We’d turned on the lamps against the dark, and they cast strange shadows across the room. Rupert’s nose went peakier still, and Anwen’s chin disappeared as she ducked it, studying her hands, picking her cuticles. I was surprised by how cowed she was tonight, how she’d been holding herself apart. The only way they’d have known about my flat would be from her: she’d been here only yesterday. Rupert had made some throwaway apology about barging in on us, and Theo had said hollowly, “Where else could we go? The dorms? A pub?”
“Everyone else was going to The Bell and Book to, you know, grieve—”
Theo slammed his glass down on the table. “People repeating the same horrible patterns. Someone else is going to get hurt.”
“Hey.” Anwen glanced up. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“I know we don’t, but I want to—”
“You haven’t told me anything about this spring,” she said. “How was Boston? How was your last semester of school?”
“School?” Rupert asked. He glanced between the two of them. “You two haven’t talked about it? I thought you’d been in touch.”
Anwen swallowed. “I mean—”
“Oh, school,” Theo said, fury lurking at the corners of his voice. “School. Yes, let’s not talk about Larkin. Let’s not talk about this summer. Why would we need to? It’s not like last year had anything to do with it—”
“Theo,” Anwen said, hands up, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry—”
“Pry?” Theo laughed. “How is it prying? You and me are friends, Anwen, remember? Remember when my girlfriend broke up with me last summer, because she thought I knew why people were being attacked and wasn’t telling anyone. Who knows where she got that idea. Oh, and then she disappeared.”
At that, Anwen stopped breathing. For a moment, only, but I was watching for it.
“And so after that I went home, where no one knew anything about it, and no one would talk to me about it. Including my parents. So fuck them. I did a lot of this”—Theo lofted his glass full of rum—“and cutting class to go boxing with Gael and like, fuck around downtown, and so I got a bunch of Cs in the fall. But fuck it, Laurence Olivier didn’t have to do AP fucking Physics so why should I, especially when I was going to acting conservatory in the fall?” He looked around the room. “Tell me.”
“I can’t,” Anwen said softly.
“So then my mom talked to the Boston Players Club about giving away my part in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time—”
“Oh God, Theo—”
“—the lead,” he bit out, “which I had auditioned for in the months after I got home from Matilda disappearing, but why does that matter? My parents said I had to focus on my grades, which didn’t matter, because senior spring and the Guthrie conservatory program emphatically did not care. So I understudied instead. Understudying’s the same, right? Totally the same. So yeah, Anwen, my spring was great. Fucking awesome.”
“That’s cold, Theo,” Rupert said, and he sat down next to Anwen on the rug, tucking one thin arm around her shoulders. “She didn’t deserve that.”
Theo stared at them, then viciously bit his lip. “Fine,” he said.
“Do better than that,” Rupert said, with an edge I hadn’t seen before.
“Fine,” Theo said again, and then, “fine. I’m sorry. Look, I wouldn’t’ve met Gael if—if Matilda hadn’t ended things with me. Her disappearing . . . I couldn’t do anything about that. But it was all I could think about. The only thing, figuring out where she’d gone, that maybe she’d given me some clue and I’d been too stupid to see it for what it was, and then, these last few months, thinking about coming back here . . . I kept thinking, and it was so stupid, but . . .”
None of it seemed rehearsed. It looked and sounded genuine—the confusion, the grief, the sad, soft eyes.
But I had seen Theo do Shakespeare that afternoon. I knew what he could do with words.
“You thought maybe she’d come back,” Anwen murmured to him. “Like magic. Maybe you’d both come back here, to Oxford in the summer, and it would all be the same as it was.”
It was a wild thing for her to say to a boy in the throes of grief. I expected him to fire back with renewed outrage. But Rupert hung his head, and Anwen turned to tuck her face into his shoulder, and Theo stared up at the ceiling, the vein in his neck still showing, and I watched in fascination, the three of them rearranging their dynamic once again.
“What was it like?” Watson asked, pulling a leg up to his chest. “Last summer?”
“It was—” Anwen sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
But she did begin, and Rupert picked up when she trailed off, and even Theo, finally, joined in, his head tipped back on the couch, words spinning up into the air. The three of them together on the floor of Theo’s room, Anwen hemming a skirt she’d bought at a charity shop while Rupert read his economics textbook out loud, asking, periodically, if he had in fact forgotten how to speak English or if the author had. The first time they’d seen Theo perform, not onstage but in the bathroom of their suite, jumping up to balance on the clawfoot tub while he did a blistering monologue from This Is Our Youth, Rupert throwing popcorn at his face to see if it would faze him. It didn’t; Theo caught a kernel in his mouth and yelled so loudly in triumph that their downstairs neighbors hammered at the ceiling with a broom. The second week, when they discovered they could take out punts from the boathouse, Anwen had brought a Bluetooth speaker and played experimental jazz as Rupert maneuvered them through the River Cherwell. They did it every afternoon, the three of them on the water, the three of them at their Italian restaurant, the rituals they developed by accident and then held to because they were theirs. Anwen adding ruffles to her socks, adding a lining to a coat, buying silk scarves from Oxfam and making them into pocket squares for their blazers, all three of them, in complimentary shades of green, paisley. And nights, then, at the St. Genesius theater, where Theo met Matilda.
“We can show you videos,” Rupert said, tugging his phone from his pocket. “I took a few last summer, back before things went wrong.”
Theo turned his head. “Go on,” he said hoarsely. “Show them your evidence.”
Watson and I exchanged a look.
There it was. Why they had come to us first, before they had even gone home.
We knew the two of us weren’t entirely anonymous; even before the Lucien Moriarty case ended up in the tabloids, our last names made us conspicuous targets. And it wasn’t precisely a secret that I’d been brought in by Dr. Larkin to help.
But I didn’t want them to think of me as a detective. Not yet. I wanted them to think of me as a friend. To confide in me as a friend.
“I’d love to see her,” I said quietly.
“Aha,” Rupert said, scrolling. Watson pulled his chair forward. “Here’s a good one. At the Parks, last June.” He held the screen out between us.
The camera shakily panned over a long grassy expanse, trees shimmering in the distance. The light was red and soft, as it was the hour after sunset or before sunrise. Anwen came into frame, her hair an exuberant mess. She held a hand over her face. “Rupert, don’t, I’m a shambles,” she said, laughing, and the camera jerked over to Theo. He was bundled in a letterman jacket, too big for him in the shoulders, and he was turned on his side with his arm thrown over—