CHAPTER THIRTY
My first self-defense class included a CPR and first aid module, the idea being that we would leave more prepared to save not only ourselves in a crisis but someone else, too.
They don’t tell you what it’s like when it’s all for nothing.
They don’t tell you how you’ll deplete your energy desperately trying to force life back into a man who’s already been dead for ten minutes.
How you’ll take to calling his name instead of counting compressions, pleading with him, Come on, Lesley, wake up, Lesley, come back.
How you’ll know long before your arms do that it’s over.
How someone will have to pull you away when it’s time, to let the paramedics try or to watch them hang their heads and murmur things like prolonged cardiac arrest and terminate resuscitation.
How you can do everything right and it can still not be enough. Not enough to save him and not enough to prepare you for the fact that when they take him out of this house on a gurney, he will be covered in a sheet.
How the only thing worse than the incessant flashing of the ambulance’s blue lights in front of the house is the way they turn off when the EMTs finish loading up, and they drive off without color or sound, without fanfare.
I don’t know how long we stand there in the foyer, staring at the front door like we’re waiting for Lesley to walk back through it.
Somehow we end up in the study, which might be even worse.
His absence is everywhere; in his empty armchair, his unlit hearth, his desk laid just as he left it—laptop open, notebooks scattered, pen uncapped.
As if he were just stepping out for a little break.
Lissa’s eyes are misty and unfocused when she stands from the couch.
“Tea,” she says, drifting numbly toward the electric kettle on the sideboard. “I’ll do tea.”
“You don’t have to,” I say.
She doesn’t turn around. “Yes I do.”
We listen to the sounds of water burbling in the kettle, china rattling and scraping. She hisses when she scalds herself and curses when she spills the sugar. I don’t startle at all when a teacup slips out of her hands and shatters on the floor.
She’s still for a moment, then turns to face us.
“I need to go buy more teacups.”
Grant rises to his feet. “Lissa, you don’t—”
“No, no, I do,” she says. “Because teacups are at the shop, which isn’t here. And that’s where I need to be. So I’ll just …”
She hurries out, leaving behind three steaming overfilled cups and a fourth in porcelain splinters on the ground. Only after she pulls the front door shut, when she passes the window outside, do we see her crumble into sobs. The sight of it tears me apart.
Too much feeling races out of me at once. Grant holds me tightly, and I cry like I haven’t in a very long time.
What’s real and what’s fictional—it’s irrelevant now.
When I’m back in Boston and the pieces of my life are neatly put back together, nothing will change the fact that this happened.
I’ll remember it all—the strength of Grant’s arms around me, Lissa’s visceral heartbreak.
And I will never stop missing Lesley. All of this has left a thousand invisible marks on me that I’ll carry forever.
If that’s not real, then I don’t know what is.
I stay curled against Grant for a long time, long after my tears have dried to salty smudges on my face and the sunlight outside has gone golden. He breathes deeply and evenly, idly stroking my hair.
“You know something,” he says softly. “I actually kind of think he might have been Banksy. In this universe, at least.”
I huff out a laugh, because my first instinct is to wonder what kind of victory pose Lesley will strike when he finds out. And then I have to remember all over again, and the tears return.
“It’s not a coincidence,” I say. I mean it as a question, but it comes out as a statement. “People don’t just die of a random heart attack hours after surviving an explosion, do they?”
“People might,” he says. “Characters … no, not so much.”
The implication weighs heavy in the air. Though neither of us speaks aloud, I can feel the questions gnawing at us, probing for answers we don’t want to face—what it all means, and what happens next.
But we don’t have to wonder long.
A single electronic ding chimes from Lesley’s phone, still tossed on his desk. Grant rises to investigate. He picks up the phone and gives me a sad smile.
“No passcode,” he says. “Typical Lesley.” Then he taps through to the source of the notification and goes rigid.
He looks up at me in shock and doesn’t have to say a word. I hurry to his side and read the new private Facebook message lighting up the screen.
AS THE COMPETITION DRAWS TO A CLOSE, SO TOO MUST OUR LITTLE CAT AND MOUSE GAME. WHAT DO YOU SAY WE MEET FACE-TO-FACE FOR THE GRAND FINALE?
“MEN WHO SWEAR UNDYING LOVE SOMETIMES HAVE THE WORST INTENTIONS IN THE WORLD.”
—THE THREE MUSKETEERS, ALEXANDRE DUMAS; p. 318, ch. 12. ISBN: 5149283-018742
—MR PAGE
I suddenly feel like I’m in the deep sea, the pressure building as I decode the message. This is it. The final showdown.
Tomorrow. Noon.
I look to Grant uneasily, but he remains frowning at the screen.
“That’s a real quote from that book,” he says, his voice in a thick fog, as if trying to decipher some ancient text.
The opening of the front door pulls my attention away, and my heart drops at the thought of adding this to Lissa’s plate right now. But when she enters the room, her eyes pink-rimmed and puffy, she already looks troubled in a way that surpasses grief.
“I’ve just spoken to the investigators,” she says through a haze, limply lifting the phone in her hand. She swallows hard. “There were no human remains found at the Fake House.”
It sets off a warning in my head, a low whine like an air raid siren—this statement that, under any other circumstance, should be excellent news.
“Alistair?”
She shakes her head.
“He wasn’t there.”