I REALIZED, AS WE WERE USHERED IN THE BACK ENTRANCE of the Morgan-Vilk residence, that my shirt was covered in Lucien Moriarty’s blood. Or maybe my own. It was hard to tell. Holmes, who was always so fastidiously clean, was filthy. Her red dress had gone brown and ragged at the bottom, and her legs below it were all-over cuts and dirty-looking bruises. She and I stood together in the kitchen like a pair of murderous orphans in the thick of the Black Plague.
The kitchen itself was unremarkable—cabinets, table, a stainless steel sink. From what I could tell from the stairs leading upstairs, Morgan-Vilk was renting the bottom two floors of a brownstone.
The girl who let us in eyed us warily. “Mr. Morgan-Vilk has just gone to get some documents.”
“Yes,” Holmes said. “Fine. Who are you?”
“My colleague,” said Milo Holmes, sitting at the kitchen table, as his assistant exited quietly. I jumped about a mile. I hadn’t seen him there. From the way that Holmes’s eyes widened, then narrowed, she hadn’t seen him either. Which was a first, as far as I could tell.
Maybe it was because Milo looked nothing like himself. A tracksuit. A massive beard. No glasses, and his hair long, tied up in a knot on the top of his head. An empty glass in front of him, and a bottle.
“No,” Holmes said, edging back toward the door. “No, absolutely not,” and for a hysterical moment I thought she was talking about his man bun.
“Sit,” he said, and I was shocked to hear a slur on his words, as though he’d been drinking. “Sit, or I’ll drag you back into this house and tie you to that goddamn chair.”
I’d always been afraid of Milo Holmes—it would be stupid not to be—but in that moment I was terrified.
Holmes was impassive, but she sat down across from him slowly, as though he might lunge at her. “DI Green sent me. I’m here for Merrick Morgan-Vilk.”
“You always assume I don’t know these things,” Milo said. He splashed more whiskey into his glass. “You never learn, do you.”
I swallowed. “Why are you here, Milo?”
“Jamie,” he said, with extravagant scorn. “I’m being so rude, forgive me. Perhaps you’d like a change of clothes? Either of you?”
“No, thank you. Milo—”
“Stop looking at me like a pair of frightened rabbits.” He brought the glass to his lips. “I wanted you here. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Holmes watched his throat as he swallowed. “Are you in touch with DI Green?”
“Detective Inspector Green was the one who reached out to me, girl.” That, from a voice booming down the stairs. “Hold on, hold on. Yes, hello.” Merrick Morgan-Vilk was a bit out of breath. He had a document box balanced on his well-fed waistline, and he greeted us with a politician’s smile. By habit, I jumped to my feet. Holmes extended her hand up from her chair.
“Merrick,” Milo said. “Miss Holmes would like to know what’s ‘going on here.’” The air quotes were almost visible.
He dropped the document box down on the table. “Our friend Milo here—”
Milo saluted.
“—has introduced me to his friends on the United Nations Security Council. I’m here working with an exploratory committee.”
“I see,” I said. I really didn’t see.
“That’s neither here nor there,” Milo said. “I’m here because I don’t think the Americans will extradite me back to Britain. Well. They might not. Perhaps they will. Who knows! It’s a party, really.”
Morgan-Vilk’s mouth tightened. “We’ve had some . . . new developments these past few days.”
Milo took another sip. “Security footage. Of all things. Security footage from the camera on my property, that I set up, footage that I wiped so clean it was sparkling, and somehow it ended up on some idiot’s desk at Scotland Yard, someone who didn’t know the score—”
“Footage. Of you—of you shooting—” I couldn’t make my mouth say the words. Say August Moriarty.
For a moment, Holmes put her head into her hands. “And what? Now you’re feeling all the guilt that you’d been suppressing?”
“Guilt?” Milo held his glass up to the light. “Is this guilt? I just don’t particularly want to go to prison.”
Holmes looked like she was about to launch herself across the table at him, claws extended. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” I said to her.
She stiffened, then relaxed. Then nodded.
