you best when you aren’t nice.”
I’d been holding out hard against the urge to touch her, but she turned to me now in a rush, buried her face against my neck. My arms went up and around her almost of their own accord.
“I hate this.” She wiped at her face with an angry hand. “All week I’ve been crying, and why? Over you? Over Lucien Moriarty?”
“I’m getting his blood all over your dress,” I told her. “I’d cry, too.”
“You’re not still dating that girl,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows. “That wasn’t a question.”
“You’re not wearing her scarf anymore.”
“When did you ever see me wear that scarf? In that stairwell?”
Her quicksilver smile. “I have my sources.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?” I asked, stroking her hair. “Watching me?”
“Would it be terrible if I had?”
I exhaled. “A little terrible.”
She pulled back to see my face. “You don’t think it’s terrible.”
“I don’t.”
“You think it’s kind of hot, actually.” That smile again, there and gone.
“Did you just say ‘kind of hot’? Who are you?”
“Most recently, I was a fashion vlogger,” she said, and then she kissed me, quickly, like an impulse, like an accident.
“Hey,” I said softly, pulling back.
She tugged at my collar. I felt her hand trace its way down, and she undid the top button, slowly, sliding it between her fingers. It was like this with her. Fits and starts. Nothing I could ever see coming.
I’d never thought we’d be here again.
“Holmes,” I said, reaching up to touch her hands, to fold them in mine.
“Do you forgive me?”
“You sound like you’re making some kind of decision,” I said, because she was scaring me a little.
“Do you?”
I paused, thinking. Not long ago, I’d wanted everything from her. For her to be my confidant, my general. My best and only friend. I wanted her to be the other half of me, like we together made a coin. She the king’s head to my tails. I loved her like you would the person you’d always wanted to be, and in return I would have followed her anywhere, excused any action, fought to keep her hoisted high on her throne.
When that myth I’d made of her shattered, I didn’t know what to do. This last year, any thought I had of her felt wrong. Skewed. How could I understand what had happened, when I had put up so many lenses between my experience of her and the girl herself?
Holmes wasn’t a myth, or a king. She was a person. And to have a relationship with a person, you had to treat them like one.
“Can I forgive you a little now?” I asked. “And then a little more tomorrow, and the next day? If there is a next day?”
“Yes,” she said, quickly, like it was more than she had asked for. Like I might take it back.
“Provided you don’t blow anything up, of course.”
“Yes.”
“Or try to look in my ears again while I’m sleeping—”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. That look on her face, always, like she was surprised to be laughing, like it was something involuntary and slightly shameful, like a sneeze.
I couldn’t take it. “I missed you,” I said, gripping her shoulders. She was here. She was here, and I could touch her and God, how could I be so lucky? I said it again, like a compulsion: “I missed you, I missed you—”
“Jamie,” she said helplessly. She said my name again, trying out the word’s edges, almost like she was saying it aloud for the first time.
“Since when you do call me Jamie?” It came out soft, a little dangerous.
“Why don’t you call me Charlotte?” she whispered. Her fingers went back up to my neck, and then followed an invisible line up to my cheek, traced my lips. “Why don’t you call me by my name?”
Because she’d been a girl from a story I loved. Because when we first met, she told me to call her Holmes, and when Charlotte told me to do something, I listened.
“Do you want me to?” I asked.
“No,” she said, urgently. “No, I only want to know why.”
“Because I needed a name for you that was mine,” I said, and her eyes went wide and dark with something I didn’t have a word for. An hour later, I still had her in my arms.
Twenty-Six
Charlotte
WE ROUSED OURSELVES, FINALLY, WHEN THERE WAS A knock on the door.
“You have thirty minutes before the car arrives to take you to Sherringford,” Milo’s assistant said, handing me a bundle. She had bought dark clothing in our sizes and then had it pressed. It was far nicer than anything I’d been able to purchase myself this past year; the shoes, in particular, were things of beauty. I thought that I might love her. I felt very loving, just then.
Watson and I took turns showering. Back in the room, I hummed a little to myself as I did up the buttons of my shirt. He laced up his new black boots. He was smiling—he had always wanted a pair like mine.
“How are you feeling?” he asked when he’d finished.