A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(20)

There was an expected response to that statement: ugh, or did your parents make you stay with him? or some other opening into a conversation about how, while my uncle was wealthy, I was not. (Which was, at this point in my life, true.) Anwen would be able to laugh off her discomfort at my social class, and—

“Oh,” Anwen said, twisting a red curl around her finger. Her face had gone blank again. “Don’t be self-conscious about it, you should see Rupert’s ancestral home. It goes on forever, and even though his family’s massive, you can wander it for days and see no one. No, I was wondering if you lived here with Jamie.”

I raised an eyebrow. “We’ve been dating for a long time, but we aren’t there yet.”

“No? I thought you were serious.” She smiled. “It sucks that you have to live with your uncle. I always thought that that was the best part of graduating, that you got to be on your own.”

Since when was Anwen running this interrogation?

“It’s nice not to pay rent,” I said, “especially when you’re taking too many courses to have a job. And as for me and Jamie . . . we’re eighteen. We don’t need to shack up together right away, especially when he’s off to London for uni this fall, and I’m staying here. Anything else you need an answer for? I could go change my clothes, if they’re not to your taste?”

Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and too late I realized what I’d done: fallen directly into one of my customary traps. Find someone’s sore spot and press down hard enough, and they’ll reveal far more than they ever intended.

I had just, more or less, told Anwen that my relationship with Watson was my own personal bruise.

“I suppose this means you’re living with Theo,” I went on, a bit desperately. “The two of you seemed friendly last night.”

“I told you he has a boyfriend,” she said, and pulled a dog-eared copy of Hamlet from her bag. “We all live in the same stairwell, but we aren’t dating.”

She was attempting, again, to rile me up. “Oh. I’d gotten the impression that something else was going on,” I said.

“No, just a friend.” Her voice was calm. She was, in fact, far more composed than I was, sitting on Leander’s sofa (velvet, gray, vastly impractical) with her tattered paperback on her knees.

I felt silly, suddenly, for thinking even momentarily that this girl had wanted to be my friend. Anwen was playing her own game, and it wouldn’t end with the two of us online shopping until four a.m. while drinking tea. (I missed Lena rather badly.)

Still, I had to reset this conversation somehow.

“Which monologue did you want to run?” I asked, standing. “I’ll just put the kettle on. Jasmine? Earl Grey?” My voice was frosted over, but then that couldn’t be helped.

“Do you have English breakfast? Twinings?” Anwen followed at my heels.

“We do,” I said, and set out two Sherringford mugs. Leander really had to get rid of those.

Anwen wandered over to the window above the sink and looked down onto the street, like some improbably beautiful vulture. “I’m sorry if I was weird, just then,” she said at length.

Had I been someone else, I would have perhaps dropped the teakettle. I hadn’t been expecting such an admission from her. Something about this cool, unflappable girl was confounding me.

It was important that she keep talking, and the best strategy for that was to let the silence hang until she felt she had to fill it.

“It’s just—we haven’t talked about that thing? In the theater? The . . . sheet body?”

When I saw her trying to meet my eyes, I reached into the cupboard for the creamer, the sugar caddy, two ramekins for our tea bags.

“I’m just . . . scared,” she said, but she didn’t sound scared in the least. Was she shamming? Was she playing me the way that I had played her? “Whatever that was, it’s a threat, and I feel like I barely escaped last summer as it was. I quit the play right after the accidents began happening . . .”

“Mm,” I said. What else could one take for tea? I took a lemon from the fridge, then returned it in favor of whole milk and half-and-half.

“Maybe you don’t know why it’s important? Or what happened at all, maybe? I know it got awkward last night, when Rupert brought it up . . . but we had such a good thing going, the three of us, until then, and everything got so messy and complicated, and Theo was spending every night at the police station and Rupert wasn’t talking to me . . .”

Nodding, I poured the whole milk into the ceramic creamer and left the half-and-half in its disgusting little carton. That was Leander’s; he called it his “nasty American habit,” though he said nothing about the Oreos he had to buy from the international store for eight pounds a package and then kept under his bed. Most likely because he didn’t want me to know they were there.

The best way to keep a disinterested face was to be interested in something else. I wondered what flavors Leander had squirreled away this week. Red velvet Oreos? Birthday cake? Candy cane? Perhaps that was just at Christmas.

“But I was scared,” Anwen said, staring down into her empty mug (it was as though I wasn’t there, exactly what I intended), “I was so scared, and after what happened to Matilda it all just went to shit, and what if it happens to me?”