Milo watched this with some interest. “Disgusting,” he said, to no one, and drained the rest of his whiskey.
Morgan-Vilk cleared his throat. “Charlotte,” he said. “We were talking about the UN?”
“Right,” she said, her eyes still on Milo. “And your mistress, of course.”
To his credit (or actually, maybe against his credit), Morgan-Vilk smiled.
“What? Wait. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m still sort of lost.”
“Mr. Morgan-Vilk, in the interest of time, would you mind terribly if I explained to Watson here your current situation, and what we’re all doing here?”
Merrick Morgan-Vilk looked delighted. He would have liked my father. “Yes, go on.”
“Where should I start?” Holmes asked, scanning him with her eyes.
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, my mistress isn’t my mistress anymore—”
“No, of course not,” she said. “Your mistress isn’t your mistress anymore, she’s your wife. That’s easy, the wedding band. But she’s not here with you—I’ve noticed you turning it around on your finger, perhaps because you’d forgotten to call her today and now it’s too late to reach her in Britain. What was your district, when you were an MP? Is she back at the old family pile? No—that would upset your children. A flat, then, in London, because if anyone is avoiding the countryside and has your means, they’re there. And, by the way, you’re not running for office, so I’m not sure why you insist on calling whatever you’re doing here an exploratory committee.”
“Oh?” he asked. “And how do you know that?”
“You’re sleeping well, eating well, and you look like you’re at peace.” Holmes paused, her eyes tracking into the distance, and then she continued. “Any man who’s running for office again after a sex scandal wouldn’t be so comfortable. He also wouldn’t be in America. It would be absurdly stupid to raise American money to run for British office. You’re meeting with a member of the UN Security Council? You’re done running for office. You’re trying to drum up support for a nomination for an ambassadorship, which is not precisely legal but not precisely illegal, either. Hence the cloak and dagger.”
Mr. Morgan-Vilk applauded. He had a wonderful, jolly smile. “Oh, excellent,” he said to Milo. “I like your sister. How fun.”
Milo shook his head. “She’s missing all the important bits. Like telling us what on earth she’s doing here.”
Holmes scowled. “I phoned Scotland Yard in need of a safe house.”
“Because you had just been beating Lucien Moriarty half to death,” Mr. Morgan-Vilk said, with the same jolly smile he had on before. I inched away from him. Maybe I didn’t want him to meet my father. “How did you manage that?” he asked me. “Brilliant work, really.”
“Ah. Rugby?”
“I should have played rugby,” he said. “Pity. Yes, anyway, Mr. Moriarty. I am very interested in Mr. Moriarty.”
Holmes frowned. “I’ve looked at the records. You know, when I first spoke to your son—”
“When was that?”
“Monday,” Holmes said. “In his stairwell.” She said it so smoothly it took me a second to realize.
“You were there—”
“Later,” she said, and gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret. “When I first spoke with him, I got the impression that perhaps Lucien had quit your campaign to deal with the matter of his brother August losing his job as my tutor.”
“‘Losing his job.’ What a euphemism. Can’t forget the trunkload of cocaine, or you framing him,” Milo said.
“I’m so happy to entertain you. Yes, me and my wretched mistakes, it’s all very dramatic.” Holmes’s tone was acid. “But I looked them up, and the dates don’t track. Your election was the summer before all that happened. So why did Lucien quit, just before your scandal broke? When he would quite literally have been needed to ‘fix’ your problem?”
The two of them locked eyes. Morgan-Vilk rested his hands on his belly. “After Moriarty quit, and I lost my seat in Parliament so dramatically, I had some time on my hands. As you can imagine, I had developed a bit of a . . . fixation with Lucien.”
“And?”
“He consults for a number of clients, you know. Spins things for them in the news. He hasn’t worked for Downing Street in years, it’s all been in the private sector. You spend your days telling lies for a living—it’s toxic. It can kill your sense of right and wrong, and if you didn’t have one to begin with . . . do you want to know why he left my campaign?”
“Why?” I asked.
