dumped her backpack and kissed Morris’s cheek, then promised to come right back. She headed for the toilets.
“You know what’s the worst thing about being a dad?” Morris leaned forward. He wrapped his good hand around Nick’s crutch, and pulled himself up close to Nick’s face. “The kid is this thing you have to protect. She’s so much more important than anything else. Even if you have to die, to keep her safe, you do it. You just do it, because if it comes down to you or her, it’s her. That’s it. It’s just her. But here’s the thing: Between me and the rest of the world, it’s me. It’s me, for her sake, because I’m her father. She needs me. She needs to not lose her dad to some nutter with a knife. What was I thinking? What the hell had I been thinking?”
He let go of the crutch. Nick rocked back.
Peter was sitting on Nick’s hospital bed, arms crossed. “I thought you couldn’t walk,” he accused. “I was told you’d never walk again and it would make you even more pathetic and everyone would point and laugh at you for as long as you lived.”
“I hobble,” Nick said. He forced a smile. Peter didn’t. “It’s good to see you,” Nick said, trying to haul the conversation back to a proper start.
Peter resisted. “Do the nurses usually let you wander? Is that wise?”
“I can balance all right,” Nick answered, as if the question had to do with his leg and not with his recent running away to Dovecote. “I was visiting the Inspector. I had to talk to him. Did you know that he’s Richard’s brother? I could hardly believe it when my mother told me that. He’s the one who caught Liv. He—”
“We all got to know him, Nick. We were all questioned by him. About you.”
“Yes, of course.” Nick still waited in the doorway, on one foot.
Peter stood up and to the side, to give him back his bed. Nick sat on it, legs over the side and back straight, rather than lying back down.
“Did you know that they dredged the Cam for you?” Peter demanded.
Nick nodded.
“That Richard considered postponing the wedding? Did you know that Polly’s mother was arrested?”
“What?”
“Because of you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“A lot happened while you were off.”
“Is she all right?”
“She was only in a few days.”
“Days? My God. Polly didn’t say.”
Peter lifted his head. “She was here?”
“Half an hour ago.”
Peter sucked in a breath, then whooshed it out. “I’ve got to ask you this. But … you’ve got to tell me the truth.”
“About what?” There was so much he had to tell everyone, over and over again. Why he left, where he went, what he’d hoped to find and what he did find….
Peter leaned in close and spoke barely above a whisper. “Liv said you raped her.”
“What?” Nick gaped. “What?”
“After they dredged the Cam she was upset. We all were. All day we’d prepared for the worst news. It didn’t come, thank God it didn’t, but all that coiled energy had nowhere to spring. Then she told me, and I was angry, and I didn’t believe her. But it stuck in my head. It stuck there.”
“You didn’t believe her,” Nick repeated, insistent.
“Not at first. No. Then maybe … The idea was absurd, but everything was already absurd. There was no reason for you to have run away, no reason for anyone to have hurt you. There was no ransom demand, no body…. And I remembered the last time I saw you. You were upset about Liv and Polly. It came across like something on the scale of a pregnancy scare. But this was you, Nick, so at the time I thought you’d ‘led Liv on’ as far as a kiss, or maybe not even that. Maybe just words had been taken the wrong way. I hadn’t thought anything significant of it.
“Then Liv told me you’d raped her. Having done that would make you run away. Or make Liv want to hurt you. It could even have made you hurt yourself. It was unthinkable that you would do it in the first place, but, if you had done it, that would make sense of everything else. Not just of you being gone, but now. What Liv did. Not why it was aimed at Gretchen and Harry, but why she felt she had to hit back at somebody….”
“No!”
“No what, Nick?”
“No to everything! No, I didn’t rape her!”
“That’s the truth?”
A leaf hanging from one of