The baby. I bit down on my lip and prayed that Abby believed in loyalty among the sisterhood.
She shook her head. “You’ll have to trust me on this one.”
Daniel looked away, out over the grass, and I saw a flash of something-exhaustion, or grief-cross his face. “We used to tell one another everything,” he said, “not so long ago. Didn’t we? Or is that simply the way I remember it? The five of us against the world, and no secrets, ever.”
Abby’s eyebrows flicked up. “Did we? I’m not sure anyone tells anyone else everything. You don’t, for example.”
“I’d like to think,” Daniel said, after a moment, “that I do my best. That, unless there’s some pressing reason not to, I tell you and the others everything that really matters.”
“But there’s always some pressing reason, isn’t there? With you.” Abby’s face was pale and shuttered.
“Possibly there is,” Daniel said quietly, on a long sigh. “There didn’t use to be.”
“You and Lexie,” Abby said. “Have you ever…?”
A silence; the two of them watching each other, intent as enemies.
“Because that would matter.”
“Would it? Why?”
Another silence. The moon went in; their faces faded into the night.
“No,” Daniel said, finally. “We haven’t. I would probably say the same thing either way, since I don’t see how it would be important, so I don’t expect you to believe me. But, for what it’s worth, we haven’t.”
Silence, again. The tiny red glow of a cigarette butt, arcing into the dark like a meteor. I stood in the cold kitchen, watching them through the glass, and wished I could tell them: It’ll all be OK now. Everyone will settle; everything will go back to normal, given time, and now we’ve got time. I’m staying.
A door banging, in the middle of the night; fast, careless footsteps thumping on wood; another slam, heavier this time, the front door.
I listened, sitting up in bed, my heart hammering. There was a shift somewhere in the house, so subtle that I felt it more than heard it, running through walls and floorboards into my bones: someone moving. It could have come from anywhere. It was a still night, no wind in the trees, only the cool deceptive call of an owl hunting far off in the lanes. I pulled my pillow up against the headboard, got comfortable and waited. I thought about having a cigarette, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one sitting upright, senses on full alert for the tiniest thing: the click of a lighter, the smell of smoke twisting in the dark air.
After about twenty minutes the front door opened and closed again, very quietly this time. A pause; then delicate, careful steps going up the stairs, into Justin’s room, and the explosive creak of bedsprings below me.
I gave it five minutes. When nothing interesting happened, I slid out of bed and ran downstairs-there was no point in trying to be quiet. “Oh,” Justin said, when I stuck my head round his door. “It’s you.”
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, half dressed: trousers, shoes but no socks, his shirt untucked and half buttoned. He looked awful.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
Justin ran his hands over his face, and I saw that they were trembling. “No,” he said. “I’m really not.”
“What happened?”
His hands came down and he stared at me, red-eyed. “Go to bed,” he said. “Just go to bed, Lexie.”
“Are you pissed off with me?”
“Not everything in this world is about you, you know,” Justin said coldly. “Believe it or not.”
“Justin,” I said, after a second. “I just wanted to-”
“If you really want to help,” Justin said, “then you can leave me alone.”
He got up and started fussing with the bedsheets, pulling them tight in fast, clumsy little jerks, his back turned to me. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything more, I closed his door gently behind me and went back upstairs. There was no light from Daniel’s room, but I could feel him there, only a few feet away in the darkness, listening and thinking.
The next day, when I came out of my five o’clock tutorial, Abby and Justin were waiting for me in the corridor. “Have you seen Rafe?” Abby asked.
“Not since lunch,” I said. They were dressed for outdoors-Abby in her long gray coat, Justin’s tweed jacket buttoned-and rain sparkled on their shoulders and in their hair. “Didn’t he have a thesis meeting?”
“That’s what he told us,” said Abby, shifting back against the wall to let a bunch of yelling undergrads tumble by, “but thesis meetings don’t last four hours, and anyway we checked Armstrong’s office. It’s locked. He’s not in there.”
“Maybe he went to the Buttery for a pint,” I suggested. Justin winced. We all knew that Rafe had been drinking a little more than was good for him, but nobody mentioned it, ever.
“We checked there too,” Abby said. “And he wouldn’t go to the Pav, he says it’s full of rugger-bugger wankers and it gives him boarding-school flashbacks. I don’t know where else to look.”
“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, coming out of his tutorial across the corridor.
“We can’t find Rafe.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said, adjusting his armful of books and papers. “Have you tried ringing him?”
“Three times,” said Abby. “The first time he hit Reject Call, and after that he turned his phone off.”
“Are his things still in his carrel?”
“No,” Justin said, slumping against the wall and picking at a cuticle. “Everything’s gone.”
“But that’s a good sign, surely,” Daniel said, giving him a look of mild surprise. “It means nothing unexpected’s happened to him; he hasn’t been hit by a car, or had some kind of health emergency and been taken to hospital. He’s simply gone off on his own somewhere.”
“Yes, but where?” Justin’s voice was rising. “And what are we supposed to do now? He can’t get home without us. Do we just leave him here?”
Daniel gazed down the corridor, over the milling heads. The air smelled of wet carpet; somewhere round the corner a girl shrieked, high and piercing, and Justin and Abby and I all jumped before we realized she was only playing at terrified, the scream had already dissolved into loud flirtatious scolding. Daniel, biting down thoughtfully on his lip, didn’t seem to notice.
After a moment he sighed. “Rafe,” he said, and gave a quick, exasperated shake of his head. “Honestly. Yes, of course we leave him here; there’s really nothing else we can do. If he wants to come home, he can ring one of us, or take a taxi.”
'To Glenskehy? And I’m not driving all the way back into town for him, just because he feels like being an idiot-”
“Well,” Daniel said, “I’m sure he’ll find a way.” He tucked a stray sheet of paper into the pile he was carrying. “Let’s go home.”
By the end of dinner-a half-arsed dinner, chicken fillets from the freezer, rice, a bowl of fruit shoved into the middle of the table-Rafe hadn’t rung. He had switched his phone back on, but he was still letting our calls go to voice mail. “It’s not like him,” Justin said. He was scraping compulsively, with one thumbnail, at the pattern on the edge of his plate.
“Sure it is,” said Abby firmly. “He’s gone on a bender and picked up some girl, just like he did that other time, remember? He was gone for two days.”
“That was different. And what are you nodding about?” Justin added, sourly, to me. “You don’t remember that. You weren’t even here for that.”
My adrenaline leaped, but no one looked suspicious; they were all too focused on Rafe to notice a slip that
