A Study in Charlotte(78)

“My mother fired him. Then she phoned his don at Oxford to have him expelled. And after all of that was over, she sat me down in the drawing room. She’d drawn all the curtains. And she explained to me, very patiently, that this was a lesson. It wasn’t to happen again.”

“The drugs?” I asked quietly.

“The drugs.” She laughed. “No. I’d started with ‘the drugs’ at twelve. I was too soft on the inside, you see. No exoskeleton. I felt everything, and still everything bored me. I was like . . . like a radio playing five stations at once, all of them static. At first, the coke made me feel bigger. More together. Like I was one person, at last. And then it stopped working, and I began taking more, and more, and they sent me to rehab. When I came back, I spent a few months going the classical route—morphine, syringes. It made everything quiet and far away. I was wrong inside, you see. I’d always been wrong. But it was too messy, the morphine, and I was found out—more rehab. So I dropped the morphine for oxy. More rehab. Then more oxy. I’ve never quite managed to shake it, any of it, and my parents stopped expecting me to. It doesn’t scare them anymore.”

The whole time she spoke, she didn’t look up at me once. She was curled up in my arms like she was my girlfriend, but she was talking to me like I was an empty shell.

“What my mother was afraid of was sentiment,” she said. “Of my being sentimental. With my particular skill set, it’s a liability. With what I felt for August, I became . . . a worse person. I was sent away to think on what I’d done. It was never about keeping me from the drugs. It was about keeping me away from myself.”

“Jesus, Holmes, that’s horrible.” What kind of monster would demand that her daughter not feel?

“Is it really? I think my mother was right. I don’t trust myself anymore. No one does.” She lifted her head to study me. She’d gone so pale that the veins on her neck stood out like pen marks. “Not even you.”

It was awful to see her like this. “Holmes—”

“You thought I killed him. And it’s almost true. He lost his life because of me. He got a job, finally. Works for my brother in Germany doing data entry. What a waste. But he’s forgiven me. He’s a sentimental fool. August even demanded his family leave me alone. I was disturbed, he told them, and no good would come of it. They listened. It was their last favor to him. You see, his family disowned him for taking my fall.”

“You aren’t disturbed,” I said, trying to mean it, to make her feel better. “You aren’t disturbed at all. You just made a mistake.”

“I don’t make mistakes,” she said, and pulled away from me. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Even if you did. You were still forgiven. They forgave you. And accepting their forgiveness isn’t a sign of weakness.” I was desperate to pull her back to me, back out from where she’d gone, deep inside herself. I’d never wanted this. Never. “I wouldn’t have thought any different of you, if you’d told me.”

“You wouldn’t have?” she asked, the last vestiges of the haze gone from her voice. “How interesting.”

“Unfair.”

“You keep using that word like it has any real-life implications.”

“It does,” I insisted.

“Fairness, Watson, would see August Moriarty restored to school and family and his fiancée—he really could have told me about her when I first confessed it to him, I wasn’t about to stalk and kill her—but no. He’s alone, in a foreign country, and friendless. Really, the parallels are striking.”

“You’re being melodramatic,” I said, and her eyes flashed. Good. Any reaction was better than none. “I’m sitting right here, being your friend, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’d be fine if you did,” she snapped.

“I don’t doubt that. But I’m still not going anywhere, and because I’m not leaving, I need you to listen to me.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. I am. It’s awful, and the fallout from it was . . . unreal. And I’m sorry I broke your trust. I never wanted to hurt you. But I only did it because I was desperate. Don’t you think that your trust in him and his family might be a touch unfounded? Like, have you had Milo look into their activities? Has August been in Germany all this time, or has he made any trips to America—”

“He isn’t responsible,” she snarled. “I’ve told you that from the start. He may hate me—he should hate me—but he isn’t a killer. And if you can’t believe that—Watson, I will not work with someone who refuses to trust me.”