“Yeah, seems like you’re doing pretty well for yourself these days.” Siobhan hears the accusation in her voice, the obvious note of bitterness, and hates herself for it. She likes that he’s doing well, that he’s obviously making money, but she can’t bring herself to tell him that.
Theo doesn’t respond straight away. He sips his coffee then asks, “This Zara – what’s her connection to Hex House?”
Siobhan thinks about the strange way Zara talks about the house, all the things that seem to glitter under her tongue that she never gives voice to. “She’s just… interested in it. Apparently, she’s speaking to someone else who’s still there.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“And she’s never been?”
“No. I’m not sure she even believed it was real, not until I…”Until I showed her, Siobhan thinks. “Until I told her what happened. Most of it, anyway. Who knows what she makes of it.”
Theo shakes his head, not meeting her eye. His face is pale. “So she knows. About the hexing.”
When Siobhan nods, Theo stands, running his hands through his hair. He paces the monochrome rug. This, at least, hasn’t changed: his need to move whenever he’s nervous. “If you’re doing this, you need to tell her about Elly.”
Siobhan feels her scar throb. “I know,” she says.
“You’re finally going to own your part in it? In what happened to her?”
A stab of pain behind Siobhan’s eyelids. She hasn’t had a drink today. She swallows, hard. “Elly made her own choices.”
Theo turns to her, eyes wide and thunderous. Evidently, she’s said the wrong thing. There’s a chime from his laptop, an incoming video call, but he either ignores it or doesn’t even hear it.
“See, this is why I can’t talk to you,” he seethes. “You knowexactlywhat you did, how far you pushed her. Shewasn’t ready. She was vulnerable. And you still can’t admit to yourself that all you cared about was the documentary. All you cared about was getting good material.”
“That isn’t true, Theo.”
“It’s your fault she’s dead,” he hisses.
Siobhan goes cold all over. This, she knows, is what’s kept him away from her for four years. This is why he can barely look at her.
“And then you wouldn’t even do the right thing by her afterwards by telling her family. You’ve made me live with that, all this time. And now you want to tell the world about it. Why now? To make yourself feel better? Because Haina’s dead, so you don’t have to be scared of her anymore?”
Siobhan looks at Theo, and he looks back at her, and all she wants to do is say,Stop it, what the hell are we doing, we only have each other in this. That might have worked once, but not with this grown man standing in front of her, not with this warped version of Theo who keeps his dishes dry and stacked on the draining board and makes enough money to keep the heating on during the day. She doesn’t have the upper hand anymore. Their conversations no longer belong to her, to do with as she pleases.
“I wasn’t the only one there, Theo,” she says. She can’t bring herself to look at him. “You could have said something at any point over the last four years. You’re your own person, aren’t you? You’re mybig brother. So why did you stay silent?”
A muscle in Theo’s jaw is twitching. He looks like he used to when in the grip of a nightmare, grinding his molars in the bed opposite her. “You told me not to,” he says. “You made me promise, for all the women still there.”
“It’s not like I cut your tongue out,” Siobhan says. Her voice is flat, lifeless.
Theo stares down at his feet. It’s the first time she’s seen him look like the Theo she knew – young, unsure. “I kept my word,” he whispers.
Siobhan digs her nails into her palms. Hehadkept his promise to her, all these years, and he’d hated her for it with every single second that passed. She could tell him the reason now, now that Haina’s dead – the real reason she had to make sure he never told anyone what he knew, but she can’t get the words to come. For a long minute, they both stay silent, avoiding each other’s eye.
“You were just sosureof Haina,” Theo says eventually. “Of what she was doing, and the need to protect it. You, and all the other women. It’s as though you were under her spell. I never understood it.”
There’s an odd sound, and it takes a second for Siobhan to realise that it’s coming from her, that she’s laughing. Theo looks at her strangely, as if she’s a wild animal. “Of course you didn’t understand it, Theo,” she tells him. “For fuck’s sake. It was always different for you. You didn’t need the house. You could never know what it was like, to feel like it was your only chance of survival. The house never gotinsideyou, not like it did for the rest of us.”
Theo looks up, eyes sharp. “The rest of us,” he says. “You include yourself in that?”
Siobhan shakes her head, feeling fuzzy and lightheaded. She’s getting confused.
As her and Theo’s time in the house had worn on, she’d found herself spending more and more with Haina. It’s what she’d looked forward to when she’d woken upeach morning: the warmth of the fire, the softness of the velvet armchair, Haina’s intense energy across from her. In all her life, Siobhan had never felt as able to talk as she did during all those hours in the study. It was like a dam had finally been opened. She told Haina about her childhood, the early years before Nora left her dad, how she’d been too young to recall anything but a murky, dread-filled feeling. She told Haina about the shelter, the other women who would stroke her hair but flinch when she tried to hug them. Nora sat at the window each day, watching, watching forhim, not stopping until he died a year later and she could watch him being lowered into the ground. Siobhan talked about moving into the Leith flat, the happiest years of her life, just her, Theo and Nora. Then, the way Nora started to look at her differently when she became a teenager and started drinking alcopops in parks, started staying out late, started smuggling strong spirits into the house. Normal teenage behaviour, she’d always told herself, nothing her friends weren’t doing, too. But Theo and Nora never touched a drop. And while her friends could stick to one or two drinks, Siobhan never could, drinking until she was sick or passed out or forgot where she was, who she was.Maybe it was my way of knowing him, Siobhan told Haina.Of trying to understand who he was and why he did what he did. I didn’t have a problem – I don’t have a problem. I was just figuring it all out. But Mum looked at me like I was his ghost. Like he’d come back to haunt her.
All of this, Haina listened to, squeezing Siobhan’s hand. Nodding as though, yes, she understood it all. And over time, the lines had started to blur. Siobhan had started tofeel not like an outsider, but part of the very fabric of the house. Like aguest. That feeling had become, in her mind, inextricably tied to the making of the documentary. She’d begun to truly understand it: how much the guests needed the house, how much they needed Haina, and she’d felt a powerful pull to preserve it all, to capture it and make it tangible. She became single-minded in her focus, in her desire to get it perfect. The documentary would be something special, she knew – it would make her and Theo’s careers. But as the weeks rolled on, it became about more than that. Something she couldn’t quite give words to: a way to tie herself to the house, to feel closer to it, and to Haina, even once she’d returned home.
