Daniel inclined his head. “You talked about paying for what you want,” I said. “How did you have to pay for this house? It looks to me like you got exactly what you wanted, for free.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think so? You’ve been living here for several weeks now. Surely you have a fair idea of the price involved.”
I did, of course I did, but I wanted to hear it from him. “No pasts,” I said. “For a start.”
“No pasts,” Daniel repeated, almost to himself. After a moment he shrugged. “That was part of it, certainly-this needed to be a fresh start for all of us, together-but it was the easy part. As you’ve probably gathered, none of us has the kind of past that one would want to retain in any case. The main difficulties there have been practical ones, really, rather than psychological: getting Rafe’s father to stop ringing up and abusing him, Justin’s father to stop accusing him of joining a cult and threatening to call the police, Abby’s mother to stop showing up outside the library high as a kite on whatever it is she takes. But these were small problems, comparatively; technical difficulties that would have sorted themselves out, given time. The real price…”
He moved one finger absently around the rim of the glass, watching the gold of the whiskey bloom and dim as his shadow passed across it. “I suppose some people might call it a state of suspended animation,” he said, at last. “Although I would consider that a highly simplistic definition. Marriage and children, for example, were no longer possibilities for any of us. The odds of finding an outsider who would be able to fit into what is, frankly, an unusual setup, even if he or she should want to, were negligible. And, although I won’t deny that there have been elements of intimacy among us, for any two of us to enter into a serious romance would almost definitely have damaged our balance beyond repair.”
“Elements of intimacy?” I asked. Lexie’s baby-“Between who?”
“Well, really,” Daniel said, with a touch of impatience, “I don’t think that’s the issue. The point is that, in order to make this house our shared home, we had to forfeit the possibility of many things that other people consider to be essential goals. We had to forfeit everything that Rafe’s father would call the real world.”
Maybe it was the whiskey, on a hangover and a half-empty stomach. Strange things spun in my mind, sprayed showers of light like prisms. I thought of ancient stories: battered travelers stumbling out of the storm into glowing banquet halls, losing hold of their old lives at the first taste of bread or honey wine; of that first night, the four of them smiling at me across the laden table and the lifted wineglasses and the curls of ivy, smooth-skinned and beautiful, with candlelight in their eyes. I remembered the second before Daniel and I kissed, how the five of us had risen up in front of me breathtaking and eternal as ghosts, hanging sweet and gauzy over the drifts of grass; and that danger drum, somewhere behind my ears.
“This isn’t as sinister as it sounds, you know,” he added, catching something in my expression. “Regardless of what the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”
“And you did,” I said. I felt like the stone bench was rocking underneath me, swaying with the ivy in a slow dizzying rhythm. “You went consenting.”
“I did, yes,” Daniel said. “I understood all of the implications, very clearly. I had thought it all out before I ever embarked on this, and I had decided it was a price well worth paying-I doubt I would ever have wanted children in any case, and I’ve never placed much stock in the concept of one perfect soul mate. I assumed the others had done the same: weighed up the stakes and found the sacrifice worth making.” He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. “That,” he said, “was my first mistake.”
He was so calm. I didn’t even hear it at the time, it wasn’t until much later, when I went over the conversation in my head looking for clues, that I caught it: was, would have. Daniel used the past tense, all the way through. He understood that it was over, whether anyone else had noticed or not. He sat there under the ivy with a glass in his hand, serene as the Buddha, watching as the bow of his ship tilted and slid under the waves.
“They hadn’t thought it through?” I asked. My mind was still sliding, weightless, everything was smooth as glass and I couldn’t get a grip. For a second I wondered crazily if the whiskey had been drugged, but Daniel had had a lot more than me and he seemed fine-“Or they changed their minds?”
