13. Lorcan
LORCAN
Her room was locked.
Rua had never locked her door. Not once in all the years she’d lived in this house. She’d left it open like an invitation, like she was always half hoping someone would walk in. It had been one of her more irritating qualities.
This girl had locked hers.
Thirty seconds with picks and the tumbler turned.
I closed her door behind me and stood still.
The room itself was the same. Black furniture, Rua’s dark sheets, the iron chandelier overhead, the red damask climbing the walls. But everything else had shifted.
The curtains were open. All of them, flung wide, her windows cracked a fist width to let in the fall air. Rua had kept hers sealed year-round, curtains drawn like she was afraid of the light.
There were no clothes on the floor. No wet brushes left in jars of cloudy water, no tubes of paint with the caps missing. The art supplies on the desk had been organized, brushes in a cup, tubes in a row, a stack of sketchbooks aligned with the edge of the table.
Rua worked in beautiful controlled chaos. Her room had always looked like she’d detonated herself across every surface.
This looked like someone else’s version of Rua.
The walls were bare of every painting of me, every canvas, every sketch, proof of the obsession Rua had spent years feeding.
I’d known about them. I’d made a point of not acknowledging them, the same way I’d made a point of not acknowledging most of what Rua had felt for me.
I found them in the back of her cupboard, every last one, stacked against the back in the dark with their faces turned inward.
A cold certainty clamped down on my chest.
Rua had painted me compulsively, the way other people bite their nails or play with their hair. She’d used the paintings the way she used me, to punish herself with, and she’d never once turned them away.
This girl had been in this room less than a week and she’d put every one of my faces in a cupboard.
I pulled out the desk drawers first. Pencils, a broken charcoal stick, a stub of eraser, a receipt. Nothing useful. The sketchbooks were Rua’s, but the handwriting on the covers was forced, like someone copying a signature they’d practiced.
I searched between the books on the shelf, thumbs running over spines and under the rim of the toilet cistern, which Rua had used once and apparently considered deeply clever.
Nothing in any of these places.
Then my fingers found the edge of something flat and glossy wedged between the mattress and the wall side of the bed frame.
A photograph. Polaroid format, the white border thick around the image.
She was facing the camera, standing with one knee bent, her purple miniskirt riding up her shapely thigh. Her long hair curled down around her shoulders and over her shimmery silver crop top, chestnut streaked with gold.
Rua had kept her shoulder-length hair for as long as I could remember.
Behind her fairy lights strung across the purple wall, lilac sheets, boho pillows in colors that were as far removed as possible to Rua’s black cave of a room.
She was smiling, unguarded and easy, two fingers of her hand up in a peace sign.
Rua would have set herself on fire before putting on a skirt. And as much as she loved turning her intrusive little camera on me, I’d never seen her take a selfie in my life.
I turned it over.
In handwriting I’d never seen before, looping and slightly rushed, were two words.
Never forget.
My thumb pressed the edge of the photograph and I turned it over again.
Something else about this photo snagged at my mind.
Her upper thigh in the photograph was bare. No Medusa. No ink at all.
Rua’s tattoo sat high, almost at the crease of the hip, placed where it wouldn’t show below the hem of anything respectable. Possible to hide unless she was in a miniskirt.
Rua had pressed the heel of her palm against it when she was anxious, a habit I’d watched develop over months after she’d gotten it when she turned eighteen. This girl didn’t touch her thigh at all.
I stared at the photograph again and traced my thumb against the bare skin of the thigh before I slipped it into my breast pocket.
Whatever this girl was, wherever she’d come from, whoever had sent her, I had enough to dig deeper. Not enough to act, not yet, but enough to pull the thread and see what came apart.
Gotcha, little imposter.