The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(16)

Most of the time, I felt like I was being sensible with her, this girl who was willing to trust me with her heart, even after everything that had happened to her because of me. I was treating her carefully. She was treating me carefully. Elizabeth had brought up the idea of us sleeping together a few weeks ago, and we tabled it—maturely. But maybe we only felt comfortable doing that because if we weren’t making out, why would we be having sex?

In other moments, I felt like I was dating the foreign exchange student who lived in my house. She was familiar, almost too much so, and still she was strange to me. And safe. She was safe.

Together, we were safe.

And still, for whatever reason, I couldn’t make myself go inside to meet her.

I watched her, now. Her worried eyes, her mouth. Her making the decision to go upstairs without me. When she was out of sight, I sent her a text—sorry, just got back, go on without me.

It’s okay, babe, she wrote back. I’ll call you after. I didn’t think I could sit and listen to a group of people critique a piece of my thinly veiled autobiography tonight. If you were on the lit mag staff, you’d have to sit through them critiquing the work you’d submitted for each issue. Last fall, someone had said, Your narrator should make some better decisions. It was like therapy, except the therapists had been given bludgeons.

I wandered back to the dorm, slowly, trying not to live in my head. My presentation. I had to think about my presentation. A wind picked up, enough to drive the cold up my sleeves and down my shoes, and I strayed off the path to cut through the sciences building.

The first floor of the sciences building. Not the fourth. (Why was I thinking about the fourth floor? Stop thinking about the fourth floor, I told myself.) A straight path through.

Physics. I needed to get my head on straight. I was giving a presentation on astrophysics tomorrow, a five-minute introduction to basic theories that involved no math and still had taken me hours to wrap my brain around, and though I’d done all the heavy lifting, I still needed to organize it into something resembling a speech. I wandered through the physics wing, looking at the displays that the teachers had made on matter and force and energy, and by the time I made it back to my dorm, I’d managed to regain some semblance of focus. Why did I feel like I was going to fly apart?

At the front desk, no Mrs. Dunham. Just her MAKING ROUNDS sign, the letters faded. The bag of Thai food was hanging from my doorknob. I took it and unlocked the door.

Two steps in, I stopped. A warning in the back of my chest, some kind of panicked pull that surprised me. No. Nothing was wrong. It was just an aftershock from earlier, from my Incident, or that text, or maybe my panic over my father’s offer, and I forced myself to shut my eyes and breathe. I was safe. I was fine. To emphasize the point, I shut the door behind me and locked it.

I could see all the exits. I could see the whole of my room. No one else was there.

Still.

Grimly, I made myself check. In the closet. Under the desks. My papers were where I’d left them, the physics syllabus and my notes and the essay I’d written on Beloved. My sheets were a mess at the end of the mattress. I’d left the window cracked to counteract the overeager radiator, but I was three floors up, and no one could have climbed up the front of our building to break in here, not since the school installed all those spotlights after Dobson’s murder.

A breath. Another. I set my dinner up next to my laptop and went to click over to my physics presentation. With luck, I could be done and in bed by midnight.

It wasn’t there.

I had left with my presentation open on my laptop, and it wasn’t there.

I checked the cloud. My email. I searched my files. I opened up a different word processing app, just in case I’d used it by accident. Nothing.

Five hours of work. I had been gone for fifteen minutes. And it was gone.

How could I be so stupid? I rifled through the papers on my desk, knowing there wasn’t a hard copy but looking anyway, like an idiot, a panicking idiot. I would have had to shut the application. Drag the file to the trash. When I’d come in, was I really that distracted? That upset? How could I have—

A feeling, like a finger skimming the back of my neck. I whirled around in my chair, but I was alone.

That was, of course, when my phone buzzed.





Six


Charlotte


I HAD HAD ONE FINAL CONVERSATION WITH MY BROTHER, Milo, in the weeks after the incident at Sussex.

He’d come to Switzerland, to Lucerne, where I was living with our mother. She had let him in. She made a small fuss over him—brushing invisible lint off his shoulders, adjusting his collar—and then, those gestures completed to her satisfaction, returned to her desk to complete her onboarding materials for her new employer. She’d found a lab in Switzerland to take her on. A place to disappear into, to forget.

She and I were more alike than most people noticed, initially.

I was left with Milo. I could hardly bear to look at him.

“Get out,” I said to him, and locked myself in my room, where there was, at least, an opaque door between me and the man who had shot August dead.

“Lottie,” he said through the keyhole. “Lottie, you know it isn’t safe, for either you or for Mum. You know you can’t be here. I can take you to Berlin, where you’ll be safe. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Stop talking to me like I’m a cocker spaniel,” I told him. I was a bit out of breath, as I was moving an end table in front of the door. “You’re disgusting.”