The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(23)

Her face becomes mask of disbelief. “You were having a nightmare. You were curled up and your shoulders were heaving and I thought—I thought you were having a seizure.”

Maybe he was having a seizure. Epilepsy would explain some of those drugs . . . .

“What happened?” Her eyes narrow, search my face.

“I saw someone die.”

“How?”

“He overdosed,” I say, and hesitate just a fraction of a second before adding, “On purpose.”

Her hands round into fists in the sheets as her spine straightens. “So, that’s three now.”

I get out of bed, begin getting dressed. Technically, she’s right, but there’s something different about the boy I just saw. Or rather, not different. “This wasn’t like the other night, with that girl. Or in England.”

She’s out of bed now too, the sheet wrapped around her body. Her arms are crossed. “Tell me.”

I sit back down on the bed, staring out at the Manhattan Bridge. “I could hear their thoughts,” I begin. “The girl who jumped the tracks, her name was Beth. She played piano.”

I struggle for words to explain what it feels like to inhabit someone else. To see what they see in their worst moments, to smell what they smell, and to live their experience—it’s not a gift. It’s a curse.

“What about Sam?” Mara asks.

I itch for distraction. Could do with a cigarette. I exhale slowly. “His last thoughts were ‘Help me help me help me,’ over and over again, until his mind went black.”

Her face loses its expression. She turns quickly and reaches for her shirt from last night, pulls on jeans.

“I couldn’t help him, Mara. I wouldn’t even know Beth’s name if she hadn’t thought it before she died.”

She’s quiet still, with her back to me.

“What?” I ask her.

She looks at me over her shoulder, fakes a smile. “Nothing.”

“Liar.”

She smiles again, a real one this time. “I take offence.”

“Keep taking it,” I say, and try forcing a smile but can’t quite manage it. “I don’t know what he was thinking. I felt the way I usually do when someone like us dies.”

Mara doesn’t flinch at that, and I love her more for it. “So, still no idea who he was, then?”

I search my memory for the still frames I sweep away after each death, those collages of misery. The pill bottles on the nightstand all have different names on them, different doctors, different addresses—

One of them matches the one scrawled on my arm. In imaginary fucking ink.

Fuck. Fuck.

“What?” Mara’d been watching me. Closely.

I regret saying the words before I even speak them, but it’s too late to lie. “There’s—I think I might know where he lived.”

“Really?”

“He took pills—there’s an address on one of the bottles.” I slip my wallet into my back pocket, head for the doorway. “I’m going to go.”

Mara slips something into her pocket. “No, we’re going to go.”

“All right, we’re going to go,” I say, but Mara hasn’t moved.

“All of us.”

“All of . . . whom?”

“You weren’t the only one who saw Beth die.”

“No . . .”

“We should tell everyone.”

“Everyone in the subway that night? The police, the random—”

“You know who I mean. Daniel. Jamie.”

I could talk to Daniel. He’s sort of become the brother I never had, and never knew I actually wanted, but more than that, he’s distanced from this—from me—in a way Mara isn’t. I can tell him about the suicides, and he might be able to help draw a connection without drawing a line through Mara.

Jamie, however . . . The issue of the professor scratches at my mind. “Why?”

“Because Daniel’s my brother, and—”

“I mean, why Jamie?”

“He was there.”

“On the platform, yes, we’ve established that—you want to tell Sophie as well?”

“God, Noah, stop. Jamie was there for everything. We were lab rats together with Stella, we had to break out of that fucking place together, we had to get to New York on our own together, with no money, and ended up exactly where your father wanted us. He was there.”

And I was not. Guilt heats the back of my neck.

“And he’s our friend, and the most loyal person I know. You want him to move in with us, for fuck’s sake!”

Not because I trust him, necessarily. Possibly in part because I don’t.

I give her a look, arrogant, condescending. “It can’t have escaped your notice that he’s wearing the pendant.”

“So?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered what was in his letter?”

Mara goes still.

“Jamie’s never mentioned it? What the professor wrote to him?”

“Why would he?”

“He couldn’t get his pendant on fast enough, as I remember it.”

“What are you saying?”

The air feels bruised, and I press on it. “Our friend’s thrown his lot in with someone who goes on about fate and destiny and made it quite plain that he’d like to use us as tools. Weapons, even, perhaps.” That’s a trigger of hers, and I pull it.