The Likeness

10

When you find a crack, you push on it and you see if something breaks. It had taken me about an hour and a half to work out that, if there was something the housemates weren’t telling me, Justin was my best bet. Any detective with a couple of years under his belt can tell you who’s going to break first; back in Murder I once saw Costello, who was installed in the eighties along with the decor, pick the weak link just from watching the gang of suspects get booked in. It’s our version of Name That Tune.

Daniel and Abby were both useless: too controlled and too focused, almost impossible to distract or wrong-foot—I had tried a couple of times to nudge Abby into telling me who she thought the daddy was, got nothing but cool blank looks. Rafe was more suggestible and I knew I could probably get somewhere with him if I had to, but it would be tricky; he was too volatile and contrary, just as likely to storm out in a strop as to tell you what you wanted to know. Justin—gentle, imaginative, easily worried, wanting everyone to be happy—was pretty near to being an interviewer’s dream.

The only thing was that I was never alone with him. In the first week I hadn’t really noticed it, but now that I was looking for a chance, it stood out. Daniel and I drove into college together a couple of times a week, and I saw a lot of Abby—breakfasts, after dinner when the guys were washing up, sometimes she knocked on my door at night with a packet of biscuits and we sat on the bed and talked till we got sleepy—but if I was ever on my own with Rafe or Justin for more than five minutes, one of the others would drift over or call out to us, and we would be effortlessly, invisibly enveloped by the group again. It could have been natural; all five of them did spend an awful lot of time together, and every group has subtle subdivisions, people who never pair off because they only work as part of the whole. But I had to wonder if someone, probably Daniel, had considered all four of them with an interrogator’s assessing eye and come to the same conclusion I had.

It was Monday morning before I got my chance. We were in college; Daniel was giving a tutorial and Abby had a meeting with her supervisor, so it was just Rafe and Justin and me in our corner of the library. When Rafe got up and headed off somewhere, presumably to the bathroom, I counted to twenty and then stuck my head over the barrier into Justin’s carrel.

“Hello, you,” he said, looking up from a page of tiny, fastidious handwriting. Every inch of his desk was heaped with books and looseleaf and photocopies striped with highlighter pen; Justin couldn’t work unless he was snugly nested in the middle of everything he might possibly need.

“I’m bored and it’s sunny,” I said. “Come for lunch.”

He checked his watch. “It’s only twenty to one.”

“Live dangerously,” I said.

Justin looked uncertain. “What about Rafe?”

“He’s big and ugly enough to look after himself. He can wait for Abby and Daniel.” Justin was still looking way too unsure for a decision of this magnitude, and I figured I had about a minute to get him out of there before Rafe came back. “Ah, Justin, come on. I’ll do this till you do.” I drummed “shave and a haircut, two bits” on the barrier with my fingernails.

“Argh,” Justin said, putting his pen down. “Chinese noise torture. You win.”

The obvious place to go was the edge of New Square, but you can see it through the library windows, so I dragged Justin over to the cricket pitch, where it would take Rafe longer to find us. It was a bright, cold day, high blue sky and the air like ice water. Down by the Pavilion a bunch of cricketers were doing earnest stylized things at each other, and up at our end four guys were playing Frisbee and trying to act like they weren’t doing it for the benefit of three industrially groomed girls on a bench, who were trying to look like they weren’t watching. Mating rituals: it was spring.

“So,” Justin said, when we were settled on the grass. “How’s the chapter going?”

“Crap,” I said, rummaging through my book bag for my sandwich. “I’ve written bugger-all since I got back. I can’t concentrate.”

“Well,” Justin said, after a moment. “That’s only to be expected, isn’t it? For a little while.”

I shrugged, not looking at him.

“It’ll wear off. Really, it will. Now that you’re home and everything’s back to normal.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” I found my sandwich, made a face at it and dumped it on the grass: few things worried Justin as much as people not eating. “It just sucks, not knowing what happened. It sucks enormously. I keep wondering… The cops kept hinting that they had all these leads and stuff, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. For fuck’s sake, I’m the one who got stabbed here. If anyone has a right to know why, it’s me.”

