Lorna stepped closer.
“What are you doing?” Oliver asked from the hallway.
But Maeve didn’t need to ask. By Hollis’s head was a card in one of Callum’s blue envelopes. Lorna plucked it from the mattress, then pulled Maeve out into the hall and shut the door behind them. Both of them sank to the floor, where Oliver and Ellie had already found themselves. When Oliver saw what Lorna had, he started shaking his head.
“Don’t,” Oliver said. “Don’t open it. Lorna.”
But she did anyway.
You try to leave when it’s too soon,
you’ll die like Hollis in your room.
Someone murdered Callum dear.
Till they confess, you’re all stuck here.
Pp. 35–45
but they had to go and make things harder than they needed to be. Honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, this is how they’ve always been. I just had to keep telling myself it wasn’t my fault. Because it’s not. They’re here because of their choices, even if they didn’t see it that way. They’ve never been able to see things for what they were. That was never more obvious than in December 1994, and what happened after.
The pale blue envelope lay flat on the dark green carpet in front of the closed door. From Maeve’s position—sprawled belly-down on the bed, the side of her face pressed into the scratchy pillowcase—it looked like someone had taken a penknife and cut a perfect square from the carpet.
Maeve didn’t need a note to remind her of last night. Every time she closed her eyes, the memories played back as clearly as watching a rerun on TV. Her empty stomach protested her inaction, but moving remained impossible. The rooms around her were as quiet as her own. An apocalypse morning, she called it, when long moments passed without the sound of another human being and she could imagine she was the only person left alive. The last had occurred over the summer, when Max had been at a sleepover and her parents visiting friends in Leeds. Maeve used to love the peace and quiet of apocalypse mornings, but having one at a house like Caldwell Street was unnatural.
Brisk footsteps sounded up the stairs and disappeared behind the click of a door—Ellie’s or Hollis’s. Though quiet, they were enough to break the morning’s spell. Or afternoon’s, rather, for when she looked at her clock, the hour hand pointed almost to the one. She shot out of bed. She never slept this late, and it made her feel even more lazy and useless than usual. But Caldwell Street did that. They all knew it. It drew you into this world where every fault was amplified and every feeling—good or bad—became thrice what it would be elsewhere.
Maeve slid out of the low bed, one foot warm in its sock, the other bare and cold. She ignored the envelope as she threw on an old hoodie and hunted for a fresh pair of socks, but the envelope would not let her be. She wanted to step on it as she walked to the door, even hovered her foot over it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, she opened the flap.
I had a great time. You looked really fine. (That’s a bad rhyme.) But I had a lot of fun. What do you say to another one?
Maeve read it a few times, then slid the card back into the envelope, sick from her memories of last night. There had been drinks, laughing, his thumb sweeping over the back of her hand as they huddled together in the booth at the club. She tucked the envelope into the front pouch of her hoodie. She needed breakfast. Or lunch. Once she had some food in her, she’d be able to think about this more clearly. But when she reached the first landing, she collided with Callum as he was leaving his room.
“Maeve! Sorry!”
“Hi.” She cringed when she saw they were dressed alike: plaid pajama bottoms and red hoodies.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
“Oh yeah. No problem. You?” She bit her lower lip at how awkward the question sounded.
“Sort of? Actually, I had this really weird dream that I was doing an internship for some botanical gardens or something out in the country? And we had no power and I kept having to fill in these holes with cement?”
“That’s weird.”
“Yeah. Do you think it means anything?”
She shrugged. “You’re not meant to be a gardener?”
He laughed, and her face got hot because it was a sweet laugh. An honest one. And then she was laughing with him, and some of the weight from that morning lifted away.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I was going to grab a quick shower then get something to eat? That café by the train station has surprisingly good fry-ups, and they don’t charge for refills on coffee. Want to give it a go?” He fiddled with the cuff of his sleeve, his pale skin turning a shade of pink, which became darker when his eye caught the corner of the blue envelope peeking out from Maeve’s pocket. Maeve’s doubt crept up inside her, but she swallowed it back down.
“Yeah, sure. You’re going to shower first? I’ll have time to get changed.”
“Or we could go like this?” He laughed, then stopped. “That’s a joke. It was a joke. I really do need to shower. I stink from last night.” He blushed. “You don’t. Just me. You’re fine. You look fine.” He glanced at the envelope and winced.
“I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said.
“Great!”
“Great.”
They nodded like two strangers who’d been discussing the weather and had run out of things to say.
“Right. Shower.” Callum hurried to the bathroom.
“See you.”
The bathroom door closed, and Maeve winced again at how stupid she sounded before retreating back upstairs to her bedroom.
Maeve’s heavy footsteps might have been what woke Oliver. Or perhaps it was Callum turning on the shower. Either way, one moment he’d been in a dream. The next, he was lying on his mattress, staring up at the water-damaged ceiling. The waking had been so abrupt, he couldn’t recall anything about the dream other than an impending sense of dread, and he knew then why he’d woken.
She was going to call.
He listened to the shower running in the bathroom next door, the groan of the pipes the loudest in his room, and told himself this time it would be different. This time when she called, he’d stick to his word. He wouldn’t come running.
The phone rang. He fumbled down the stairs and picked up the receiver on the fifth ring.
“Yeah?”
He heard her voice, the baby crying in the background.
“Mum, I can’t . . . Mum, I have a final exam . . . Then get your husband to—”
Her answer did not surprise him. He rubbed his thigh, pain springing from his knee and traveling the familiar route to his hip.
“I’ll see what I can do . . . Yeah, you too.”
The phone’s shrill ring stirred the rest of the house. Once he hung up, a steady cacophony of footsteps, random thumps, drawers opening and closing echoed between the walls like an orchestra warming up. When Oliver returned upstairs, the shower had stopped. He ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his itching eyes, and knocked on Callum’s door. No one answered, and he tried again. The third time, the bathroom door swung open, and Callum appeared in only a towel.
“Callum! Exactly who I wanted to see.”