“God, yeah. Thanks, man.” I knew my voice sounded weird, tight and breathless, but that was OK, there were logical reasons for that— “You didn’t say it to them, right?”
“Fuck, no.”
“Good. Like you said, Leon wouldn’t . . . So there’s no reason to go sending the cops down the wrong track.”
Dec was nodding away. “Right.”
Leon. Leon desperate not to let the house be sold: a new owner might have decided to cut down the trees, and surprise! Leon wanting to throw the skull away and forget all about it, Leon like a cat on hot bricks about the detectives. Leon, after all that huffing and puffing about having to get back to his job and his boyfriend, still here weeks later: no way to leave while this was still up in the air. Leon with excellent reasons to want Dominic dead. And Leon who would have remembered me taking photos on that camera at his birthday party, who might have had reasons to worry about what was on there—
Sean and Dec and Melissa were all watching me, identical concerned expressions, and I realized what my face must look like. “I should’ve known,” I said.
“How?” Sean said. “Dominic wouldn’t have pulled any of that crap when you were around. It’s not like you’re psychic. I didn’t know either.”
Melissa slipped her hand into mine, on the table. “Or maybe Leon did talk to you,” she said softly, “and you did make Dominic leave him alone. You might not remember.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a small huff of a laugh. I seriously doubted it. Leon making snide little jabs about how easy I had it. Leon, who would have seen the Dominic thing as a totally valid reason to hold a grudge against me, to nudge the cops in my direction—I had been the one who people actually listened to, I should have done something, should have stood up for him; to someone like Leon, it would make no difference that I hadn’t had a clue what was going on. “True enough. That’s some best-case scenario.” She squeezed my hand.
“The memory’ll come back,” Sean said. “Give it time. You seem like you’re doing a lot better already.”
“I am.”
“He is,” Melissa said, when Sean glanced at her.
“That thick head came in handy for once,” Dec said.
“That night,” I said, and had to take a breath again. “The night it happened. That basically got knocked right out of my head, yeah? A lot of it’s come back, but there’s still big chunks missing. It’s been driving me mental.”
“Same as the time I got concussion,” Sean said easily. “The Gonzaga match, remember? That prop they had, size of a moose; I tackled him and knocked myself out? I played the whole rest of the match, and I don’t remember a single thing about it.”
“You,” Dec told me, pointing a finger at me, “you spent that evening giving me shite about my hair. Because you’re a bollix. Your fella, right?”—to Melissa—“your fella, he notices me admiring this very beautiful woman at the next table. Which should’ve been fair enough, right? seeing as I was single at the time? But he starts accusing me, at the top of his lungs, of having hair plugs—”
Bit by bit—all to Melissa, as if they were telling the story for her sake, to make her laugh—they reconstructed the evening for me (or at least most of it: they skipped delicately over the brunette giving me the eye, and the work trouble). As they talked, my memory twisted and flicked into life—fitfully, almost playfully, filling in a vivid sweep of images here and just a brushstroke there and then skimming away, leaving behind tantalizing patches of shadow and blankness. Sean pointing at Dec, “—where to go for our holiday, and Toby and I are all on for Thailand, but this contrary git here, right? he just has to be different, he keeps banging on about Fiji—” and a flash of me waving my phone at Dec, Look, look at this, this guy says the beaches in Fiji are covered with wild dogs, you want to get eaten? I laughed along with Melissa, but every flash went through me like a zap of electricity.
Except—I realized with a slow sinking, as Sean and Dec worked their way through the evening—there was nothing there. I had been hoping for the vital fragment that would bring all the pieces together; instead I was getting a lads’ night out, unremarkable in every way except for the