“He was having an affair with my wife,” Morgan-Vilk said. There wasn’t a scrap of emotion in his voice. “And I had no idea. It had been going on for more than a decade. Lucien was . . . what, mid-twenties when he started working for me? Young, handsome. He has that ne’er-do-well charm, or did, anyway. That Moriarty name. There’s an odd glamour to it. I suppose my wife was drawn to it.
“He left my campaign because my daughter, Anna, was thirteen years old, and the moment she hit puberty she began to look just like him.”
Anna.
Anna Morgan-Vilk.
Anna with the missing thousand dollars.
“No,” I breathed. “You have got to be—”
“Was there a paternity test done?” Holmes demanded.
“Of course,” Morgan-Vilk said. “Lucien wore his hair longer, in those days. Anna did it herself—plucked a few hairs off his coat and sent them in through a mail service. She showed him the results the week before the election.”
“And he rabbited,” I said.
“Yes,” Morgan-Vilk said. That smile again, like Santa Claus. “Yes, he rabbited. I quite like that term. And when the news broke the next week about me and my mistress—well. My daughter despised me. She despised her mother. And she began worshipping the ‘father’ she’d just discovered she had. She tried to live with him, you know, and he promptly sent her off to school.”
“Our school. She’s working for him now,” I said. “Set me up pretty neatly earlier this week.”
“Oh, I thought he might do something like that. Nasty business.” Morgan-Vilk’s smile faded slightly. “I hate that my girl is mixed up in all of that. You two—well. Like I said, the story about Charlotte and August and Lucien is the sort of nightmare fuel I’ve been running on, thinking about Anna. That man has it in for you, and he’s using my daughter to do it.”
“I’m sorry,” Milo said, and to my surprise it sounded genuine. Maybe it was because the bottle was almost empty. He stood, unsteadily, to open the document box on the table. “I came here originally to discuss certain actions Mr. Morgan-Vilk could perform to improve his public perception, both here and abroad.”
Even drunk and disheveled, Milo Holmes had a certain sort of dignity that made you loath to talk back to him. But I couldn’t let this one slide. “Right. You being here had nothing to do with taking down Lucien. With helping your sister.”
She locked eyes with him. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“Come, now. Moriarty has his fingers in other pies. Yours isn’t the only one.” Morgan-Vilk indicated the files in the document box. “Let me put it bluntly. He’s a brand-name criminal, and I’m in need of the recognition that would come from bringing him to justice. So I’d like to be the one to haul him in, if you don’t mind. I’m working out the extradition details already.”
“Mind?” I laughed, bitterly. “I don’t know about Holmes, but yes, please, for Christ’s sake, drag him home in irons. That fucker just married my mother.”
“Did he?” Milo murmured, the way you would ask about the weather.
“That’s a good reason to be wearing someone’s blood down your shirt,” Morgan-Vilk said.
“I actually don’t know if I agree with that, but sure, fine. Look, he has some kind of plan. Who knows how deep this goes. And he’s on his way to accomplishing it—Milo is hiding out, drunkenly giving you advice in a kitchen, and Holmes and I have our hands tied. I can’t imagine what he’s telling the police right now. The facts themselves are pretty damning.”
“Which are?”
Holmes sighed. “We beat him up, stripped him of his weapons, his wallet, and his fake passport, and then we escaped the police through the bathroom window.”
Morgan-Vilk whistled; Milo stuck his hand out. “His passport,” he said. “And wallet.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No,” Holmes said again. “Why would I help you? Where would that possibly get me?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Lottie. Closer to putting away your tormentor?”
“You don’t help.” She was struggling with them, the words. In her filthy red dress, she looked like a girl who’d wandered away from an explosion. “Milo, you don’t know how to help. You take over, instead. You make things worse. I knew what I was doing! I knew where Leander was! I was going to free him, I went to Berlin to lure Hadrian and Phillipa back to our house. DI Green was going to ‘arrest’ them. Lucien would never let his brother and sister take the fall for something he’d done. He has that much loyalty. In order to spring them, he would have had to make a move! Come out into the open! It was a plan, a good one, and then you showed up with your sniper rifle? Didn’t it have a scope? Didn’t you stop to look before you fired? Did you—”
Milo had his hands up in front of him. They were shaking. “I was trying to protect you,” he said, quietly. “I only ever wanted to protect you.”
