“Abby caught hold of your arm,” Rafe said, “but you whipped round, with your fists up; I honestly thought you were about to go for her. Justin and I were standing there gawping like a pair of morons, trying to figure out what the fuck-I mean, two seconds ago we’d been on Jekyll sex, for God’s sake. As soon as you let go of Daniel, he shoved the paper at me, caught your wrists from behind and told me, ‘Read that.’ ”
“I didn’t like it,” Justin said softly. “You were flinging yourself back and forth, trying to pull away from Daniel, but he wouldn’t let go. It was… You tried to bite him, his arm. I thought he shouldn’t be doing that, if it was your paper then he should let you have it, but I just couldn’t catch up enough to say anything.”
I wasn’t surprised. These were not men of action here; their currencies were thoughts and words, and they had been catapulted into something that blew both of those right out of the water. What did surprise me, what set warning lights flashing at the back of my mind, was the speed and ease with which Daniel had snapped into action.
“So,” Rafe said, “I read the thing out loud. It said, ‘Dear Lexie, have thought it over and OK we can talk about 200K. Please get in touch ’cause I know we both want to get this deal wrapped up. Best regards, Ned.’ ”
“Surely to God,” Justin said softly and bitterly, into the airless silence, “you remember that.”
“The spelling was shit,” said Rafe, through his cigarette. “He actually had a number two for ‘to,’ like a fucking fourteen-year-old. What an utter moron. Apart from anything else, I would’ve expected you to have better taste than to mess about making shoddy little deals with someone like that.”
“Would you have?” Abby asked. Her eyes were very steady on mine, searching, and her hands had gone still in her lap. “If none of this had happened, would you really have sold out to Ned?”
When I think about how breathtakingly cruel I was to those four, this is one of the few things that make me feel any better: I could have said yes, then. I could have told them exactly what Lexie was planning to do to them, to everything they had put their hearts and minds and bodies into building. Maybe that would have hurt them less, in the end, than thinking it had all been over nothing; I don’t know. All I know is that the last time I had a choice, and much too late to make any difference, I lied for the right reasons.
“No,” I said. “I just… God. I just needed to know I could. I freaked out, Abby. I started feeling trapped and I panicked. It was never about actually leaving. I just had to know I could leave, if I wanted to.”
“Trapped,” Justin said, and his head moved in a quick, hurt jerk. “With us,” but I saw Abby’s fast blink as she realized: the baby.
“You were going to stay.”
“Oh God, I wanted to stay,” I said, and I still don’t know and never will whether this one was a lie at all. “So much, Abby. I really did.”
After a long moment she nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“I told you,” Rafe said, tipping his head back and blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Fucking Daniel. Up until last week he was still practically hysterical with paranoia about that. I told him I’d talked to you and you had no intention of going anywhere, but God forbid he should listen to anyone.”
Abby didn’t react to that, didn’t move; it looked like she wasn’t even breathing. “And now?” she asked me. “Now what?”
For a light-headed second I lost the thread, thought she had made me and was asking if I wanted to stay anyway. “What do you mean?”
“She means,” Rafe said, his voice cool and clipped and very level, “when this conversation is over, are you going to phone Mackey or O’Neill or the village idiots and turn us in. Shop us. Rat us out. Whatever the appropriate expression is, in these circumstances.”
You’d think this would have sent guilt shooting through me like pins and needles, spreading from that mike red-hot against my skin, but the only thing I felt was sad: a huge, final, dragging sadness, like an ebb tide down in my bones. “I’m not going to say anything to anyone,” I said, and felt Frank, off in his little humming circle of electronics, approve. “I don’t want you guys going to jail. No matter what happened.”
“Well,” Abby said softly, almost to herself. She sat back in her chair and smoothed her skirt, absently, with both hands. “Well, then…”
“Well, then,” Rafe said, and drew hard on his smoke, “we made this whole thing an awful lot more complicated than it needed to be. Somehow, I’m not surprised.”
“Then what?” I said. “After the note. Then what happened?”
A small, tense shift through the room. None of them were looking at each other. I searched for some tiny difference between their faces, anything that would hint that this conversation was hitting one of them harder than the others, that someone was protecting, being protected, guilty, defensive: nothing.
“Then,” Abby said, on a big breath. “Lex, I don’t know if you’d thought about what it would mean, if you sold your share to Ned. You don’t always… I don’t know. Think things through.”
A vicious snort from Rafe. “That’s putting it mildly. My God, Lexie, what the hell did you think would happen? You’d sell up, buy yourself a nice little apartment somewhere, and everything would be just ducky? What did you expect to get when you walked into college every morning? Hugs and kisses and your sandwich all ready for you? We would never have spoken to you again. We would have hated your guts.”
“Ned would have been at the rest of us,” Abby said, “all the time, every day, to sell out to some developer and turn this house into apartments or a golf club or whatever the hell it was that he wanted. He could have moved in here, lived with us, and there would’ve been nothing we could do about it. Sooner or later, we would have given up. We would have lost the house. This house.”
Something stirred, subtle and waking: a tiny ripple in the walls, a creak of floorboards upstairs, a draft spinning down the stairwell.
“We all started shouting,” Justin said, low. “Screaming, everyone at once-I don’t even know what I was saying. You got away from Daniel, and Rafe grabbed you, and you hit him-hard, Lexie, you punched him in the stomach-”
“It was a fight,” Rafe said. “We can call it whatever we want, but the fact is we were fighting like a bunch of scumbags on a street corner. Another thirty seconds and we would all have been rolling around on the kitchen floor beating the living shit out of each other. Except that before we got that far-”
“Except,” Abby said, her voice slicing his off clean as a slammed door, “we never got that far.”
She met Rafe’s eyes calmly, unblinking. After a second he shrugged and slumped back on the sofa, one foot jiggling restlessly.
“It could have been any of us,” Abby said, to me or to Rafe, I couldn’t tell. There was a depth of passion in her voice that startled me. “We were all raging-I’ve never been that angry in my life. The rest was just chance; just the way things happened. Every one of us was ready to kill you, Lexie, and you can’t blame us.”
That stirring again, somewhere off the far edge of my hearing: a whisk across the landing, a humming in the chimneys. “I don’t,” I said. I wondered-I should have known a whole lot better, I must have read too many cheesy ghost stories as a kid-if this was all Lexie had wanted from me: to let them know it was OK. “You had every right to be mad. Even afterwards, you would’ve had every right to throw me out.”
“We talked about it,” Abby said. Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Me and Daniel. Whether we could all still live together, after… But it would have been complicated, and anyway, it was you. No matter what, it was still you.”
“The next thing I remember,” Justin said, very quietly, “is the back door slamming and this knife lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. With blood on it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening.”
“And you just let me go?” I said, to my hands. “You didn’t even bother to find out if-”
“No,” said Abby, leaning forwards, trying to catch my eye. “No, Lex. Of course we bothered. It took us all a minute to catch up with what had happened, but the second we did… It was Daniel, mostly; the rest of us were basically paralyzed. By the time I could move again, he was already getting the torch out. He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages ready-”
“Which would have come in useful,” Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, “if we’d been delivering a baby in Gone With the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby’s embroidery needle?”
“-and he and Justin went looking for you. Straight away.”
It had been a good call. Daniel had known he could trust Abby to keep it together; if anyone flaked out, it would be Rafe or Justin. He had got them separated, put them both under supervision and come up with a plan
