A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(71)

Had I been twelve years old, it would have been everything I wanted. It was, and it wasn’t. I spent spring break of my freshman year out in Connecticut, visiting Abby, watching her boys so she could have a few nights to herself. I couldn’t atone for anyone’s mistakes, but I had two hands, and I could help.

In Oxford, Leander and Stephen kept that lovely old flat, and they had my father and me over every now and then, for roast duck and board games. Stephen had a wicked sense of humor, and sometimes, laughing with them all around a candlelit table, I forgot that Charlotte wasn’t just in the next room.

Her letters came every two weeks. Sometimes through the post, sometimes through email. She often didn’t say where she was, but I could glean it from the postmark, and inside would be a few lines about what she’d been reading, an odd deduction she’d made about a stranger. If she missed me. She always said she missed me. I couldn’t respond; by the time my return letter reached her, she’d often moved on.

Finally, in December, the night Lucien Moriarty was sentenced to twenty years in prison, she’d called me.

I’d been at a party and stepped out onto the balcony. “Jamie,” she’d said. She sounded as though she’d been crying. “Jamie. Would you mind it if . . . I came home?”

“Come home,” I said, closing my eyes against the city. “Come home. Tomorrow. Come home tomorrow,” and she’d laughed wildly, and for a moment I thought it was going to be all as it had been.

The flat in Oxford had come around this January. Leander had to travel to China for a case, and though he’d given her the option of accompanying him, she’d taken a place of her own. I think deep down she wanted to be close to the university, even if she’d decided against getting a formal education. She’d made a life here. She had a chemistry tutor, and sometimes she’d mix her witch’s brews in her kitchen. She’d joined a string quartet that was starting to do weddings, and sometimes she played her parts for me to see what I thought. In an attempt to “exorcise some demons,” she’d said, she’d joined a bare-bones production of The Merchant of Venice. Sometimes we’d run her lines in a café overlooking the water. The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . .

Today, I drank my coffee. She took off her jacket and slung it over an arm; the day was growing warmer. Soon I’d have to catch my train. I told myself I was dreading it because of the flat in London I was returning to—five other English undergraduates, us two to a room, a filthy kitchen and no one ever replacing the toilet roll except for me. I could be living at home, I supposed, but I wanted to give my parents’ romance a little space to breathe.

“I was thinking about a publishing internship for the summer,” I was saying as we picked our way back to Cowley Road. “Finals are next week, so I have to decide soon. And publishing’s writing-adjacent, not writing-writing, but that’s fine, right? I need some kind of job when I finish school. Though maybe I could just do more school.”

“So the solution to school is school?”

I grinned. “I guess I like institutions.”

“You don’t. You have an authority problem and you know it.”

“I do not.”

“You can’t even take a correction from me. How many of your teachers do you actually like?”

“King’s College isn’t Sherringford, H— Charlotte.” It still felt odd in my mouth.

She pretended to ignore my slip. “So they’re not trying to bug your room, then. Not a major improvement.”

We rounded a corner onto a prettyish street not far from her flat. The houses were brick, and they had window boxes, and a few of the doors were painted bright red. “This isn’t our usual way back,” I said.

“We’re looking at a place,” she said, and pointed to a FOR LET sign near the end of the block. “I thought you could give me your opinion. My sublet is up at the end of the month.”

We were the only showing. She’d booked it for two o’clock and, in her usual way, maneuvered us there so subtly and determinedly that we’d arrived exactly on time. The letting agent opened the door and left us to it.

It was quite a bit bigger than her current place, a second-floor flat with low ceilings but lots of light, and a proper kitchen that wasn’t nice, exactly, but not terrible either, with a big old table that came with. The room she’d sleep in was just beyond, with a generous-sized bed, and there a door beside it that led to what I thought would be her study. It was a good size, with a closet and ceiling fan, which I thought would be good to blow away the fumes from her chemistry table. Though she’d have to get rid of the bed in there. Most flats in England came furnished; the only furniture I knew she had to her name was that ridiculous velvet sofa she’d taken from Leander, and so we wandered back to the living room and measured with our arms to see if it would fit. There wasn’t an amazing view from the windows, but then, Holmes didn’t seem to mind those things.

Charlotte. Charlotte didn’t.

“I like it,” I said, and I did. I was also ridiculously jealous of her having her own space. “Though the question is—”

“How can I afford it. I know.”

“Is your brother helping?” She hadn’t been taking money from Milo, though I knew he’d offered. His company had been doing quite well; they’d expanded their operations to South America. He had more power than before, though Milo Holmes was hardly someone to trust with it.