Daniel and Abby, talking late again, out on the patio. This time I didn’t need to feel my way along the walls to the kitchen; I could have moved through that house blindfolded without putting a foot wrong, without creaking a floorboard.
“I don’t know why,” Daniel said. They were sitting on the swing seat, smoking, not touching. “I can’t put my finger on it. Possibly I’m letting all the other tensions cloud my judgment… I’m just worried.”
“She’s been through a tough time,” Abby said carefully. “I think all she wants is to settle down and forget it ever happened.”
Daniel watched her, moonlight reflecting off his glasses, screening his eyes. “What is it,” he asked, “that you’re not telling me?”
The baby. I bit down on my lip and prayed that Abby believed in loyalty among the sisterhood.
She shook her head. “You’ll have to trust me on this one.”
Daniel looked away, out over the grass, and I saw a flash of something-exhaustion, or grief-cross his face. “We used to tell one another everything,” he said, “not so long ago. Didn’t we? Or is that simply the way I remember it? The five of us against the world, and no secrets, ever.”
Abby’s eyebrows flicked up. “Did we? I’m not sure anyone tells anyone else everything. You don’t, for example.”
“I’d like to think,” Daniel said, after a moment, “that I do my best. That, unless there’s some pressing reason not to, I tell you and the others everything that really matters.”
“But there’s always some pressing reason, isn’t there? With you.” Abby’s face was pale and shuttered.
“Possibly there is,” Daniel said quietly, on a long sigh. “There didn’t use to be.”
“You and Lexie,” Abby said. “Have you ever…?”
A silence; the two of them watching each other, intent as enemies.
“Because that would matter.”
“Would it? Why?”
Another silence. The moon went in; their faces faded into the night.
“No,” Daniel said, finally. “We haven’t. I would probably say the same thing either way, since I don’t see how it would be important, so I don’t expect you to believe me. But, for what it’s worth, we haven’t.”
Silence, again. The tiny red glow of a cigarette butt, arcing into the dark like a meteor. I stood in the cold kitchen, watching them through the glass, and wished I could tell them: It’ll all be OK now. Everyone will settle; everything will go back to normal, given time, and now we’ve got time. I’m staying.
A door banging, in the middle of the night; fast, careless footsteps thumping on wood; another slam, heavier this time, the front door.
I listened, sitting up in bed, my heart hammering. There was a shift somewhere in the house, so subtle that I felt it more than heard it, running through walls and floorboards into my bones: someone moving. It could have come from anywhere. It was a still night, no wind in the trees, only the cool deceptive call of an owl hunting far off in the lanes. I pulled my pillow up against the headboard, got comfortable and waited. I thought about having a cigarette, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one sitting upright, senses on full alert for the tiniest thing: the click of a lighter, the smell of smoke twisting in the dark air.
After about twenty minutes the front door opened and closed again, very quietly this time. A pause; then delicate, careful steps going up the stairs, into Justin’s room, and the explosive creak of bedsprings below me.
I gave it five minutes. When nothing interesting happened, I slid out of bed and ran downstairs-there was no point in trying to be quiet. “Oh,” Justin said, when I stuck my head round his door. “It’s you.”
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, half dressed: trousers, shoes but no socks, his shirt untucked and half buttoned. He looked awful.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
Justin ran his hands over his face, and I saw that they were trembling. “No,” he said. “I’m really not.”
“What happened?”
His hands came down and he stared at me, red-eyed. “Go to bed,” he said. “Just go to bed, Lexie.”
“Are you pissed off with me?”
“Not everything in this world is about you, you know,” Justin said coldly. “Believe it or not.”
“Justin,” I said, after a second. “I just wanted to-”
“If you really want to help,” Justin said, “then you can leave me alone.”
He got up and started fussing with the bedsheets, pulling them tight in fast, clumsy little jerks, his back turned to me. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything more, I closed his door gently behind me and went back upstairs. There was no light from Daniel’s room, but I could feel him there, only a few feet away in the darkness, listening and thinking.
The next day, when I came out of my five o’clock tutorial, Abby and Justin were waiting for me in the corridor. “Have you seen Rafe?” Abby asked.
“Not since lunch,” I said. They were dressed for outdoors-Abby in her long gray coat, Justin’s tweed jacket buttoned-and rain sparkled on their shoulders and in their hair. “Didn’t he have a thesis meeting?”
