Her lips were parted slightly. One of her earrings was caught in her hair, but she didn’t make a move to free it.
‘One minute, it’s like it always was,’ I said. ‘Like we’re partners again. Like you’ve got my back. Like I’ve gotyouback. And then the next minute—’
I dug my fingers into my temples.
‘When you weren’t here, I missed you,’ I said, ‘but at least I could trust that you were still out there. That you stillexisted, god. But now I look at you and I don’t have a fucking clue who I’m looking at.’
I pointed my finger at her. ‘Every time I think I have a handle on what you’re doing you rip the carpet out from under me. I’m angry with you all the time. I’m worried about you all the time. I miss you all the time.’
The barest flicker of something across her face. God, couldn’t she give me more than that?
‘I need you to explain it to me, Lily,’ I said. ‘I am losing my mind over this, so if you give a shit about me at all, you’re going to tell me why you really came here. Why you’re doing this to yourself. Why you’re doing this tome. And you’re going to tell me the truth this time.’
She hesitated.
For a long, agonising moment, I thought she wasn’t going to say anything at all. That she was going to let the silence hang there, unfilled, forever.
‘Everything I’ve told you has been the truth, Murray.’
My fingers curled around the top of one of the dining chairs, wood digging painfully into my palm.
‘I was lonely, and sad, and bored,’ she said, ‘and I knew you needed me.’
She crossed the room, heels clicking against the floorboards, and stopped just short of me, not quite close enoughto touch. ‘Once I heard that Greg was letting you do this season, Iknewyou needed me. So…’
I didn’t finish the sentence for her. I was not going to break first, not this time.
‘So that’s why I came. Just like I told you. But…’
I dug my fingers even tighter into the top of the chair.
Her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible. ‘I needed you too.’
‘I didn’t go anywhere. Any time you needed me, you could have called me, and I would have been there. Straight away. No questions asked.’
‘I know. I know. But – fuck!’
The word exploded out of her, sudden, a whipcrack. She clawed at her chest, fingernails leaving angry red scratches on her skin.
I caught her hand. ‘Butwhat, Lily?’
‘Don’t use that voice on me!’
‘But,’ I said, biting out the T, ‘what?’
‘I couldn’t call you! I couldn’t be around you, not unless I turned myself into someone else first! Otherwise – otherwise—’
‘Otherwise what?’
‘I loved him!’
She clenched her fists. Her wrist was tense as a steel cable in my fingers.
‘I loved Jeff,’ she said, after a long moment, modulating her voice down to a more normal volume. ‘I’m not good at loving people, but I loved him. After he died – god, I wanted to cut that love out of me, because it hurt so badly, but I still loved him.’
She looked up at the roof, taking a long breath through her nose.
‘I wasn’t lying,’ she said. ‘Dying is the worst thing that man ever did to me. That stupid, patient, gentle man, who deserved so much better than me.’