“But I thought you were feeling better. You said you were fine.”

“I guess. Never mind.”

“We thought… I mean, I didn’t expect you to be this bothered. To keep thinking about it. It’s not like you.”

I glanced over at him, but he didn’t look suspicious, just worried. “Yeah, well,” I said. “I never got stabbed before.”

“No,” said Justin. “I suppose not.” He arranged his lunch on the grass: bottle of orange juice on one side, banana on the other, sandwich in the middle. He was biting the edge of his lip.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” I said abruptly. “My parents.” Saying the words gave me a sharp, giddy little thrill.

Justin’s head snapped up and he stared at me. “What about them?”

“That maybe I should get in touch with them. Tell them what happened.”

“No pasts,” Justin said, instantly, like a quick sign against bad luck. “We agreed.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. Easy for you to say.”

“It isn’t, actually.” Then, when I didn’t answer: “Lexie? Are you serious?”

I did another edgy little shrug. “Not sure yet.”

“But I thought you hated them. You said you never wanted to speak to them again.”

“That’s not the point.” I twisted the strap of my book bag around my finger, pulled it away in a long spiral. “I just keep thinking… I could have died there. Actually died. And my parents would never even have known.”

“If something happens to me,” Justin said, “I don’t want my parents called. I don’t want them there. I don’t want them to know.”

“Why not?” He was picking the seal off his bottle of juice, head down. “Justin?”

“Never mind. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No. Tell me, Justin. Why not?”

After a moment Justin said, “I went back to Belfast for Christmas, our first year of postgrad. Not long after you came. Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” I said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was blinking at the cricketers, white and formal as ghosts against the green, the thwack of the bat reaching us late and faraway.

“I told my father and my stepmother that I’m gay. On Christmas Eve.” A small, humorless snort of a laugh. “God love me, I suppose I thought the holiday spirit-peace and good will to all men… And the four of you had taken it so completely in your stride. Do you know what Daniel said, when I told him? He thought it over for a few minutes and then informed me that straight and gay are modern constructs, the concept of sexuality was much more fluid right up through the Renaissance. And Abby rolled her eyes and asked me if I wanted her to act surprised. Rafe was the one I was most worried about-I’m not sure why—but he just grinned and said, ‘Less competition for me.’ Which was sweet of him, actually; it’s not like I was ever much competition to him anyway… It was very comforting, you know. I suppose it made me think that telling my family might not be such a huge big deal, after all.”

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “That you’d told them. You never said.”

“Yes, well,” Justin said. He picked the cling-film away from his sandwich delicately, being careful not to get relish on his fingers. “My stepmother’s a dreadful woman, you know. Really dreadful. Her father’s a carpenter, but she tells people he’s an artisan, whatever she thinks that means, and she never invites him to parties. Everything about her is pure faultless middle-class—the accent, the clothes, the hair, the china patterns, it’s as if she ordered herself from a catalogue—but you can see the incredible effort that goes into every second of it. Marrying her boss must have been like attaining the Holy Grail. I’m not saying my father would have been OK with me if it hadn’t been for her—he looked like he was going to be sick—but she made it so, so much worse. She was hysterical. She told my father she wanted me out of the house, right away. For good.”

“Jesus, Justin.”

“She watches a lot of soap operas,” Justin said. “Erring sons get banished all the time. She kept shrieking, actually shrieking, ‘Think of the boys!’—she meant my half brothers. I don’t know if she thought I was going to convert them or molest them or what, but I said—which was nasty of me, but you can see why I was feeling vicious—I said she had nothing to worry about, no self-respecting gay man would touch either of those hideous little Cabbage Patch Kids with a barge pole. It went downhill from there. She threw things, I said things, the Cabbage Patch Kids actually put down their PlayStations to come see what was happening, she tried to drag them out of the room—presumably so I wouldn’t jump them on the spot—they started shrieking… Finally my father told me it would be better if I wasn’t in the house—‘for the moment,’ as he put it, but we both knew what he meant. He drove me to the station and gave me a hundred pounds. For Christmas.” He pulled the cling-film straight and laid it on the grass, the sandwich neatly in the middle.

