“Luce?” Max reaches for my hand but misses. His voice is more urgent now, perhaps out of frustration. He rolls over to my nightstand, picks up my phone, and glances down at the screen, where I’ve left themessage open. As he looks at it, his face becomes clay, like his blood has stopped pumping completely.
My phone begins to ring again.
“Max, what... What does Tash not want me to find out?”
Max looks up at me, but he doesn’t say anything. His eyes look almost empty. If he wasn’t sitting upright, I might think he’d passed out.
“Max?” I’ve never seen him lost for words before, and it’s this sudden inability to speak that lets me know this is bad. Really bad. He has done something bad, something so awful he can’t even bring himself to open his mouth.
But how does this involve my sister? Tash can’t stand him, she flinches whenever I so much as mention his name, she...Oh no.
I feel the floor fall away from me as we look at each other, and something unspeakable passes between us.
Not that. Please, anything but that.
“Max... what did you do?” I manage to whisper, though my mouth feels dry and unwieldy, like I’ve been chewing on flour.
He just shakes his head in response, and I know that if he can’t even say it out loud, it’s the worst possible thing I can imagine.
So I start gathering up my stuff, because I know the only move I can make right now is to run—as far away as I possibly can, don’t stop, keep running, running, running.
—
We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
I’m back at home, in Jools’s room, sitting with her on the bed. She’s switched on the light and made us both a cup of chamomile tea, and I’ve changed into joggers, washed my face, brushed my hair. I feel a little calmer now that I’m here and have had a chance to think.
“I mean, yes—it’s a weird message. But it could mean anything.” Jools hesitates, presses her lips together, tactful as ever.
“Go on. I’ve literally thought of every scenario.”
She clears a tumble of hair from one side of her face, flipping it over with a tilted hand. “Well, isn’t the most likely explanation that Max just did something a bit shady and Tash found out? I can’t imagine in a million years it involved Tash and Max... doing anythingtogether. For a start, when would they even have had the opportunity?”
The screen starts to flash on my phone. I turned it off as soon as I fled Max’s flat and caught the night bus home, and I’ve only just switched it back on.
It’s Max, my tenth missed call from him. Tash, meanwhile, has racked up fifteen.
Jools nods at me. Reluctantly, I return the call.
“I’m outside.” His voice sounds shaky, keyed up. “Please let me in.”
I head downstairs, but I don’t let him in. Instead I move onto the front step, pull the door to behind me. The night air is warm and still, the sky above our heads spattered with stars. I hear the rumble of vehicles on the main road and feel a quick pulse of panic in my chest, the familiar urge to flee.
Usually so smart and composed, Max looks crumpled, undone. He’s thrown on a T-shirt and joggers, and on the road, a 4x4—presumably his—is parked at a ludicrous angle from the curb, the way detectives park in TV crime dramas when they’re chasing a hot lead.
I didn’t even know Max had a car.
“If I found out what?” is all I say, because right now, that’s the only question I want him to answer.
And now his expression turns almost feral with—what is it? Fear?—and my knees begin to fold as I hear him confirming the worst, and then I feel Jools’s arms around me, apparently alerted by some kind of noise I’ve made. A swarm of angry voices rises and falls above my head, and I can hear Reuben threatening to call the police, but the whole time there is only one word in my mind I can grip on to:No, no, no, no, no.
Nine
Stay
Caleb has said I can use the beach hut to write in, so every afternoon, after my morning shift at Pebbles & Paper, I walk down to the beach, stopping at the deli en route for a takeaway coffee and crabmeat sandwich. Then I make my way to the dunes, passing pleasantries with walkers and day trippers and fishermen as I go.
There’s something about the vista from the hut—the mercurial landscape of the water, the braying of gliding seagulls, the push-and-pull of the tide like a creature drawing breath—that fires my imagination. Through the front door, I watch the weather twist and shift: sheets of summer rain that slice into the sea and drill down on the roof, intercut by splashes of bright, brilliant sunshine. I watch the sky in its catalog of colors—from the rarest of silvers to a flawless afternoon blue—as clouds tumble through it like cashmere on a breeze. The view from where I sit is an ever-changing artist’s canvas, my daily spur of creativity.
