I don’t know. Can’t think straight, not with anguish seeping like hot acid through my veins, and the dying cries of my friends echoing in my ears. My hands shake as I let go of her waist and grip the arms of my desk chair.
“We never had a future.” My words are crisp. Clear. I hold Maddy’s gaze as I say them, watching each word strike her likean arrow. “I’m your employer. Nearly twice your age. What did you think was happening here, Madeleine?”
Her sweet face crumples, and Christ, I’ve never loathed myself more than this moment. Even when I was laid out on a stretcher with a ruined leg in the Himalayas, the deaths of my friends still sickeningly fresh in my brain, I didn’t plummet this low.
God.
What have I done?
“Maddy,” I start to say, blood rushing in my ears, but she’s already scrambling off my lap. The chair creaks and her elbow jabs into my gut, then her socked feet hit the woven rug. “Wait, Maddy—”
I take her wrist, but she snatches it out of my grasp. Practically hisses like a cat as she whirls on me, teeth bared.
“Don’t youdaretouch me.” Trembling from head to toe, dressed in baggy clothes that hide her perfect shape, Maddy glares like I’m a stubborn stain she needs to scrub clean. My gut lurches, but some distant part of me is proud of her, too. Maddy is right. She deserves infinitely better than this. “Don’t you ever touch me again, Lord Westmore.”
“Wait. Let me explain—”
She’s across the study in a blink, yanking the door open so hard that it bounces off the wall. Then she’s gone, swallowed up by the shadows beyond.
“Maddy,” I call, struggling to my feet, but an hour of having another person sit on my bad leg has taken its toll. Pins and needles prickle along my bones, and the nerves send jagged bolts of lightning as I test my weight, snatching for my cane.
Though the pain makes my teeth grit so hard they ache, I limp to the doorway. Beyond, the hallway is cloaked in darkness, and there’s no sound except for the distanttockof a grandfather clock.
“Maddy!” I call again, not caring who hears.
No answer.
I sway on my feet, misery and regret pounding me from all sides.
Is this really the only path I could take? Neck stiff, I turn and stare at the research notes crumpled across my desk. At the photograph we took before that fateful expedition to the Himalayas, the one that forever sits framed at my right hand side. It’s been knocked over, my friends and I grinning up at the ceiling.
My breaths are shaky. I swallow hard, my eyes dry, as I limp back to the desk and pick up the frame, staring down at each face in turn. Though I’ve kept this photograph close to me every day for the last eight years, I’ve barely ever looked at it directly. Always kept it in my peripheral vision, because it was too raw, too hard, too much.
Now I look directly at each of my friends in turn, and try to conjure up their voices. Try to imagine what they’d say about the mess I’ve just made; the way they’d curse me out for being a prick. What they’d urge me to do next, research notes be damned.
They all died for their work, yes, but first, they knew how tolive.
“Right,” I say, and place the frame carefully back on my desk. “Okay.”
I have travel plans to make.
Ten
Maddy
By the time dawn spills across the island, I’ve finally finished crying and gotten myself together. A long, warm-ish shower, a stolen pint of butterscotch ice cream from Mrs Ainslie’s freezer, and a few hundred laps of my attic bedroom, pacing and muttering to myself, have set me right.
I need to leave.
Not give notice; not stay here a few more days and make plans. I need to leavenow, even if it means the other staff think I’m rude as hell. Even if it means I wind up stranded in the middle of nowhere on the mainland, dragging my hot pink suitcase along the rocky coastal path. Desperate for a bus stop or a friendly face.
It’s go time.
“Come on,” I mutter, stuffing balled-up t-shirts and leggings into my case. Nothing is folded; everything is in tangled disarray. My phone charger, bathroom bag, and favorite books are all tossed in too, jumbled up together in a big pile. “Come on, Maddy. Move faster.”
Already, the sky is growing pale. Weak light creeps through the window of my attic bedroom and casts the room in a ghostly glow.
I need to get out of here before Lord Westmore wakes up. Before the other staff come looking for me.