“What did you do?” I asked quietly.

“Over Christmas? Stayed in my flat, mostly. Bought a hundred-quid bottle of whiskey. Felt sorry for myself.” He gave me a wry half smile. “I know: I should have told you I was back in town. But… well, pride, I suppose. It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I know none of you would have asked, but you couldn’t have helped wondering, and you’re all too sharp for your own good. Someone would have guessed.”

The way he was sitting—knees pulled up, feet neatly together—rucked up his trousers; he was wearing gray socks worn thin by too much washing, and his ankles were delicate and bony as a boy’s. I reached over and covered one of them with my hand. It was warm and solid and my fingers almost circled it.

“No, it’s all right,” Justin said, and when I looked up I saw that he was smiling at me, properly this time. “Really and truly, it is. At first it did upset me a lot; I felt like I was orphaned, homeless—honestly, if you could have seen the level of melodrama going on in my head… But I don’t think about it any more, not since the house. I don’t even know why I brought it up.”

“My fault,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He gave my hand a little fingertip pat. “If you really want to get in touch with your parents, then… well, it’s none of my business, is it? All I’m saying is, don’t forget: we’ve all got reasons why we decided no pasts. It’s not just me. Rafe… Well, you’ve heard his father.”

I nodded. “He’s a git.”

“Rafe’s been getting that exact same phone call for as long as I’ve known him: you’re pathetic, you’re useless, I’m ashamed to mention you to my friends. I’m pretty sure his whole childhood was like that. His father disliked him almost from the moment he was born—it happens sometimes, you know. He wanted a big oaf of a son who would play rugby and grope his secretary and throw up outside chi-chi nightclubs, and instead he got Rafe. He made his life a misery. You didn’t see Rafe when we first started college: this skinny prickly creature, so defensive that if you teased him the tiniest bit he would absolutely take your head off. I wasn’t even sure I liked him, at first. I just hung around with him because I liked Abby and Daniel, and they obviously thought he was all right.”

“He’s still skinny,” I said. “And he’s still prickly, too. He’s a little bollocks when he feels like it.”

Justin shook his head. “He’s a million times better than he was. And it’s because he doesn’t have to think about those awful parents of his any more, at least not often. And Daniel… Have you ever, once, heard him mention his childhood?”

I shook my head.

“Neither have I. I know his parents are dead, but I don’t know when or how, or what happened to him afterwards—where he lived, with who, nothing. Abby and I got awfully drunk together one night and started being silly about that, making up childhoods for Daniel: he was one of those feral children raised by hamsters, he grew up in a brothel in Istanbul, his parents were CIA sleepers who got taken out by the KGB and he escaped by hiding in the washing machine… It was funny at the time, but the fact is, his childhood can’t have been too pleasant, can it, for him to be so secretive about it? You’re bad enough…” Justin shot me a quick glance. “But at least I know you had chicken pox, and you learned to ride horses. I don’t know anything like that about Daniel. Not a thing.”

I hoped to God we wouldn’t run into a situation where I needed to show off my equestrian skills. “And then there’s Abby,” Justin said. “Has Abby ever talked to you about her mother?”

“Bits,” I said. “I got the idea.”

“It’s worse than she makes it sound. I actually met the woman—you weren’t here yet, it was back in about third year. We were all over at Abby’s flat one evening, and her mother showed up, banging on the door. She was… God. The way she was dressed—I don’t know if she’s actually a prostitute, or just… well. She was obviously out of it; she kept shouting at Abby, but I barely understood a word she said. Abby shoved something into her hand-money, I’m sure, and you know how broke Abby’s always been—and practically hauled her out of the door. She was white as a ghost, Abby was; I thought she was going to faint.” Justin looked up at me anxiously, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Don’t tell her I told you that.”

“I won’t.”