“You had years to protect me,” Holmes said, defeated. “That was a piss-poor time to start.”
They stared at each other.
“Charlotte,” Morgan-Vilk said, into the silence.
“Oh, for crying out loud—fine,” she said. “Fine. How about this? I’ll give you copies of Lucien’s forged passport and anything you find in his wallet. In exchange for the originals, I’ll allow you to bring the bastard in when the time comes.”
“And that time is?” Morgan-Vilk asked.
Holmes glanced at me. “Watson?”
She was asking my opinion. “We still have a few loose ends,” I said, taken aback. “How does tomorrow work for you?”
While Holmes supervised the extensive photography Milo’s assistant was performing on Lucien’s things, I stepped aside to turn on my phone. It had been ringing so incessantly since we’d cut and run that I’d had to turn it off to save the battery.
I had nearly a hundred texts, almost all of which were from my stepmother, Abigail. Jamie, what have you done? What were you possibly thinking? and Jamie, come home, it’ll be okay, I promise, a blatant lie, and Your father keeps telling me to let the police handle this but I just don’t know what’s going on, what were you thinking, how could you do something like this? I was horrified for her, but when I began to type out a reply, I realized that she might not be the one in control of her phone. In fact, I’d bet that she wasn’t. If not Lucien Moriarty, then the police.
Nothing from my mum. Well—now that the adrenaline was beginning to leave my system, I had to come to terms with the possibility that there wouldn’t be anything from my mother ever again. I’d just assaulted her new husband in a public restroom. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it, what she must be feeling. Even if she found out that Lucien Moriarty had been behind it all this time, I’d beaten him so brutally that she had to think that I was a monster. How could she ever look at me again?
I realized I was shaking. Nauseous. I took a steadying breath. Think about it later, I told myself. You can’t deal with this now.
Texts from Elizabeth making sure I was okay; she hadn’t heard back from me. Texts from Lena, incomprehensible, thick with unicorn emojis, celebrating some kind of win she thought was coming when we’d meet up tonight.
And a single text from my father. I want you to know that I’m proud of you. Nothing else.
For some reason, that scared me more than anything else I’d seen tonight.
I was crashing, and hard, by the time that Holmes returned with the passport in her fist. “I’m going to have to sleep with this under my pillow,” she muttered, as Morgan-Vilk chattered on a phone in the background.
I showed Holmes my text messages from her and Elizabeth. “What do you think? Should we meet up with Lena? See what she has on the boil?”
“I’d think so. My plan had been to leave the country tonight—”
I stared at her. “Tonight?”
She hurried on. “—but I don’t think it’s safe for me to rejoin my uncle—”
“Wait, you were staying with Leander? For how long?”
“—or maybe it is safe, but why risk it, and then there’s the matter of you being hunted by the police, and I—well. I’d prefer to be here. But Lena said midnight. That’s still four hours until we’re due back in at Sherringford.”
“Jesus.” It was only eight o’clock. I was shocked a whole week hadn’t passed since I left campus this afternoon.
“Well.” Holmes wasn’t quite meeting my eyes. In the background, Milo dumped out a file folder on the table, and papers scattered like a rush of leaves.
“We haven’t had a chance to— I haven’t told you about Shelby,” I said, remembering in a horrible rush. How could I have forgotten? Lucien-stroke-Ted, and our mad dash across town, and Milo appearing like the Ghost of Hangovers Past—all of it had pushed my sister to the back of my mind. “She started her new school today, here, in America, but I think it’s another con of Lucien’s. My mother’s claiming that she’s just homesick, but I trust my sister’s judgment, and Holmes—Shel was scared, when she called. Hiding in a closet scared. That isn’t homesickness.”
Holmes’s eyes refocused on me. “Where is it?”
