I headed to my own room a little lifted after the gloomy party. Perhaps it hadn’t been gloomy after all. Perhaps, in some small way, I had actually done something that mattered. I figured that Tom was probably thinking about how Aurelia would have loved to have shared this moment with him. Watching their little girl celebrate her first birthday, taking her first steps. It really was very sad.
But when I closed the door of my bedroom there was something different about the place. On the floor beside my bed was a book bound in red leather. I looked around. Had someone been in my room? Nothing appeared to be moved, but the book definitely hadn’t been there earlier, and it didn’t belong to me. Maybe it was the logbook Maren had said I was meant to fill out, about how the girls were getting on with their reading and so on.
I reached down and picked it up, noticing how soft the leather was. The letters AF were embossed in gold on the cover. AF? When I opened the book I realized quickly it wasn’t a logbook. Someone had written inside in blue biro and occasionally black Sharpie, about twenty pages’ worth. It was hasty, scribbled writing, but there were dates, and at a glance I could see this was fairly personal stuff . . . why would she say that???? . . . the look on his face . . . I’m feeling better these days . . .
I shut the book quickly. It was a diary, clearly, and reading it made me feel unclean. I set the book on the bed beside me and gave it the side-eye, like it was a living object. It was taunting me. I had an itch to read it. I felt I was meant to read it, not in some cosmological, fate-of-the-gods kind of way, but because it most definitely hadn’t been in my room earlier. It didn’t walk in here of its own accord. Someone had obviously put it on the floor, in my room. Why else would they put it here unless I was meant to read it?
I had a little internal battle for a while, and then I spent a while imagining the two voices in my head as Revolutionaries and Royalists with bayonets, in white breeches and tricorn hats, charging across a muddy plain. Once that scene was done with, I looked down and jumped to see the diary was still there, red as a heart ripped fresh from someone’s chest. I was certain it was staring at me. The gold letters on the front—AF—must be someone’s initials. Maren’s? No, her surname was Larsen. With a shudder, I realized Tom’s wife was called Aurelia. Aurelia Faraday. Was this her diary? I was certain I’d seen the names Gaia and Coco in there when I flicked through.
I felt sick.
I got up, peered down the corridor, and then closed the door. Then I paced my room. I had decided quickly that taking the book to Tom or Maren and telling them I just found it on the floor of my bedroom was not a wise move. Maren already suspected me. She just didn’t know what she suspected me of, but if I went to her and said that someone had popped the diary of Tom’s dead wife in my bedroom, she’d never believe me. She’d suspect me of rooting around in Tom’s office and stealing the diary.
So now I had to put it back somewhere. But what if I got caught? They only needed to see me with the diary in my hands and I’d be packed off on a plane back to England. And at the back of my mind, I knew that someone had to have put the diary in here. The only reason they’d do that is for me to read it.
So, with the Revolutionaries and Royalists still charging across the bloodied field of my mind, I went into my bathroom, locked the door, and began to read.
19
the lift
NOW
It’s late. Tom is standing on the deck of Granhus smoking and looking out across the woods. He likes the thick black night that leans on the jagged silhouettes of the trees and the animal sounds that pierce the silence. Bats flitting and screeching, owls hooting, the dozen or so crows that constantly circle the house like a bad omen.
A few nights ago he heard a wolf howl. He stiffened at the sound, his senses primed to