“She’s never mentioned it since; I doubt she wants to talk about it now. Which is sort of my point. I’m sure you’ve got reasons, too, why you thought the no-pasts thing was a good idea. Maybe what happened changed all that, I don’t know, but… just remember you’re still fragile, right now. Just give it a little while before you do anything irrevocable. And if you do decide to get in touch with your parents, maybe the best thing would be not to tell the others. It would… Well. It would hurt them.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “You think?”

“Well, of course. We’re…” He was still messing with the cling-film; there was a faint pink flush creeping up his cheeks. “We love you, you know. As far as we’re concerned, we’re your family now. All of one another’s family—I mean, that’s not right, but you know what I mean…”

I leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Course I do,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Justin’s phone beeped. “That’ll be Rafe,” he said, fishing it out of his pocket. “Yes: wanting to know where we are.”

He started texting Rafe back, peering nearsightedly at the phone, and reached over to squeeze my shoulder with his free hand. “Just have a think about it,” he said. “And eat your lunch.”

“I see you’ve been playing Who’s the Daddy,” Frank said, that night. He was eating something—a burger, maybe, I could hear paper rustling. “And Justin’s out, in more ways than one. Place your bets: Danny Boy or Pretty Boy?”

“Or neither,” I said. I was on my way to my lurk spot—I was ringing Frank almost as soon as I got out the back gate, these days, rather than wait even a few extra minutes to hear if he had anything new on Lexie. “Our killer knew her, remember; no way to be sure just how well. That’s not what I was after, anyway. I was chasing down the no-pasts thing, trying to work out what these four aren’t sharing.”

“And all you got was a nice collection of sob stories. I grant you the no-pasts thing is fucked up, but we already knew they were a bunch of weirdos. No news there.”

“Mmm,” I said. I wasn’t so sure that afternoon had been useless, even if I didn’t know how it fit in yet. “I’ll keep poking around.”

“It’s been one of those days all round,” Frank said, through a mouthful. “I’ve been chasing our girl and getting zip. You’ve probably noticed: we’ve got a gap a year and a half long in her story. She ditches the May-Ruth ID in late 2000, but she doesn’t show up as Lexie until early 2002. I’m trying to track down where and who she was in between. I doubt she went home, wherever that is, but it’s always a possibility; and even if she didn’t, she might have left us a clue or two along the way.”

“I’d focus on European countries,” I said. “After September 2001, airport security tightened up a lot; she wouldn’t have made it out of the U.S. and into Ireland on a fake passport. She had to be this side of the Atlantic before then.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what name to chase. There’s no record of May-Ruth Thibodeaux ever applying for a passport. I’m thinking she went back to her own identity or bought herself a new one in New York, flew out of JFK on that, switched identity again once she got wherever she was going—”

JFK—Frank was still talking but I’d stopped dead in the middle of the lane, just forgotten to keep walking, because that mysterious page in Lexie’s date book had gone off in my head with a flash-bang like a firecracker. CDG 59… I’d flown into Charles de Gaulle a dozen times, going to spend summers with my French cousins, and fifty-nine quid sounded just about right for a one-way. AMS: not Abigail Marie Stone; Amsterdam. LHR: London Heathrow. I couldn’t remember the others but I knew, sure as steel, that they would turn out to be airport codes. Lexie had been pricing flights.

If all she wanted was an abortion she would have headed to England, no need to mess about with Amsterdam and Paris. And those were one-way prices, not returns. She had been getting ready to run again, right off the edge of her life and out into the wide blue world.

Why?

Three things had changed, in her last few weeks. She had found out she was pregnant; N had materialized; and she had started making plans to take off. I don’t believe in coincidences. There was no way to be sure of the order in which those three things had happened, but by whatever roundabout path, one of them had led to the other two. There was a pattern there, somewhere: tantalizingly close, popping in and out of view like one of those pictures you have to cross your eyes to see, there and gone too quick to catch.

