Happy Families. I had been taking it for granted that she’d hidden the diary to make sure no one found out about her N appointments, whoever or whatever N was. But this: she had had a whole other secret to keep. If the others had found out that Lexie was about to slash herself straight out of their interlaced world, shed it like a dragonfly shrugging out of its skin and leaving behind nothing but the perfect shape of its absence, they would have been devastated. I was suddenly, almost dizzily glad I hadn’t told Frank about that diary.
“I’m on it, Frank,” I said.
“Good. Stay on it.” Paper crumpling-he had finished his burger-and the beep of him hanging up.
I was almost at my surveillance spot. Snippets of hedge and grass and earth sprang alive in the pale circle of the torch beam, vanished the next moment. I thought of her running hard down this same lane, this same faint circle of light ricocheting wild, the strong door to safety lost forever in the dark behind her and nothing up ahead but that cold cottage. Those streaks of paint on her bedroom wall: she had had a future planned here, in this house, with these people, right up until the moment the bomb dropped. We’re your family, Justin had said, all of one another’s family, and I had been in Whitethorn House long enough to start understanding how much he meant it and how much it meant. What the hell, I thought, what the hell could have been strong enough to blow all that away?
Now that I was looking, the cracks kept coming. I couldn’t tell whether they had been there all along, or whether they were deepening under my eyes. That night I was reading in bed when I heard voices outside, below my window.
Rafe had gone to bed before I had, and I could hear Justin going through his nighttime ritual downstairs-humming, puttering, the odd mysterious thump. That left Daniel and Abby. I knelt up by the window, held my breath and listened, but they were three stories down and all I could hear through Justin’s cheerful obbligato was a low, fast-paced murmur.
“No,” Abby said, louder and frustrated. “Daniel, that’s not the point…” Her voice dropped again. “Moooon river,” Justin sang to himself, hamming it up happily.
I did what nosy kids have done since the dawn of time: I decided I needed a very quiet drink of water. Justin didn’t even pause in his humming as I moved across the landing; on the ground floor, there was no light under Rafe’s door. I felt my way along the walls and slipped into the kitchen. The French window was open, just a thumb’s width. I went to the sink-slowly, not even a rustle from my pajamas-and held a glass under the tap, ready to turn the water on if anyone caught me.
They were on the swing seat. The patio was bright with moonlight; they would never see me, behind glass in the dark kitchen. Abby was sitting sideways, her back against the arm of the seat and her feet on Daniel’s lap; he had a glass in one hand and was covering her ankles casually with the other. The moonlight poured down Abby’s hair, whitened the curve of her cheek and pooled in the folds of Daniel’s shirt. Something fast and needle-fine darted through me, a shot of pure distilled pain. Rob and I used to sit like that on my sofa, through long late nights. The floor bit cold at my bare feet and the kitchen was so silent, it hurt my ears.
“For good,” Abby said. There was a high note of disbelief in her voice. “Just keep on going, like this, for good. Pretend nothing ever happened.”
“I don’t see,” Daniel said, “that we have any other option. Do you?”
“Jesus, Daniel!” Abby ran her hands through her hair, head going back, flash of white throat. “How is this an option? This is insane. Is this seriously what you want? You want to do this for the rest of our lives?”
Daniel turned to look at her; I could only see the back of his head. “In an ideal world,” he said gently, “no. I’d like things to be different; several things.”
“Oh, God,” Abby said, rubbing at her eyebrows as if she had a headache starting. “Let’s not even go there.”
“One can’t have everything, you know,” Daniel said. “We knew, when we first decided to live here, that there would be sacrifices involved. We expected that.”
“Sacrifices,” Abby said, “yes. This, no. This I did not see coming, Daniel, no. None of it.”
“Didn’t you?” Daniel asked, surprised. “I did.”
Abby’s head jerked up and she stared at him. “This? Come on. You saw this coming? Lexie, and-”
“Well, not Lexie,” Daniel said. “Hardly. Although perhaps…” He checked himself, sighed. “But the rest: yes, I thought it was a distinct possibility. Human nature being what it is. I assumed you’d considered it too.”
Nobody had told me there was a rest of this, never mind sacrifices. I realized I had been holding my breath for so long that my head was starting to spin; I let it out, carefully.
“Nope,” Abby said wearily, to the sky. “Call me stupid.”
