NOW
‘What did you mean about Elena in the wheelchair, by the way?’ Marianne asks, throwing me off my stride with the question I expected ten minutes ago.
‘Sorry?’
‘Patrick said that Felix put Elena in the wheelchair. What does that mean? What happened to her?’
‘It was an accident. Felix left a bag at the top of the stairs and Elena tripped over it and fell down the stairs.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is she a paraplegic?’
‘No, she can walk with a stick – she’s had a lot of physio. But she can’t walk long distances and she has a bad limp.’
‘Did she blame Felix?’
‘I never heard her say that.’
‘Was it really an accident?’ Marianne asks. ‘A wife has a bad accident at home with her husband and her husband dies soon after. It would make a good book.’
‘This actually happened,’ I remind her.
Marianne gives me another long look I can’t decode and I’m getting a little sick of them. ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Go on.’
‘I’ve forgotten where I was.’
‘You and Patrick had this mad idea to invite Felix and Elena’s friends over so you could talk to whoever was there the night that Felix died,’ Marianne says immediately, proving that she’s been paying attention. ‘If this was a book, someone else would die at the party, you know.’
‘Nobody died.’
‘I said if. He sounds cute, by the way. Is he cute?’
‘Who?’
‘Patrick, of course.’
I think about Patrick: the lean, string-beanness of him, the hair that always ends up over his eyes, the dimples that blossom on his cheeks the way weeds push up through cracks in a footpath.
‘Sure, I guess.’
Marianne smirks. ‘Knew it.’