A Study in Charlotte(79)

“But you refused to trust me in the first place,” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? I know you have personal stakes in the matter, but so do I!”

“What stake could you possibly have in this?” She was inches from my face now. How could she not understand?

“Your life. Your life, and mine. Are they really worth you being right in this?”

“I would never let you die,” she said, her breath coming fast and shallow.

“But what about you? What’s going to happen to you?” I could hear my voice breaking as I pictured it. Her on the concrete, the blood a halo around her dark hair. Her under a slab of granite in her lab. On a slab in the morgue. In a bath of shattered glass, or poisoned in the night. Her curled up under the goddamn porch to die, her stone-blank eyes staring up at me, Jesus . . . it could happen to either of us, but if my being there meant she had any more of a chance of staying alive, then I would be there. Full stop. I was saying it to her out loud, now, pleading. “I know you don’t need me, any fool could see that, but we are in this together. I will be here, right here, until it’s over. You . . . you’re the most important thing to me, and I can’t imagine being without you, but if the moment it’s over, you want to send me away, I will, I’ll go—”

“You should.” It tumbled out of her in a rush. “You don’t see it—that I’m not a good person. That I spend every minute of every day trying not to be the person I know I could be, if I let myself slip. And I’ll bring you down with me. I have. Look at us. Look at where we are.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it?” she asked dully. I was losing her again. “Are you blind?”

“You can’t be a bad person,” I told her, “because you’re a robot, remember?”

It really was the lamest, most halfhearted joke I think I’d ever made. But there wasn’t anything else that I could say. I’d betrayed her trust; she’d kept things from me I’d needed to know. She’d endangered our lives; I’d endangered our friendship. I had no idea what was next. All I wanted was for her to look at me the way she used to, with that wry half-twist of her mouth, and make some deduction about the sandwich I’d had for lunch.

I realized then that Holmes was laughing.

I looked at her askance, in case she was also bleeding from the head. But there it was: her low chuckle, a hand thrown up to hide it. When our eyes met, there was a kind of confused electricity there, like we’d broken up and simultaneously exchanged vows. It brought back that hallucinatory fear I’d had that night in the infirmary, that Nurse Bryony would just as soon kiss me as smother me with a pillow. I didn’t understand girls at all.

Bryony.

Bryony.

“Holmes,” I said urgently, “what did you say August’s fiancée’s name was?”

“I didn’t.” Her eyes went vague. “I didn’t know her at all, only that they were engaged, and that he left her in the wake of . . . Jesus Christ, Watson,” and she shoved past me in her haste to get out from under the porch.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“Milo,” she replied. I snatched up her shoes and crawled out after her. The two of us together burst through the door, covered in clumps of mud, shivering from the cold—we must’ve looked like we’d come up from some arctic hell. In a way, I guessed we had.

My father was standing with his arms crossed in the middle of the kitchen. “Jamie,” he said, a warning in his voice, as the detective stood up from the table. We pushed past them and ran straight up the stairs. “Where the hell did you two go?” he yelled at our backs.

“Five minutes,” I said, spinning around, “just give us five more minutes.”

In the guest room, Holmes practically fell on her phone. “Milo,” she said into it, and I froze. The text I’d sent. If he ratted me out, this could get ugly all over again. “Where are you? A tarmac? I’m only catching every other word.” Her voice went dangerous. “You’re coming to New York. Tell me why. No, that’s a lie. That is too. Fine, tell me the last time you left your apartment. Before this. No, don’t give me that, you were the one who had them put it in your office building. Yes—no, I’m not on drugs. No. Yes, fine, I am, don’t hang up. Of course I want to see you while you’re here, you ass.”

He was coming. He was coming, and he wasn’t going to tell her that I’d asked him to. I said a silent prayer to the saint of deranged best friends’ deranged older brothers.