“Not to fight with you.”
“But not to make up either, or we’d have had this conversation a long time ago.”
John nodded. “That decision was yours to make. You sent me away.”
“I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. I dreamed of you that night. You and Paddyjack.”
“And you left us these,” John said, holding up the wrist enclosed by the cloth bracelet. “But it was already too late. You sent me away, Izzy, but I had to go as well. It was never going to be the same between us, not with you thinking you’d created me.”
“But I did. The painting—”
“Brought me across. You brought all of us across. But that doesn’t mean you made us. In the before, in our own world, we already
Isabelle didn’t want to get into a repeat of that argument. “So why are you here today?” she asked.
“To warn you. It’s starting again.”
“You mean my paintings.”
John nodded.
“But I haven’t even begun the first one.”
“Doesn’t matter. The veil that lies between my world and yours is already trembling in anticipation.”
“Is it so wrong, bringing you across?” Isabelle asked. “I know what I’m doing. This time I’ll be responsible. I won’t let any of you be hurt again.”
John regarded her steadily for a long moment. Isabelle tried, but she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.
“Rushkin’s back as well,” he said finally. “And this time he’s not alone.”
“The other John,” Isabelle said.
“What do you mean?”
Isabelle told him what had happened at Jilly’s apartment this morning. “He might look like me,” John said, “but he’s not.”
“So Rushkin made—brought him across?”
John shrugged. “That’s something you’ll have to ask him when you see him.”
“I don’t want to see him—not ever again.”
“Then why are you here? Why are you so set on bringing more of us across? Surely you knew it would call him to you.”
Isabelle nodded. “I’m doing it for Kathy.” She told him about the book Alan had planned, the children’s Art Court. And then she asked him, “How did you survive, John?
“My painting wasn’t destroyed.”
Isabelle looked for the lie, but it wasn’t there. Not in his features, not in his eyes, not so she could read it. Of course it wouldn’t be, she thought. This was John and the one thing he didn’t do was lie.
She’d ignored that truth once, but she wouldn’t do it again.
“You and Paddyjack,” she said softly. “Did I imagine all those deaths, then? Did any of the paintings bum?”
“We survived,” John said, “but the others weren’t so fortunate.”
“How? Who rescued you?”
John shook his head. “That’s not important right now. What you have to think about is what you’re going to do when Rushkin comes for you again.”
“I’ll kill him before I let him hurt anybody again.”
“Will you?”
Isabelle wanted to make it a promise, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what the hold was that her old mentor had always had on her, but it was still there.
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
“We bless you for bringing us across,” John told her, “but our lives are in your hands.”
“I know.”
“You’re the only one who can stand up to him in this world.”
“Will he still be so strong?”
“Stronger.”
“Then what can I do?”
“That’s something nobody can decide for you,” John said.
“If I don’t do the paintings ...”
“Then he’ll still be out there, waiting. He will always be a piece of unfinished business. The only way you can be free of him is to stand up to him.”
“And if I do ...”
“You will have to be sure that you’re stronger than him.”
“I don’t want to be like him,” Isabelle said.
“I didn’t say as ruthless—I said stronger.”
“But—”
“Rushkin has put a piece of himself inside you,” John told her. “That’s the hold he has over you.
What you have to do is find that piece and exorcise it.
“And if I can’t?”
“Then I would think very carefully upon what you’re about to do.”
“Will you help me?” Isabelle asked.
“I am helping you. But you’re the one who invited him into your life. Only you can best him.”
When he started to turn away, Isabelle called him back a second time.
“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she said. “I never meant to drive you away or for anyone to be hurt.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you come back to me?”
“I’ve already told you, Izzy.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest that she was about to make.
“If you can’t think of me as real,” he said, “why would you want me to come back to you? Would you love me for myself, or for what you thought you’d made me to be?”
It was Kathy’s story all over again, Isabelle realized. Secret lives that weren’t really secret at all.
They only seemed like a secret when you weren’t paying any attention to them. When you couldn’t accept the difference between who you thought someone was and who they really were. You could hang onto your misperceptions all you wanted, but that didn’t make them real.
John wasn’t who she or anybody else decided he was. That wasn’t the way the story went, whether Kathy wrote it or it took place in the real world. John was who he was. It was as simple, as basic as that, and she knew it. In her mind, in her heart. So why was it so hard for her to accept that he was as real as she?
“Think about it,” John said.
She nodded.
“I always know where you are,” he said. “I always know when you want me. That hasn’t changed.
That will never change.”
“Then why has it taken you so long to come and see me?” Isabelle asked. “God knows I’ve wanted to see you, if only to apologize for the mess I went and made of everything.”
John shook his head. “We could have this conversation forever, Izzy, but it all boils down to one thing: first you have to change the way you think of me. Until you manage to do that, each time we try to talk to each other we’re doomed to an endless replay of what happened that night in the park.”
He turned away once more, but this time she didn’t call him back.
As soon as they reached the Crowsea Precinct, the two detectives hustled Alan into their lieutenant’s office, leaving Marisa out in the hall. Waiting inside the office were the lieutenant—Peter Kent, according to the name plate
