She looked at him. He had a strange expression on his face, as though he wanted to be proud but wasn’t quite sure if he was allowed to be.
“What do you think?” he asked them.
“It’s amazing,” Katie said.
“Really?” He beamed at her for a moment—but then corrected himself. “I know it needs a lot of work. But it’s a start.”
Chris was looking around with the same sense of wonder he’d had outside the role-playing game shop. It would occur to Katie years later that he often approached the world that way—that it was as much a part of him as the vulnerability. It was another thing Michael Hyde would take from him.
“Do people really buy this many candles?” Chris said.
“Not all at once,” her mother told him.
She had been silent until then, still hugging herself and looking around, as though she wasn’t sure what to make of what she was seeing. But then she stepped over to her husband, put her arms around him, and hugged him tightly. After a moment’s hesitation, he embraced her back. Even though Katie didn’t fully understand everything that had gone on between them, she felt it in the air anyway: some kind of tension dissipating.
“It’s perfect,” her mother said.
“No, it needs a lot of work.”
She rubbed his back.
“Not all at once,” she repeated quietly.
* * *
As well as a phone number for Chris, Katie’s mother had an address for him. He had even left her a spare key. But her mother no longer drove, and she wanted Katie to see if he was all right. The idea of doing so filled her with dread. Despite her mother’s assurances he was no longer using, her mind immediately conjured up an image of Chris lying dead in his apartment, and she couldn’t imagine how it would feel to find him like that. And even if he was fine, what would it be like to see him again after all this time?
“If you’re that worried about him,” Katie said, “we should call the police.”
Her mother shook her head.
“He would never want the police involved.”
Once again, her mother was gracious enough not to mention what had happened the last time Katie had seen Chris.
But it hung in the air anyway.
And so, back in the car, Katie texted Sam to let him know she was going to be a little longer than she’d expected, and then drove south into the whorl of the highway that circled the city center. The streetlights filled the car with alternating waves of amber and shadow, and they washed over her in time with the anxiety that was throbbing inside her. Along with the familiar feeling that what she wanted was always less important than her brother.
Of always being second best.
The GPS took her past the city’s floodlit prison, which sat on the crest of a hill like a castle, and then along streets lined with flat, hard-edged houses. A single main road ran through the village in which Chris had made his home. She drove past shuttered convenience stores and charity shops, interspersed with the bright windows of intermittent fast-food restaurants. She caught sight of a few shapes huddled in the doorways, and a couple sitting hunched together in the shadows of a bus shelter, but the street was otherwise almost eerily deserted.
She signaled and pulled in.
At first glance, the address Chris had given her mother looked like a bust. Number fifty-three was a real estate agent, while the windows of number fifty-five beside it were filled with rolls of carpet and squares of dull-colored fabric. Both were closed. She was beginning to think her brother must have lied once again, but then she noticed an unmarked door between the two businesses.
She leaned forward and peered up through the windshield. There was a second story above the fabric shop, almost invisible against the night sky. Its windows were dark.
Okay, then.
Katie checked her cell phone.
No reply from Sam.
She wasn’t sure what to read into that silence. Maybe he was pissed off at having to put Siena to bed himself. More likely, though, he was concerned about her. He would be worried about what her brother coming back into their lives meant. Certainly, if he knew where she was right now, he would very much want her to turn around and drive away.
She looked up at the dark apartment again and wondered if perhaps she should do exactly that. Her mother might have felt it was her job to be here, but if there was something terrible waiting inside the apartment, she had no obligation to see it. And if Chris was in some kind of trouble, it wasn’t her duty to risk her own safety by getting involved. Especially when he had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her.
For a moment she felt torn between what Sam and her mother wanted from her, in the same way she remembered her brother being caught between her and their parents outside the Mill.
Forget about them for a minute, she told herself.
What do you want to do?
She thought back to that day at the Mill again—how her brother’s smile had made the resentment waft away, like the sun cutting through a cold morning’s mist. And then she remembered, a few years later, crying at the sight of him in the hospital when they had been finally allowed to visit. While her brother had survived the attack, Michael Hyde had left him with so many scars. The one that ran prominently down his face; the ones on his body that were less visible; the ones in his mind that only he could see. And while nothing is ever so clear-cut and simple, it had always seemed to her that their paths colliding that day had knocked Chris off course and set him on the path he had followed since.
The guilt from that had never left her.
She remembered how she had felt as she ran toward the police cordon, and it seemed to her now that what she wanted to do was the wrong question. What mattered far more was what she would be able to live with herself for not doing.
So she took a deep breath.
Then slipped the phone into her jacket pocket and got out of the car.
Seven
Katie shivered. Night had fallen properly now, and it was cold, but this whole area seemed rough, and she felt vulnerable outside the car. There was noise coming from farther up the street: the sound of people outside a pub, an angry edge to the echoing laughter. She glanced across the street behind her. A forbidding metal block of public toilets rested on a grass shoulder there, and a skinny man, bald and shirtless, was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, talking to himself and gesticulating with his thin arms.
She turned to Chris’s door and rang the bell.
There was no response, but the apartment above her was so dark and silent that she hadn’t expected one. She tried the key in the lock, a part of her hoping it wouldn’t turn.
But it did.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
There was a thin set of stairs directly ahead, leading up to a dark landing above. She stood still and listened for a few seconds, but everything was quiet aside from the thud of her heartbeat. Nobody was here. You can tell when a place is empty; the silence just has a different quality.
But, of course, that didn’t mean Chris wasn’t here.
She found a light switch, and then made her way up the stairs to the landing above, breathing slowly and carefully the whole time. The air smelled slightly stale, but—mercifully—no worse than that. It didn’t take long to explore the apartment. There were only four small rooms: a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. She steeled herself as she stepped into each one, but there was no sign of her brother.