Lost Among the Living(21)

It took me a moment to follow. I’d told him sometime during the first bottle of wine about Helen and her ruse, barely thinking about what I was saying in the rush of conversation, the pure pleasure of talking to him. But it had snagged in his mind, I could see now.

“It’s simple,” I said. “Of course I know it.”

“You’ve never spoken to her about it. Did she confess to you?”

“God, no.” He still gave me a searching look, so I had to explain. “It’s not a new ruse, Alex.” I closed my mouth before I could elaborate that my own mother had introduced me as a niece more than once, when she introduced me to people at all. It nearly always worked.

“Perhaps the girl’s parents truly did die,” he persisted. “Perhaps you’ve got entirely the wrong idea, and you’re slandering the lady in your mind unnecessarily. Do you think that’s possible?”

I did not even hesitate. “No,” I replied. “Helen has sacrificed everything for that little girl. She has no friends, no family. She’ll never marry, because no man will want a single woman who already has a child, niece or not. She never goes anywhere, does anything, and she lives in terror of losing her job. That’s the kind of sacrifice you make for a daughter, not a niece.” I looked away from him for a moment, trying not to let on how closely I understood Helen’s life. “Helen must type or perish,” I explained, keeping my voice steady. “Like me. It’s why we get on as we do. No questions asked, no secrets told.”

Still he watched me, his hand resting around the stem of his glass, the candlelight flickering on his face. There was gentle surprise in his expression, and an effortless intelligence that swiftly put the pieces together behind his eyes. Good breeding, I had thought when I’d first seen him. He didn’t seem wildly wealthy, and he certainly wasn’t titled, but Alex Manders came from a background that let him live at loose ends, that had no concept of type or perish. In his world, women had the money to do what they wanted; or they married and kept houses and children while their husbands cared for them, with no thought that to some women, that was good fortune such as they had never seen.

But there was no judgment in that look. He saw me just as I was—all of me, clearly and in detail, without the preconceptions of class, despite his declaration that I was a mystery. I didn’t know how he had come by it, but he had the ability to observe, to understand, with the same stark clarity as a film camera. It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time, to truly be seen.

I took a breath. “My mother,” I managed, and then I stopped. My cheeks heated, shame and anger and fear mixing in my veins in a brief flash under Alex Manders’s clear, unwavering gaze. “My mother is in an asylum for the insane. The nicest one I could find. The nicest one I could afford.” I let the words hang there between us for a moment, like smoke. I did not look at him. “She has been ill all my life, I think, though it has worsened over the years. She will never walk out of there. She will never get well.” I blinked hard, fighting everything I felt, always fighting. “That is the truth of it, Alex. The truth of me. I type or I perish.”

His extraordinary eyes with their dark-ringed irises never left me. “And your father?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know who he is,” I confessed. “I used to think that Mother kept the information from me, but now—now I think perhaps she doesn’t know. Her memories are . . . precarious. She remembers things that were never real. I think that perhaps, if she ever knew, that knowledge has gone.”

There was a pause. “I am sorry,” he said at last, with a sincerity that made my breathing nearly stop. “I am so very, very sorry.”

It wasn’t just sympathy in his voice. It was as if he knew. But of course he couldn’t know, not really. “Yes, well,” I said. I took a gulp of wine, trying to process the fact that he wasn’t putting the leather coat back on, putting the cap back on, and walking away. No one had ever said to me that they were sorry and meant it. The sensation was strange, like falling. “I have a question for you,” I said to him, deflecting the topic.

“What is it?” He sipped from his own glass.

“Are you an orphan?”

He froze for a moment, the rim of the glass still against his lip, before he lowered the glass again. “How,” he said softly, “could you possibly know such a thing?”

“I guessed,” I said, pleased despite myself that I’d guessed correctly. “You assumed that Helen’s girl really was an orphan. It was something in your tone when you asked.”

He leaned back in his chair and regarded me. “I shall never attempt to hide anything from you,” he said. “There is no point. My parents died while on holiday without me in Turkey. The train they were on derailed in an accident. They were both killed instantly. I was seven.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. I meant it, but at the same time part of me eased and took a deep breath. He knew. He knew what it was like to be without parents, to fight and fight every day alone. Money didn’t matter here; anyone who has lost their parents, or never known them, knows that money doesn’t make it better. What matters is that horrible, yawning feeling of facing the world alone.

“It was terrible,” Alex agreed, keeping a close shutter on his expression. “And it was unexpected. They left enough money to see me raised and through Oxford, at least. And they left no plan of where I’d go, so I was passed from relative to relative for a time. I spent three years in Germany with my paternal grandparents.”