It was a bright night, the moon high in a clear cold sky, flicking chips of white off the dark hawthorn leaves; I buttoned Lexie’s suede jacket up to my neck. The torch beam lit up a narrow bar of dirt path and the invisible fields felt suddenly huge around me. The torch made me feel very vulnerable and not very smart, but I kept it on. If anyone was lurking out there, he needed to know where to find me.
No one came. Something shifted off to one side, something heavy, but when I whipped the torch around it was a cow, staring back at me with wide, sorrowful eyes. I kept walking, nice and slow like a good little target, and thought about that exchange back in the sitting room. I wondered what Frank had made of it. Daniel could have been simply trying to jog my memory loose, or he could have had very good reasons for wanting to check whether the amnesia was real, and I had no idea which it was.
I didn’t realize I was heading for the ruined cottage until it rose up in front of me, a smudge of thicker dark against the sky, stars flickering like altar lights in the windows. I switched off the torch: I could find my way across the field without it, and a light in the cottage was likely to make the neighbors very antsy, possibly even antsy enough to come investigating. The long grass swished, a soft steady sound, around my ankles. I reached up and touched the stone lintel, like a salute, before I went through the doorway.
The quality of the silence was different inside: deeper, and so thick I could feel it pressing softly around me. A slip of moonlight caught the crooked stone of the hearth in the inner room.
One wall sloped jaggedly down from the corner where Lexie had curled up to die, and I pulled myself up onto it and settled my back against the gable end. The place should probably have freaked me out-I was so close to her dying, I could have leaned down across ten days and touched her hair-but it didn’t. The cottage had a century and a half of its own stillness stored up, she had taken only an eyeblink; it had already absorbed her and closed over the place where she had been.
I thought about her differently, that night. Before, she had been an invader or a dare, always something that set my back stiffening and my adrenalin racing. But I was the one who had flashed into her life out of nowhere, with Sticky Vicky for a pawn and a wild why-not chance dangling from my fingertips; I was the dare she had taken, years before the flip side of the coin landed in front of me. The moon spun slowly across the sky and I thought of my face blue-gray and empty on steel in the morgue, the long rush and clang of the drawer shutting her into the dark, alone. I imagined her sitting on this same bit of wall on other, lost nights, and I felt so warm and so solid, firm moving flesh overlaid on her faint silvery imprint, it almost broke my heart. I wanted to tell her things she should have known, how her tutorial group had coped with Beowulf and what the guys had made for dinner, what the sky looked like tonight; things I was keeping for her.
In the first few months after Operation Vestal I thought a lot about leaving. It seemed, paradoxically, like the only way I could ever feel like me again: pack my passport and a change of clothes, scribble a note (“Dear everyone, I’m off. Love, Cassie”) and catch the next flight to anywhere, leave behind everything that had changed me into someone I didn’t recognize. Somewhere in there, I never knew the exact moment, my life had slipped through my hands and smashed to smithereens. Everything I had-my job, my friends, my flat, my clothes, my reflection in the mirror-felt like it belonged to someone else, some clear-eyed straight-backed girl I could never find again. I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past.
I don’t know why I stayed. Probably Sam would have called it courage-he always goes for the best angle-and Rob would have called it pure stubbornness, but I don’t flatter myself that it was either one. You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best. I think I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.
Lexie had run. When exile somehow hit her out of a clear blue sky, she didn’t fight it the way I did: she reached out for it with both hands, swallowed it whole and made it her own. She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.