“Somewhere close to Sherringford, I think? I don’t know—”
“Get her out of there,” she said, immediately. “Now. Now, Jamie. How long has she been there?”
“Only a few hours,” I said. “Hopefully not long enough for anything terrible to happen to her.”
“There are a lot of terrible things,” Holmes said, “that can happen to a girl in a few hours.”
“Can we get a car? How do we get out of the city? Is there—”
“Do you require my assistance?” Milo called.
“No,” Holmes and I said together, and she dragged me away from him and Morgan-Vilk, out into the darkened hallway.
There, she paced, dragging her hands through her hair. “No. No, we can’t be everywhere. We can’t try to be. We have resources—yes. My uncle.”
“My dad,” I said, pulling out my phone. “I’ll text him.”
Dad, I wrote. Shelby’s in trouble. Her new school—I think it’s a front for something.
Holmes was watching my fingers. “Lucien consults for a school in Connecticut. A wilderness rehabilitation school. I’ve been to places like that, and they’re awful, but generally safe. I don’t know how true that will hold if Lucien is involved.”
“She’s just a girl,” I said, almost desperately.
“I know,” Holmes said. “I wish that made a difference.”
Get Leander and get her out of there. Please, I wrote, and I powered down my phone, but even still I couldn’t keep myself from staring at the screen, like some reassurance would appear there by magic.
“Wash your hands of it for now,” she said, watching me. “Trust them. Your father. Leander. They’ve handled worse. And I know your sister. She’s strong.”
“Okay,” I said, because it was awful and it was true.
“Okay,” she said, and then, “Jamie. Can we talk?”
“Yeah,” I said, “of course,” because we hadn’t yet, not really.
She fidgeted a little, flexing her hands. “There’s a bedroom upstairs,” she said, finally. “If you want some privacy.”
“Oh.” The back of my neck went hot, then freezing cold. “Oh. Okay.”
“Not ‘oh,’” she said, the rebuttal automatic, and then, “I mean. Not necessarily ‘oh.’ Not ‘oh’ unless—dammit, Jamie, I am trying very hard here, can we please just go upstairs.”
There was more house here than I’d realized. The room we’d been given was at the end of a long corridor, the floorboards chalky and warped, the walls paneled too in dusty white. All the other rooms were shut up, unused, and there was a musty smell in the air, like no one had opened a window all winter.
Our bedroom had the same haunted feeling. The bed was piled high with white down and linen, and there were chairs and a dresser, but they were covered in dust sheets. I wanted to snap them off and shake them out, see if there was anything below them worth salvaging. I didn’t, though. They were beautiful as they were.
Holmes didn’t care about that. Not that kind of beauty. “Someone might have bugged the room,” she muttered, and immediately started dismantling it piece by piece, beginning with the bed. Once she’d finished feeling up the mattress, I flopped myself down on it and watched her work.
It was the first moment I’d had alone with her in over a year.
I found myself looking for signs of change, ones I could see. Her hair was the same length, give or take, dark and straight down to her shoulders, her eyes still the same unfathomable gray. She was taking apart the dresser, now, removing each drawer to examine them, and she moved with the furious intensity she always had when we were on a case.
Like a missile, made of pylons and metal and rocket fuel, deadly and unstoppable, fired off to hit a tiny target thousands of miles away. That precise. That incredible.
I stopped myself there. A year of beating my head against a wall, alone, cursing her, mourning August, awash in guilt and shame. An hour together in Manhattan, and I caught myself admiring her?
Really?
I felt myself begin to shut down.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, flicking the sheet off the last chair. It kicked up a storm’s worth of dust.
“Nothing,” I said, coughing. “Do you need help?”
“I’m almost done.” She dug her hands underneath the cushion. “Wait—no. Hold on.” Frowning, she examined the thing in her palms. “I think that’s an actual bug.”
“Maybe wash your hands, and—”
“Right.”
I saw, when she returned, that she’d also made some effort to wash out the bottom half of her dress. “I think it’s unsalvageable,” she said, standing awkwardly by the bed. “I feel badly. I took this from the house where I was staying.”