Up until that night, I hadn’t had much time for Frank’s mystery stalker. Very few people are willing to ditch their whole lives and spend years bouncing around the world after some girl who pissed them off. Frank has this tendency to go for the more interesting theory rather than the more likely one, and I’d filed this one somewhere between Outside Chance and Pure Hollywood Melodrama. But this made three times, at least, that something had smashed broadside into her life, left it totaled, irreclaimable. My heart twisted for her.

“Hello? Ground control to Cassie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Frank, can you do something for me? I want to know anything out of the ordinary that happened in her May-Ruth life in the month or so before she went missing—make it two months, to be on the safe side.”

Running away from N? Running away with N, to start a whole new life somewhere, him and her and their baby?

“You underestimate me, babe. Already done. No strange visitors or phone calls, no arguments with anyone, no odd behavior, nothing.”

“I didn’t mean stuff like that. I want anything that happened, anything at all: if she switched job, switched boyfriend, moved house, got sick, took a course in something. Not ominous stuff, just your basic life events.”

Frank thought about this for a while, chewing his burger or whatever. “Why?” he asked, in the end. “If I’m going to call in more favors from my friendly Fed, I need to give him a reason.”

“Make something up. I don’t have a good reason. Intuition, remember?”

“OK,” Frank said. He sounded disturbingly like he was picking bits out of his teeth. “I’ll do it. If you do something for me in exchange.”

I had started walking again, automatically, towards the cottage. “Hit me.”

“Don’t relax. You’ve started to sound way too much like you’re enjoying yourself in there.”

I sighed. “Me woman, Frank. Woman multitask. I can do my job and have a laugh or two, all at the same time.”

“Good for you. All I know is, undercover relax, undercover in big trouble. There’s a killer out there, probably within a mile or so of wherever you’re standing right now. You’re supposed to be tracking him down, not playing Happy Families with the Fantastic Four.”

Happy Families. I had been taking it for granted that she’d hidden the diary to make sure no one found out about her N appointments, whoever or whatever N was. But this: she had had a whole other secret to keep. If the others had found out that Lexie was about to slash herself straight out of their interlaced world, shed it like a dragonfly shrugging out of its skin and leaving behind nothing but the perfect shape of its absence, they would have been devastated. I was suddenly, almost dizzily glad I hadn’t told Frank about that diary.

“I’m on it, Frank,” I said.

“Good. Stay on it.” Paper crumpling—he had finished his burger—and the beep of him hanging up.

I was almost at my surveillance spot. Snippets of hedge and grass and earth sprang alive in the pale circle of the torch beam, vanished the next moment. I thought of her running hard down this same lane, this same faint circle of light ricocheting wild, the strong door to safety lost forever in the dark behind her and nothing up ahead but that cold cottage. Those streaks of paint on her bedroom wall: she had had a future planned here, in this house, with these people, right up until the moment the bomb dropped. We’re your family, Justin had said, all of one another’s family, and I had been in Whitethorn House long enough to start understanding how much he meant it and how much it meant. What the hell, I thought, what the hell could have been strong enough to blow all that away?

Now that I was looking, the cracks kept coming. I couldn’t tell whether they had been there all along, or whether they were deepening under my eyes. That night I was reading in bed when I heard voices outside, below my window.

Rafe had gone to bed before I had, and I could hear Justin going through his nighttime ritual downstairs—humming, puttering, the odd mysterious thump. That left Daniel and Abby. I knelt up by the window, held my breath and listened, but they were three stories down and all I could hear through Justin’s cheerful obbligato was a low, fast-paced murmur.

“No,” Abby said, louder and frustrated. “Daniel, that’s not the point…” Her voice dropped again. “Moooon river,” Justin sang to himself, hamming it up happily.

I did what nosy kids have done since the dawn of time: I decided I needed a very quiet drink of water. Justin didn’t even pause in his humming as I moved across the landing; on the ground floor, there was no light under Rafe’s door. I felt my way along the walls and slipped into the kitchen. The French window was open, just a thumb’s width. I went to the sink—slowly, not even a rustle from my pajamas—and held a glass under the tap, ready to turn the water on if anyone caught me.

