WHEN I WENT LOOKING FOR A SOURCE TO KEEP ME apprised of the goings-on at Sherringford School in my absence, I needed someone that I could rely on. My former roommate Lena would seem the obvious choice: we trusted one another; she was enterprising and resourceful; she responded to texts within seconds, even when in the shower. For a few weeks at the beginning of the school year, I had asked her for updates. But she wasn’t close enough to Watson anymore to be able to give me workable data. He’s fine I guess?? Didn’t eat much at lunch today but maybe he’s cutting now for rugby he was bulking before lol gross right. How is London girl? Heart emoji. Detective emoji. Two shopping bag emojis.
It wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
I hadn’t wanted information on his personal life, or I’d told myself I hadn’t. I only wanted to know that he was safe. I was on the cusp of writing my awful older brother for help when I’d received a call on an October afternoon. I’d answered only because it came from a blocked number—I had hoped that my uncle Leander might be calling. I always hoped, with him.
“I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Elizabeth? From last year. I got your number from his phone.” She hadn’t had to say who “he” was. “I get that this is weird, me calling. But I think he misses you a lot, and it would help him out if you got in touch. Even to tell him good-bye.”
I didn’t respond. I was sitting at a table in my favorite café by the Thames, and the water was quite loud, and I had nothing to say to this girl.
“Do you even care if he’s okay?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped.
“She speaks,” Elizabeth said with a lonely sort of laugh, and that was when I knew that if she wasn’t dating him, she would be soon.
But if she wouldn’t tell me that, I’d pretend I didn’t know. It was more convenient for my purposes, which were taking shape as we spoke. “I need time,” I’d told her. “I want to come and see him in the new year, and I’ll tell him good-bye then. But for now—could you text me every now and then and tell me how he’s doing? Make sure that there aren’t any more incidents like what happened with Bryony Downs?”
Useful for her: an end date for her boyfriend’s psychic misery. Useful for me: a regular word or two on Watson’s well-being.
At first that was all it was. A line here, about where he was applying to college. A line there, about how the rugby team was doing. There was nothing useful about this information, really, and still I craved it. I reread her messages in transit, at my desk, in bed when I woke in the morning. Jamie has a cold. Two days later: He’s better. Prosaic things. Things no one would care about.
I found I cared immensely.
What was she getting in return? I had always loathed psychology, but I began to think these messages gave her a sense of control. Her boyfriend was still upset about a girl in his past; ergo, by managing that girl’s knowledge of him, Elizabeth could feel as though she had control over her relationship.
It was untrue, of course. You couldn’t control how someone else felt. You could hardly control how you felt most of the time. And so the holidays came and went. New Year’s came and went. Elizabeth pressed me for plans to visit, to finally have it out with Watson, and I provided her with none. This week, when I began getting messages that said I’m worried about Jamie, I think bad things are happening to him and he’s not telling me, and He’s getting hauled in to see the dean, and I think he’s suspended, I thought I knew why. Her plan was to force my hand. If I wouldn’t come to help ease Watson’s mind, I would perhaps come if I thought he were in danger. If she had to manufacture the danger herself, so be it.
It seemed a petty reason to delete someone’s school presentation, but then, I was the girl desperately rereading text messages about Watson’s new shoes.
But Elizabeth Hartwell (Hartwell, of course that was her name) was nothing if not a survivor. Watching her walk away now—watching the darkened hallway where I could hear her walk away—I realized I had given her too little credit. She had been put into a situation where her family was in danger; she had been blackmailed into going along with Anna Morgan-Vilk’s plan; she was forced into hurting Watson, a boy she clearly cared for, and in response she had called in the one person she thought could help, knowing full well that person was me.
The text on my phone read, I don’t know if you’re coming with Jamie tonight, but you need to be careful. Lucien Moriarty and his daughter are in the tunnels. The police are everywhere.
I knew that was what it said, because Watson dragged me into the now-unlocked prayer room, shut the door, pulled the phone from my hands, and read it out to me in a voice shimmering with anger.
“‘Jamie seems like he’s forgiven Tom,’” he said, scrolling up with his thumbs. “‘Jamie’s dad keeps picking him up to go somewhere.’ ‘Jamie is rereading His Last Bow. He looks sad.’ ‘Jamie and I had a picnic today’—what the hell is this, Holmes? How long has this been going on?”
“Keep your voice down,” I said. What else could I say?
“My voice. You’re worried about my voice. Jesus Christ, this is—this goes back for months. This goes back to homecoming. To when she asked me out. Did you have some kind of plan, the two of you? God—” He spun around, and the light from my screen strobed up and down the cinder block wall. “I thought it was bad when you disappeared. I thought it was the worst thing. The worst thing. But this—this is worse.”
“I told you I was keeping tabs on you. I needed to know you were safe.” It came out small. “I needed to know Lucien wasn’t coming after you.”
“Yes, he does really love to ruin picnics, doesn’t he. Rugby games. My shoes. He just loves to ruin my shoes. All of that was necessary information. It wasn’t you washing your hands of me and then getting to keep being my friend by proxy.”
“What you saw out there—she’s being coerced. She’s not working with Anna because she wants to.”
“I got that,” he snapped.
I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders. He shrugged them off, clutching his boots to his chest.
“Lucien’s here,” he said. “Somewhere. Anna is here. Call Detective Shepard. Call Leander. Do whatever you need to do.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’m going to think about some of my life choices,” he said.
This was not an unreasonable response to the situation. Still, I swallowed. The room was cold and dark and bare, and Watson was in sock feet on the concrete floor. If I were him, I’d be looking for a metaphor. Instead I said, “I’m sorry.”
Watson turned to stare at me, my phone still in his hands. The light from the screen made me flinch.
“You’re sorry for a lot of things, aren’t you?” he said.
WE ONLY HAD TEN MINUTES UNTIL WE WERE MEANT TO meet Elizabeth, and if we’d had a plan before, we didn’t now. The worst was knowing that this betrayal of mine was fairly small, in the grand scheme of recent betrayals, and that given the proper amount of time (a few days, perhaps a week) Watson would no longer be mad at me. It made it difficult for me to take his anger seriously, as its timing was so inconvenient.
He was being a bit of a monster. He was doing that by being human.
In short: I did mean my apology; I would not have done anything different; I thought it very stupid for Watson to go thundering out into the darkened access tunnels, and yet he did.
And then I wondered if these were the thoughts a horrible person would have, if perhaps I hadn’t changed in the slightest, that any development I’d made as a human being had been in a vacuum and not in the more demanding arena of my day-to-day life, or that perhaps it was Watson, my indispensible Watson, who brought out the very worst of me—the part of me that loved someone, and then I thought aegres cere medendo, I have come looking for my heart only to be broken by it, and, how pathetic, I am quoting proverbs in a grungy empty room while my idiot best friend is stomping off to get his idiot self killed, and there was no real way to rid oneself of oneself, there was no real way to imagine it, Watson dead, myself dead, or Watson gone, and his mother—his mother and her faith that she had found herself a partner. My veins burned. They burned horribly, and my head was a broken steam valve, and it was like I was under the porch at Watson’s family home, dug into the snow to preserve my own body prematurely—it would be less work in the end—and really I had put my oxycodone in my bag as a challenge to myself, I carried it as a challenge, it would be the sane thing to have been rid of it months ago, and I threw the pills on the ground and crushed them under my heel.
There.
If Lucien Moriarty was in these tunnels, I would find him, and I would deal with him myself. I found that, right then, I had a need to break someone open.
I would see his blood spilled all over the floor.