Tana French - The Likeness

“So?” Abby demanded. “Big deal. We were all worried about that, if we’re honest. Why not? If she did remember, she’d have had every right to be raging with the lot of us. That evening you came home, Lex, we’d been like a bunch of cats on hot bricks all day. Once we realized you weren’t angry or anything, we were OK-but when you got out of that cop car… Jesus. I thought my head was going to explode.” For one last second, I saw them again the way I had that evening: a golden apparition on the front steps, shining and poised like young warriors stepped out of some lost myth, heads lifted, too bright to be real.

“Worried,” Rafe said, “yes. But Daniel was a lot more than worried. He was so hysterically nervous that it was making me nervous too. Finally I cornered him-I had to sneak up to his room late at night, like we were having an affair or something; he was bloody careful not to let me get him alone-and I asked him what the hell was up. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘We have to accept the fact that this may not be over so easily. I think I have a plan that should cover all eventualities, but a few of the details are still unclear. Try not to worry about it for the moment; it may never come to that.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“Not being a mind reader,” Abby said crisply, “I haven’t a clue. I assume he was trying to reassure you.”

A dark lane and a tiny click, and that note in Daniel’s voice: focused, absorbed, so calm. I could feel my hair lifting. It had never occurred to me, not once, that the gun might not have been pointing at Naylor.

Rafe snorted. “Oh, please. Daniel didn’t give a damn about how any of us felt-including Lexie. All he cared about was finding out whether she remembered anything and what she was going to do next. He wasn’t even subtle about it; he was blatantly pumping her for information, every chance he got. Do you remember what route you took that night, are you taking the jacket or would you rather not, oh Lexie do you want to talk about it… It made me sick.”

“He was trying to protect you, Rafe. Us.”

“I don’t need protecting, thanks very much. I’m not a bloody child. And I definitely, definitely don’t need protecting by Daniel.”

“Well, good for you,” said Abby. “Congratulations, big man. Whether you feel you needed it or not, he was doing his best. If that’s not good enough for you-”

Rafe gave a jerky, one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe he was. Like I said, I’ve got no way to know for sure. But if he was, then his best is pretty crap, for such a smart guy. These last few weeks have been hell, Abby, living hell, and they didn’t need to be. If Daniel had just listened to us, instead of doing his best… We wanted to tell you,” he said, swinging round to me. “All three of us. When we found out you were coming home.”

“We really did, Lexie,” said Justin, leaning over the arm of his chair towards me. “You don’t know how many times I almost… God. I thought I was going to explode, or disintegrate or something, if I didn’t tell you.”

“But Daniel,” Rafe said, “wouldn’t let us. And look how well that’s turned out. Look how well every single one of his ideas has turned out. Look at us; where he’s got us.” His hand flying up to all of us, to the room, bright and desperate and cracking at the seams. “None of this needed to happen. We could’ve called an ambulance, we could’ve told Lexie straight off-”

“No,” Abby said. “No. You could have called an ambulance. You could have told Lexie. Or I could have, or Justin. Don’t you dare put this all on Daniel. You’re a grown man, Rafe. Nobody held a gun to your head and made you keep your mouth shut. You did it all by yourself.”

“Maybe. But I did it because Daniel told me to, and so did you. You and I were on our own here for how long, that night? An hour? More? And the only thing you could talk about was how badly you wanted to get help. But when I said yeah, OK, let’s do it, you said no. Daniel said not to do anything. Daniel had a plan. Daniel would handle it.”

“Because I trust him. I owe him that, that much at least, and so do you. This-everything we’ve got-it’s because of Daniel. If it weren’t for him, I’d be on my own in a scary underground bedsit right this minute. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you-”

Rafe laughed, a loud, harsh, startling sound. “This fucking house,” he said. “Every time anyone hints that your precious Daniel might not be perfect, you throw the house in our faces. I’ve been keeping my mouth shut because I thought maybe you were right, maybe I owed him, but now… I’ve just about had it up to my tits with this house. Another of Daniel’s brilliant ideas, and how well has this one worked out? Justin’s a wreck, you’re six feet deep in denial, I’m drinking like my father, Lexie almost died, and most of the time we all hate one another’s guts. All because of this fucking house.”

Abby’s head came up and she stared at him. “That’s not Daniel’s fault. He just wanted-”

“Wanted what, Abby? What? Why do you think he gave us all shares in the house to start with?”

“Because,” Abby said, low and dangerous, “he cares about us. Because, right or wrong, he figured this was the best way to make sure all five of us were happy.”

I expected Rafe to laugh out loud at that, too, but he didn’t. “You know,” he said after a moment, staring down into his glass, “I thought that too, at first. I really did. That he was doing it because he loved us.” The vicious edge had fallen out of his voice; all that was left was a simple, tired melancholy. “It made me happy, thinking that. There was a time when I would’ve done anything for Daniel. Anything.”

“And then you saw the light,” Abby said. Her voice was hard and brittle, but she couldn’t keep the shake out of it. She was more upset than I’d ever seen her, more upset even than when I’d brought up the note in the jacket. “Someone who gives his best friends most of a seven-figure house is obviously doing it for purely selfish reasons. Paranoid much?”

“I thought about that. I’ve thought about this a lot, the last few weeks. I didn’t want to-God… But I couldn’t help it. Like picking at a scab.” Rafe looked up at Abby, shaking his hair out of his face; the booze was soaking in and his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, as if he’d been crying. “Say we’d all ended up in different colleges, Abby. Say we’d never met. What do you think we’d be doing now?”

“I don’t have the foggiest clue what you’re talking about.”

“We’d be OK, the four of us. Maybe we would’ve had a tough first few months, maybe it would’ve taken us a while to get to know people, but we’d have done it. I know none of us were the outgoing type, but we’d have learned. That’s what people do, in college: they learn to function in the big scary world. By now we’d have friends, social lives-”

“I wouldn’t,” Justin said, quietly and definitely. “I wouldn’t be OK. Not without you guys.”

“Yes you would, Justin. You would. You’d have a boyfriend-you too, Abby. Not just someone who shares a bed with you occasionally, when the day’s been too much to take. A boyfriend. A partner.” He gave me a sad little smile. “You, silly thing, I’m not so sure. But you’d be having a lot of fun, either way.”

“Thanks for sorting out our love lives,” Abby said coldly, “you patronizing prick. The fact that Justin doesn’t have a fella doesn’t make Daniel the Antichrist.”

Rafe didn’t rise to that, and for some reason that frightened me. “No,” he said. “But think about this for a second. If we’d never met, what do you think Daniel would be doing now?”