They were on the swing seat. The patio was bright with moonlight; they would never see me, behind glass in the dark kitchen. Abby was sitting sideways, her back against the arm of the seat and her feet on Daniel’s lap; he had a glass in one hand and was covering her ankles casually with the other. The moonlight poured down Abby’s hair, whitened the curve of her cheek and pooled in the folds of Daniel’s shirt. Something fast and needle-fine darted through me, a shot of pure distilled pain. Rob and I used to sit like that on my sofa, through long late nights. The floor bit cold at my bare feet and the kitchen was so silent, it hurt my ears.

“For good,” Abby said. There was a high note of disbelief in her voice. “Just keep on going, like this, for good. Pretend nothing ever happened.”

“I don’t see,” Daniel said, “that we have any other option. Do you?”

“Jesus, Daniel!” Abby ran her hands through her hair, head going back, flash of white throat. “How is this an option? This is insane. Is this seriously what you want? You want to do this for the rest of our lives?”

Daniel turned to look at her; I could only see the back of his head. “In an ideal world,” he said gently, “no. I’d like things to be different; several things.”

“Oh, God,” Abby said, rubbing at her eyebrows as if she had a headache starting. “Let’s not even go there.”

“One can’t have everything, you know,” Daniel said. “We knew, when we first decided to live here, that there would be sacrifices involved. We expected that.”

“Sacrifices,” Abby said, “yes. This, no. This I did not see coming, Daniel, no. None of it.”

“Didn’t you?” Daniel asked, surprised. “I did.”

Abby’s head jerked up and she stared at him. “This? Come on. You saw this coming? Lexie, and—”

“Well, not Lexie,” Daniel said. “Hardly. Although perhaps…” He checked himself, sighed. “But the rest: yes, I thought it was a distinct possibility. Human nature being what it is. I assumed you’d considered it too.”

Nobody had told me there was a rest of this, never mind sacrifices. I realized I had been holding my breath for so long that my head was starting to spin; I let it out, carefully.

“Nope,” Abby said wearily, to the sky. “Call me stupid.”

“I would never do that,” Daniel said, smiling a little sadly out over the lawn. “Heaven knows, I’m the last person in the world who has any right to judge you for missing the obvious.” He took a sip of his drink—glitter of pale amber as the glass tilted—and in that moment, in the fall of his shoulders and the way his eyes closed as he swallowed, it hit me. I had seen these four as safe in their own enchanted fort, with everything they wanted within arm’s reach. I had liked that thought, a lot. But something had blindsided Abby, and for some reason Daniel was getting used to being terribly, constantly unhappy.

“How does Lexie seem to you?” he asked.

Abby took one of Daniel’s cigarettes and snapped the lighter hard. “She seems fine. A little quiet, and she’s lost some weight, but that’s the least we could expect.”

“Do you think she’s all right?”

“She’s eating. She’s taking her antibiotics.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about Lexie,” Abby said. “She seems pretty settled to me. As far as I can tell, she’s basically forgotten about the whole thing.”

“In a way,” Daniel said, “that’s what’s been bothering me. I worry that she may be bottling everything up and one of these days she’s going to explode. And then what?”

Abby watched him, smoke curling up slowly through the moonlight. “In some ways,” she said carefully, “it might not be the end of the world if Lexie did explode.”

Daniel considered this, swirling his glass meditatively and looking out over the grass. “That would depend very much,” he said, “on the form the explosion took. I think it would be as well to be prepared.”

“Lexie,” Abby said, “is the least of our problems here. Justin—I mean, it was obvious, I knew Justin was going to have trouble, but he’s just so much worse than I expected. He never saw this coming, any more than I did. And Rafe’s not helping. If he doesn’t stop being such a little bollocks, I don’t know what…” I saw her lips tighten as she swallowed. “And then there’s this. I am not having an easy time here either, Daniel, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that you don’t seem to give a damn.”

“I do give a damn,” Daniel said. “I care very much, in fact. I thought you knew that. I just don’t see what either of us can do about it.”

