The thought of Cal, and the memory of wet, clean skin under Joe’s mouth made him lick his lips. He texted a quick update as the elevator opened and Uber reminded him they were already outside.
Most of Joe’s life, he reminded himself as he tucked his phone back into his pocket, had been navigated without Cal. He should probably get used to it again. The car outside was a navy blue sedan that smelled of upholstery cleaner and children’s sweets.
“Reading?” the driver checked as he looked over his shoulder at him. “That’s a way, mate.”
“Is it a problem?” Joe asked coolly as he put hisseat belt on. “I can call another cab.”
“Not a problem,” the driver said. “It’ll be expensive. You want me to drive you back too?”
Joe leaned back against the freshly cleaned upholstery. “No,” he said. “I’ve a car arranged to pick me up later.”
He wasn’t ready to let Cal go yet, whatever he should or shouldn’t get used to.
THE UBERdropped Joe off at the end of the street, eager to beon his way back to London. It was easy enough to find the house. It hadn’t changed at all in the five years since the surveyor had snapped a photo of it. The flowers in the garden were still pink and yellow and perfectly lined up in rows. The curtains in the windows were still blue, and the mat at the door still said Welcome, although the bristles had worn down to the nubs.
Joe hesitated on thepath up to the front door. He wondered if he’d ever been there before. It didn’t feel like he had. There was no sense of déjà vu, no familiarity. Of course he’d been a baby. How old did you have to be to form memories?
Joe waited on the street for a while as he paced down to the chalk scrawl of flowers, faces, and impermanent graffiti about who wanted to kiss who. There was no sign of Bea, andno texts from her to update her time of arrival.
There was a missed call from Cal.
Something tight in Joe’s stomach relaxed as he saw it. He tapped it with his thumb as he gave up on Bea and headed up to the front door. It couldn’t hurt to speak to whoever still lived there, or try to. If they slammed the door in his face, at least he knew his lawyer was, supposedly, on her way.
It was a voicemessage. Joe hit Play and lifted it up to his ear. He caught the heavy growl of traffic and the tail end of a muttered curse as he pressed the doorbell. It bing-bonged inside the house.
“I found the kid from the graveyard,” Cal yelled into the phone. “Someone hired him to beat you up and give you a scare, and they told him you were an abusive ex. It weren’t Kristen, though.”
A horn blared throughthe recording, and Cal told them to fuck off. Joe tilted his head away from the noise and flicked his attention back to the door as it creaked open. A slim woman in black jeans and a gray T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, smiled at him as she held out her hand.
“Joseph,” she said as he accepted the handshake out of habit. “I’ve been waiting.”
“I know you,” he said as the familiarityslotted into place. He’d been thrown by how she held herself, the twitchy mannerisms and ducked chin abandoned for new confidence. “You’re the girl from the bar, Bea’s girlfriend. Rosie.”
“Yes,” she said as she waved him into the hall past her. It was small, most of it taken up by the stairs, and had the faintly musty smell of somewhere not used much. “Bea asked me to meet you here while shecrossed some Ts. I made us tea.”
Joe hesitated as she pushed the door shut behind him. There was something wrong, he realized, even before the recording of Cal’s voice warned from the phone, “It was Abigail’s assistant. Daisy something. She claimed she was Abigail’sdaughter.”
Joe ended the call and turned to look at Rosie. Or Daisy, he supposed.
“They’re both flowers. It didn’t feel like alie,” she said. The butcher’s knife in her other hand glittered in the morning light as she lifted it. “Go into the kitchen.”
He lunged at her instead and grabbed for the wrist. They struggled back and forth between the white-painted banisters and the neatly lined up striped wallpaper. Joe was stronger than she was, but Rosie refused to let go of the knife. She leaned forward and sank her teethinto his wrist.
Joe had been bitten before. The occasional lover had left a crescent-marked bruise on his skin, a blue-tinged souvenir that lasted longer than his memory of the man, and he’d been nipped by dogs and cats. This was different. The blunt pressure as she clenched her jaw made his bones ache, and her teeth tore instead of pierced his skin. He pulled away from her in surprise and hisfingers loosened on her wrist. Rosie wrenched her hand free and lashed out with the knife.
The point of it, ground down to a scratched, uneven point over the years, caught him under the ball of his thumb and sliced him open to halfway up his wrist.
It didn’t hurt. For a moment there wasn’t even any blood, all he could see was his skin peeled back to flash wet meat and the struts of white boneand cartilage that was his thumb. He had enough time to suck in a startled breath, and then blood filled the injury and spilled down his arm onto the floor.
A sick dizziness hit Joe as he grabbed his forearm and dug his fingers down into the bloody sleeve. It hurt now—a sullen throb of pain that kept time with his heartbeat. He staggered back a step and leaned against the stairs. His feet hadleft bloody marks on the floor, worked the blood down into the soft nap of the carpet.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” Rosie told him in an oddly prim voice. When Joe looked up at her, he saw that her face matched the off-beat tone of her words. She’d stabbed him, but her face was set in purse-lipped disapproval, as though he’d walked mud into the carpet instead of his own blood. Only her eyes seemedto realize the seriousness of what was going on. They looked tight and twitchy as she kept the knife on him. “Why won’t youeverdo what you’re supposed to Joseph? If you’dgone away, then none of this would have happened. Now it’s all ruined.”
She poked him in the chest with the knife to underline her point. Joe clenched his jaw at the small, smart pain as it dug into his skin. He swallowed,his mouth dry and sticky, and tried to pretend this was another business meeting. How many times had he sat down at the table to negotiate a deal where tens of thousands of dollars hung in the balance.
This was just a bit of blood and a ruined shirt.
“Why?” he asked. “You contacted me. You tracked me down. What did I ever do to you?”
