Page 71

“We’ll be fine,” Chris said. “I promise. And who knows—after tonight, maybe we’ll even be able to afford a coffee each from now on.”

That got him half a smile, at least.

“Let’s never go that far,” James said.

“All right. Deal.”

Chris continued collapsing the tent. Because theywouldn’tneed it again. Everything was going to be fine.

But even so, James’s mention of choice made him think about Alan Hobbes.

All the steps are there at once.

Beginning, middle, and end. They’re all the same.

All the conversations he’d had with the old man came back to him then. Cause and effect. Fate and destiny. And as he carried on packing, Chris couldn’t quite shake the sensation that there were cogs turning below the surface of the world. That events had been set in motion and were now continuing along inevitable paths that had been there all along.

And that however much he tried to reassure them both, he had no real control at all over what would happen next.

Twenty-six

It’s not my story to tell.

Even in the face of Katie’s obvious frustration, her mother refused to tell her more about whatever relationship Nathaniel Leland had to their family.

You need to find your brother. And ask him.

As she left the house, Katie wondered bitterly if she was simply being manipulated into continuing the search for Chris—but the emotion on her mother’s face had been too genuine for that. Whatever the story behind the newspaper clipping was, it clearly upset her in some way. And regardless, the reality was that shedidneed to find Chris. She needed to understand what had happened to him and what was happening to her family now.

Back in the car, she rubbed some life into her face and gathered her resolve. Then she set off. She drove to James Alderson’s studio first, but it turned out that her luck had run out there. The front door was locked, and when she tried the bell for number six there was no reply. If Chris was inside, he wasn’t answering. And if he had returned since she came yesterday and seen her message, he had obviously decided not to call her.

Which broke her heart again.

She drove across the city, past the prison on the hill, and parked up onthe main road outside Chris’s apartment. Late afternoon on a Saturday, the street was busier than it had been on her previous visit, and most of the shops were open now, including the real estate agent and carpet shop on either side of her brother’s front door. She let herself in quietly—locking the door behind her this time—and then searched the apartment again. Everything appeared to be the same as she had left it, but there was a sadness to the air now, and the place felt even more abandoned than before, the sense of it being a home like a light growing steadily dimmer. She worked methodically through each of the rooms again but found nothing. Whatever secrets the apartment held, it had already given them up.

Where are you, Chris?Katie thought.

She picked up the die and rolled it across the top of the shelf.

A blank face, the number long since worn away.

She went back downstairs and locked the door, and then sat in her car for a while, trying to think. Trying to work her way through the little she knew as carefully as she’d just searched the apartment above her.

Two years ago, her brother had effectively vanished off the face of the earth. At that point, he had been an addict and a lost cause. But then he had come back—sober, in what appeared to be a loving relationship, working in some capacity, and building a home and a life for himself here.

It was properly him, she remembered her mother saying.

Like he was meant to be.

Except that, a couple of weeks ago, something had scared Chris badly enough for him to drop everything and run. He had been being watched and followed, and so it seemed reasonable to assume he had been frightened ofsomeone. What she didn’t know was who. Was it connected to the work he’d been doing? Someone from his days on the streets? Or did the answer somehow lie even further back in his past?

And, of course, it wasn’t just about Chris anymore.

Katie looked around the street, remembering being followed back from here two nights ago. There had been the car parked outside Siena’s day care that day. And there had been the intruder in the garden last night, watchingher through the kitchen window and then trying the door handle. Any one of those things by itself, she might have put down to coincidence—but not all three. Yes, she worried too much. But whatever Sam might think, she wasn’t imagining the danger her family was in. The question was whether it was connected to what was happening to Chris.

She kept turning it all around in her head, attempting to make the pieces fit together, if only by accident, the same way her mother had been working on her jigsaw puzzle. But it was impossible to make any of them click into place. The harder she thought about everything, the more it all seemed to drift apart.

What the fuck have you got us all mixed up in this time, Chris?