“I could leave,” Abby said. She was watching Daniel intently, her eyes round and very grave. “We could leave.”

I fought down the impulse to slap a hand over the mike. I wasn’t at all sure what was going on here, but if Frank heard this, he would be positive that the four of them were planning some dramatic getaway and I was about to find myself bound and gagged in the coat closet while they hopped a plane to Mexico. I wished I had had the sense to test out the mike’s exact range.

Daniel didn’t look at Abby, but his hand tightened around her ankles. “You could, yes,” he said, eventually. “There would be nothing I could do to stop you. But this is my home, you know. As I hope…” He took a breath. “As I hope it’s yours. I can’t leave it.”

Abby let her head fall back against the bar of the swing seat. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. Me neither. I just… God, Daniel. What do we do?”

“We wait,” Daniel said quietly. “We trust that things will eventually fall into place, in their own time. We trust one another. We do our best.”

A draft swept across my shoulders and I whipped round, already opening my mouth on my drink-of-water story. The glass clanged against the tap and I dropped it in the sink; the clatter sounded enormous enough to wake up all of Glenskehy. There was no one there.

Daniel and Abby had frozen, faces turned sharply towards the house. “Hey,” I said, pushing the door open and going out onto the patio. My heart was pounding. “I changed my mind: I’m not sleepy. Are you guys staying up?”

“No,” Abby said. “I’m going to bed.” She swung her feet off Daniel’s lap and brushed past me, into the house. A moment later I heard her running up the stairs, not bothering to skip the creaky one.

I went over to Daniel and sat down on the patio beside his legs, with my back up against the swing seat. Somehow I didn’t want to sit next to him; it would have felt crude, too much like demanding confidences. After a moment he reached out one hand and set it, lightly, on top of my head. His hand was so big that it cupped my skull like a child’s. “Well,” he said quietly, almost to himself.

His glass was on the ground beside him, and I took a sip: whiskey on the rocks, the ice almost melted. “Were you and Abby fighting?” I asked.

“No,” Daniel said. His thumb moved, just a little, across my hair. “Everything’s fine.”

We sat like that for a while. It was a still night, barely a breeze rippling the grass, the moon like an old silver token floating high in the sky. The cool stone of the patio through my pajamas and the toasty smell of Daniel’s unfiltered cigarette felt comforting, safe. I rocked my back just a little against the swing seat, swaying it in a gentle, regular rhythm.

“Smell,” Daniel said softly. “Do you smell that?”

A first faint scent of rosemary drifting over from the herb garden, barely a tint in the air. “Rosemary; that’s for remembrance,” he said. “Soon we’ll have thyme and lemon balm, and mint and tansy, and something that I think must be hyssop—it’s hard to tell from the book, during winter. It’ll be a mess this year, of course, but we’ll trim everything back into shape, replant where we need to. Those old photos will be a great help; they’ll give us some idea of the original design, what belongs where. They’re hardy plants, these, chosen for their endurance as well as for their virtue. By next year…”

He told me about old herb gardens: how carefully they were arranged to make sure that each plant had everything it needed to flourish, how perfectly they balanced sight and scent and use, practicality and beauty, without ever allowing one to be compromised for another’s sake. Hyssop to loosen chest colds or cure toothaches, he said, chamomile in a poultice to reduce inflammation or in a tea to prevent nightmares; lavender and lemon balm for strewing to make the house smell sweet, rue and burnet in salads. “We’ll have to try that sometime,” he said, “a Shakespearean salad. Tansy tastes like pepper, did you know that? I thought it had died off long ago, it was all brown and brittle, but when I cut right back to the roots, there it was: just a tinge of green. It’ll be all right now. It’s amazing, how stubbornly things survive against incredible odds; how irresistibly strong it is, the drive to live and grow…”

The rhythms of his voice washed over me, even and soothing as waves; I barely heard the words. “Time,” I think he said somewhere behind me, or maybe it was “thyme,” I’ve never been sure. “Time works so hard for us, if only we can let it.”