“Where were you staying?” I asked, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Ah,” she said, gathering back up the sheets and pillows in her arms. She dumped them unceremoniously on top of me. “I don’t—that is—do you remember Detective Inspector Green?”
It was hard to forget her. She’d been the one to arrest Holmes for killing August Moriarty. “I do,” I said, neutrally.
“We’ve known each other for so long—no. I mean, yes, she was the Jameson emeralds, but I—her sister—”
“You’re staying in her sister’s place,” I said, sitting up.
“Yes.”
“By yourself?”
“I’ve been going it alone now for some time,” she said, with an airiness that was obviously false. “But Leander’s with me now—I didn’t know if you knew that.”
“I didn’t. But it makes sense, since you showed up together tonight.”
“Of course.”
“I’m not stupid, Holmes,” I said, and she recoiled. Why did I lob that one at her? Why was all this suddenly so hard? We could put down our worst nightmare in a restaurant bathroom and then escape across New York bloody City in the dark, but I couldn’t talk to her alone in a quiet room.
“I never thought you were stupid,” she said. “Not ever. Which you know.”
I’d been trying so hard to stay in the moment, to meet her where we were now. But her defensiveness—which you know—dragged it out of me. “I wasn’t worth it,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “You decided that I wasn’t worth telling the truth to. You couldn’t even tell me where you were going. The police took you away, and you walked off without saying a word. You were gone. A year went by, Holmes. A year! For all I knew, you were—you were dead.”
“You’re my friend,” she said, crossing her arms. “My only friend. If I would’ve told anyone what I was doing, I would have told you. But I thought that you would trust me.”
“You don’t get to pull that one,” I told her. “We chased Hadrian and Phillipa across Europe because you lied to me. I should have trusted you after that? Leander was in your basement. You knew about it. You didn’t tell me. I should have trusted you after that?”
“Yes,” she said, automatically. Then she winced. “No. No, of course not. But can you blame me for not thinking clearly after what happened to—?”
“To August,” I said. “Well, you were thinking clearly enough to give me orders.”
She gave me a despairing look. “Not good ones.”
“Clearly not.”
Holmes shifted her weight. “Anything else?”
“Well.” I pulled my knees up to my chest. “I— That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“I had— There’s been so much I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve made so many mistakes. I feel . . . I feel almost like you’ve ruined me.”
“Watson—”
“Or maybe I was like this all along. I didn’t know why you put up with me, for so long, and at first I thought, I’m not as smart as her, I’m just her sidekick, that you wanted me around because I—I admired you. I couldn’t hide it, I felt it so much. I just didn’t know what you wanted from me. What you got from the two of us together. And then you left, and I—I think I got lost, somewhere. I don’t like myself anymore. I used to. Like myself. At least a little. And I’ve just been behaving like a monster.”
“You think I’ve done that to you?” It was an honest question.
“Maybe,” I said, and swallowed, and said the thing I’d been thinking ever since Lucien Moriarty dragged me out of that bathroom stall. “Holmes, I don’t know if we’re going to get out of this one alive.”
Her eyes were shining. “I know.”
I forced a laugh. “Any final words?”
She shrugged a shoulder.
“Holmes—” I pulled it off, the comforter, the sheets, all those mountains of white, clearing a space beside me. “Come here,” I said, then winced. “I mean. If you want to.”
She sat down gingerly at the edge of the bed. “Jamie—”
The word hovered in the air.
“I’m sorry,” she said, all at once.
“For what?”
“I’m—I’m sorry, Jamie.”
I waited. Sometimes I could read her as clearly as though her thoughts were scrolling across the sky, and sometimes she was the most unknowable creature in the world.
“When I met you, I was still . . . I hate this.”
Words are imprecise, I remembered her saying once. Too many shades of meaning. And people use them to lie.
Holmes had this look on her face like she was trying to drag something up from the basement of her heart.
“Try,” I said.
“I was . . . I think the only way to describe it is wild.”
“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.