The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(54)

“I want to be by myself,” he says flatly. “I’m just waiting until I know she’s gone.”

“You can be alone here,” Mara insists.

“Stop.”

“You should,” I say. “It’s late. We have the room. We’ll let you alone.”

He wants to argue, but he’s wrung out. “Where?” he asks, glancing upstairs.

“Second floor, make a left after the first bank of rooms. It’s completely quiet—”

“I don’t want quiet.”

“There’s a telly,” Goose says. We all turn to him. “What? There’s one in all the rooms.”

“Not ours,” Mara mouths to me.

Because we have better ways of spending our time, I’m a bit tempted to say, but, not quite the moment, is it?

“Fine,” Daniel shrugs off his jacket, loops it over his arm. “I’ll see you guys . . . whenever.”

“Take care, buddy,” Jamie says.

“Night, brother,” Mara calls up as he disappears. No response.

Jamie and Goose awkwardly disperse, leaving Mara and me alone.

A dark look up through dark lashes. “I’m going to bed.” She doesn’t look tired. I think I hear her heart charged up, her pulse pounding in her veins.

“I’ll be a bit,” I say. “I want to clear up.”

She nods, then, letting out a long-held breath, says, “I could kill her for what she did to Daniel.”

An edge of a grin. “Literally or figuratively?”

She kisses me lightly on the mouth, then darts up the stairs and calls out, “Haven’t decided yet.”

With Mara, there’s no way to tell whether she means it.





31


BY MY EXPERIMENT

UNABLE TO SLEEP, I CLEAR the untouched mess left in the wake of the inquisition on my own and am in the kitchen burning toast and making tea when Mara descends the stairs at dawn, desultory. The sun fades in through the windows, pale and weak.

“Morning,” I say.

“God is dead.”

“Coffee?”

“Fuck you.”

“Again?”

She folds her arms on the counter and lets her head fall over them, issuing a muffled, “I hate everything.”

I ignore the toast and the prospect of tea (and sex, let’s be honest) and stand beside her. Stroke back her hair, prompting a turn of her head that leaves one cheek and eye exposed. She’s so hurt I ache.

“What can I do?”

“I don’t know. He’s been crazy about her since our first day at Croyden. And now he thinks she only started talking to him because of me. To find out more about me.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him now.”

Mara rounds on me. “She lied—”

“Don’t we all?”

“Why are you defending her?”

A good question. I do find myself sympathising with Sophie a bit. Something she said last night—seeing Beth in the subway, her light appearing on Sophie’s mental map again just in time for her to snuff it out herself. I know what that’s like.

There’s much about Leo and his little operation, which we now know includes Sophie, that I find suspect—but so far I can’t find an excuse to lay the blame for Sam’s and Beth’s deaths at their feet. And so far they’re the only ones with real connections to the Gifted who’ve gone missing. Not us.

What’s different about us?

“Look,” I say, needing to appease Mara before I can get away to think on it. “Daniel was betrayed by someone he loves. It’s savage. But here’s the thing: Part of that betrayal isn’t heartbreak—it’s because she had her eyes on you. It’s because he loves you that he’s hurting so much. He feels like he should’ve seen it coming.”

An assumption, surely; one I make because it’s how I feel about her, though there’s no one more capable of protecting Mara than Mara. But I know Daniel as well.

“He feels like he failed you,” I say.

Incredulous, she says, “How could he think that?”

“Because he feels responsible for you.”

“But he knows me, he knows what I can do—”

“He’s your big brother. No matter how strong you are, he’ll always worry about you.” A stirring of guilt, because I’m not there, haven’t been there, for my own sister. Haven’t even been thinking about how she’s faring in the roiling, shark-infested sea of adolescence and mourning the loss of her doting father.

Mara’s face falls again. “I know. I hate what she did to him.”

I let Mara have that, but, confession, I don’t. Hate her, that is. Sophie lied by omission, true, and she may well have been spying on us for Leo et al., of course. But I haven’t got the sense that it was malicious. Wary, yes. Curious, surely. But we’ve been acting the same toward them, in truth.

Despite differences in specifics, they want what (most of us) want: answers. The truth. They care about one another the way we do.

And then, I’ve an idea. “I think you, Jamie, and Goose should meet with Leo today.”

“What?” Mara rears back a bit. “Now?”