a prick to you too, the last while.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I think that’s what she was aiming for, you know that? She kept telling me to chill out, like, ‘What’s the big panic, they can’t even prove he was murdered,’ but then she’d turn around and be all, ‘Keep your mouth shut around Toby, you can’t trust him . . .’”
“Susanna?”
“‘He didn’t have your back when Dominic was giving you shit, and now he’s all fucked up we don’t know what he might do, just watch yourself around him . . .’ Was she doing it to you too? About me?”
“Pretty much,” I said. I couldn’t even be angry. Whatever Susanna’s game had been, she had in fact been right about me: I had been frantically flailing for ways to dump the whole thing on her and Leon. It was nice that at least one person had had a clear sense of what was going on here.
“‘Just trust me, I know what I’m doing . . .’ Look how that turned out.” Leon drew zigzags in the condensation on the glass. “At least it should be over now. Shouldn’t it?”
“What?”
“If Hugo confessed. That’s the end of that. They’re not going to keep hassling us.”
“Probably not,” I said. I had no idea—whether Hugo had been convincing enough to fool Rafferty, or what Rafferty could do about it if he hadn’t, or what I was going to do either way. I knew I had to come up with some kind of plan, fast, but—in that place, with every remaining brain cell taken up by listening for the alarm—I could no more have done it than I could have flapped my wings and flown away.
Holding up crossed fingers, both hands: “God, I hope. I can’t take much more of him.” A violent back-flick of Leon’s head, towards THE BELLS and Hugo’s room. “I can’t believe he’s actually hanging around here. We’re in with Hugo, saying good-bye, and he’s sitting there listening to every—” His voice cracked. “I really need a smoke,” he said. “Do you want to come for a smoke?”
“No,” I said. The hospital seemed to have sent my body into some kind of unnatural suspended state; I hadn’t wanted anything to eat or drink since I got there, never mind a cigarette.
“I should have got a vape,” Leon said, “or those patches, or— Ring me if anything happens,” and he was out the door at a fast scuttle, already fumbling for his smokes. I kept staring out the window. A cyclist had got into a yelling match with some suit in a Range Rover; the suit was out of his car and they were making sweeping arm gestures at each other. Another cyclist was about to flatten the pair of them.
A swelling, shameful part of me was screaming for this to be over. My father leaning against a wall with his face white and strained, staring at nothing, his hand tense in my mother’s: I wasn’t sure how much longer he could take. I wasn’t sure how much longer any of us could take, come to that. All my circuits were so overloaded with suppressed fight-or-flight that I was practically locked in spasm. My leg was wobbling and I wanted to shift my weight to the other one, but it was like the thought couldn’t reach my muscles, nothing happened.
Rain on the window. Nurses coming and going, incomprehensible color-coded scrubs, brisk soft slip-slap of their shoes. The heat had dried out my eyes till I could barely blink.
“Is Melissa coming in?” my mother asked. She had a bunch of cups of coffee in a complicated cardboard holder.
“She’s back at her place,” I said. My lips felt numb. “It’s a long story.”
For an awful moment I thought my mother was going to go off into some spiel, Oh no Toby what happened?! are you two OK? you’re so wonderful together I know whatever happened you can work it out you’ve both been under so much stress, or even worse try and hug me. Instead she said, after a second’s pause, “Here. Have one of these. It’s not the horrible stuff from the machine; I went out for it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe in a minute.” We stood there in silence, side by side. Susanna sang a lullaby, very quietly, into her phone.
When the alarm finally went, it was me and my father in the room. I was past being able to come up with words