The Sanatorium(94)

He looks at her, his gaze steady, penetrating. “When did this start?”

“With Sam. You were right, what you said before, about me always having to look for answers. It’s because of Sam. All this, it goes back to him. Every case I’m working on, I’m looking for answers, but Sam’s is the one I keep coming back to. I just want to know what happened. The truth, so I can move on.”

The words come out in a rush, a torrent. Words she’s wanted to say for so long. Isaac makes a frustrated noise. He looks at her, his eyes red, bloodshot.

“Elin, stop, please. Stop doing this.”

“Stop what?”

“Endlessly bringing things back to that day. Even now, with Will like that.” He jerks a hand toward the bed. “Sam died, and there’s nothing we can do about it. You think I don’t go over and over it in my mind all the time as well? I look at photos of him and I want to pull him out, physically reach in, make him real again, but he’s never going to be. He’s not here. You’ve got to accept it. Move on.”

“Isaac—” She stops, taken aback. How can he do that? Take this self-righteous tone when all this comes back to him.

“What? It’s true. I can’t bear seeing you like this. You’re a shadow of who you used to be. No one blames you, Elin. No one. I didn’t want to have to say it, but I think it’s what you need to hear.”

Elin stares at him. “Blames me? For what?” Her voice is high. “All this, it’s because of you, Isaac. What you did that day to Sam. That’s what’s been holding me back.”

“Me?” Isaac falters.

“I keep getting flashbacks. Flashbacks of what really happened. You, with your hands covered in blood. You did it, didn’t you? You killed him. You had that argument, and it went too far.” The words are sliding out of her now, easy, ugly, fueled by resentment, anger—everything she’s been hiding for so long.

“No.” His voice catches. When he meets her gaze, his features are tight. “Like I said, let’s not get into this now.” He looks at the bed. “Not with Will like this.”

“No, it’s not going to be that easy. I want to know, Isaac. I want you to tell me exactly what happened.”

Silence. Several heavy beats pass. Her throat is throbbing, thick with more words. More questions.

“Come on.” Elin roughly grabs his arm. “You can start with the first lie. You didn’t go to the loo, did you? You were there, with Sam.”

It’s then she notices something strange in his eyes, something that sends a cold drop of fear right through her.

Pity.

This isn’t right, she thinks, panicked. He should be sad, sorry, even defensive, but not this . . . he shouldn’t be pitying her.

Isaac’s eyes pull up to meet hers. They’re dimmed, sad.

“Okay,” he says finally. “You want the truth? I wasn’t there when he died, Elin. It was you with him, not me.”





76





Elin falters. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. I wasn’t there. I was by the cliff.”

Isaac rubs roughly at his eye. “No. You’d come back. I asked you to watch Sam while I went to the loo. When I came back, he was in the water. You were gabbling, repeating yourself, said you watched him go in, couldn’t do anything.” He hesitates, swallowing hard. “Look, the doctors, they said you were in shock. That you froze.”

“No. No.” Rocking forward, she folds her arms tight around her body. The words aren’t being absorbed. “That’s not right.”

Isaac carries on. “They said there wasn’t anything you could have done. The postmortem showed that he died instantly, a brain hemorrhage caused by the fall. The impact from the rock . . . it was the wrong place on his skull, that’s all. Bad luck.”

Elin feels a sudden, sharp wave of nausea, the world as she knew it shattering, becoming something new.

Several beats pass.

She speaks first. “Tell me what happened,” she says in a whisper. “The details.”

“You’re sure?”

She nods.

Isaac shifts his body to face her. “When I left for the loo, you’d put your line in next to his. That’s the last thing I saw.”

“And then?” Her words are barely audible.

“I came back, saw Sam in the water. I waded in, pulled him out. I—” He stops, and Elin knows why. He doesn’t want to say the words. Doesn’t want to implicate her. Tell her that he saw her standing there, doing nothing.

The thought causes a sudden pull of breath, a sharp, painful inhalation.

All this time, she’s been blaming him. Thinking he hurt Sam, Laure . . .

“What about the blood,” she says, “on your hands?”

“That was from when I pulled him out of the water. There was a cut on the side of his head.”

Elin’s silent, realizes her fingers are moving, almost entirely independently from her brain. Flexing, then retracting around nothing but air.

“So you’re saying that I was there and I did nothing to help him.” Her voice stutters.

“Yes, but the doctors said it was shock.” Isaac puts his hand on hers. “People react differently when something like that happens, you must know that from work. Elin, you were only twelve. I’ve thought about this a lot, read about what can happen when you experience something traumatic. You saw something horrifying. You froze. It’s normal.”