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“Does your girlfriend know what you did?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“There was a woman here the other day. When I locked you in, I thought she’d come and let you out when you didn’t turn up for dinner.”
He smiles. “It’s good to know that you didn’t intend to kill me. That was Mara, our sister. She lives in Dunedin, I live here.” There’s a pause. “I did stay on, you know. In England. I didn’t come running back here as soon as it was over. I even went to Reading, hung around for a few days.”
I stare at him. “You came to Reading?”
“Yes.”
“But—why didn’t you—”
“Come and see you? How could I, when you thought I was dead? How could I, after what we did?”
“Then why come?”
“Because I wanted to make sure you were alright. And I did want to tell you I was still alive, Paul knew that and he said I should write to you. But you seemed okay. I watched you shopping, and you seemed okay.”
I remember the times I had sensed him close, and my throat burns with unshed tears.
“I was never okay.”
“What you said to Carl, at the memorial service for Lina and Justine, the message you gave him, about sleeping on a mattress in a room with a boarded-up window. Was that true?”
It’s too much. Tears begin to leak from my eyes. I wipe them away with my fingers but they keep on coming.
I see him kick the door shut, blocking out the light. And suddenly, I’m back in the house in Haven Cliffs, in the room with the boarded-up window, and my captor is walking toward me in the darkness. I close my eyes, wait to feel his hands on my shoulders—but instead, his arms come around me. And in that moment, a huge weight lifts from my shoulders.
I don’t know how long I stand wrapped in his arms, thinking about him coming to Reading, wondering what might have been if he had had the courage to tell me he was alive.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly, after an eternity. “For everything.”
I breathe in the scent of him. He smells of sun and sea.
“You don’t smell the same,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“You smelled like Lukas. When you were near me, I recognized the same smell that I had smelled on him, like freshly mown grass. It’s one of the reasons I thought you were Lukas.”
He gives a low laugh. “That’ll have been the shower gel. Lukas left a whole bottle of it, unopened. He brings his products over from Lithuania and doesn’t bother to take them back with him.”
Lukas’s shower gel. He had been using Lukas’s shower gel.
I step back and his arms fall from around me.
“I need to go. I’m leaving tonight.”
“Won’t you stay?”
“I can’t.”
He follows me to the door.
“Will I see you again?”
“No.”
I walk into the sunlight, up the slope to the track. When I get to the top, I turn around. He’s standing in the doorway, watching me, and I feel this terrible tug inside me. I’ve lost everyone and despite everything, I don’t want to lose him too. He’s all I have left, and there’s somuch about him that I don’t know. I don’t even know his first name, I realize.
I raise a hand, shading my eyes from the sun.
“Maybe,” I say.
