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B en is here.

Emily looked at Jack, who glared at her wordlessly.

Then he turned on his heel and left the room.

Ruth moved to close the door behind him, then turned back to Emily. ‘Are you all right? It sounded like things were getting a bit dramatic in here.’

‘How much did you hear?’

Emily asked this in the same annoyed tone she’d have used for How long were you snooping outside the door, eavesdropping on us? , which was what she was really asking.

‘Not a lot,’ Ruth said. ‘More than enough.’ She crossed the room, cracked open one of the windows and took out her cigarettes. ‘You want one?’

‘Are you allowed to smoke in here?’

She lit up. ‘Probably not.’

Emily went and joined her. She looked out over the beach. The heavy clouds had started to thin and break, revealing promising patches of bright blue and letting sunshine light spots on the sand and create patches of shimmer on the water.

Ruth waved the box at her and, relenting, Emily slid one out. She lit it, inhaled and immediately regretted her decision. This is the thing with smoking , she thought. It’s fucking horrible but you just have to power through .

Kind of like this godforsaken ghostwriting gig.

Although each drag of an occasional, illicit cigarette would be slightly less awful than the one before. This job only ever got worse.

‘He just showed up,’ Ruth said. ‘Which I suppose he’s entitled to do, seeing as this is his house. But he knows what Jack is doing here, so why interrupt?’ She exhaled, half-heartedly aiming her plume of smoke to the open part of the window. Most of it got trapped by the glass and billowed back into the room. ‘He said something about meeting a buyer at Fort Walton Beach. That’s the airport near here, right?’

‘Meeting a buyer?’ Emily repeated.

‘That’s what he said.’

But that was the airport at which private jets weren’t allowed to land, so even that smelled a bit like bullshit.

And of course it was, because Ben had already been here since yesterday.

At least.

‘You think he followed you?’ When Emily gave her a reproachful look, Ruth said, ‘OK, yeah, I heard that part.’

‘I don’t know,’ she lied.

She was sure it had been him, but she was cautious around Ruth. There was something about her, a sharpness to her edges that only caught in certain lights, that made her wary of sharing too much.

And no doubt anything she said would get reported back to Jack.

They smoked in silence for a few moments, while watching the waves crash up against the shore.

‘Ben is a touchy subject for Jack,’ Ruth said then.

‘Why?’

‘You can’t put anything in the book Jack doesn’t say, right?’ Ruth gave her a sidelong glance. ‘That’s how it works?’

‘It’s his story. His memoir. So if he doesn’t say it to me, it doesn’t go in.’

‘My brother keeps himself to himself, so I don’t have all the details. None of us do. But when they were racing, things happened. From what I was able to put together from comments here and there – and from some things Kate told me – Ben was a badly behaved boy, if you know what I mean. He liked women and he liked bringing them home with him, and he couldn’t hear the word no . But he was getting results for the team, so it was all kept hush-hush. They cleaned up his problems for him. Swept it all under the proverbial rug. And sometimes, I think, Jack had to help with the brushing. I think he had no choice but to help.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘Ben threatened him,’ Ruth said. ‘Apparently, in that last season, when they were both with Sync, he started spreading rumours. Whispering that it was actually Jack who had a reputation for doing those things. And because they were always sharing rooms, and they were so close, and they were the only two Irish guys on the team … Jack must have felt like it was an alternative history that would make sense to people.’

‘But couldn’t he have just said it wasn’t him? Proved it wasn’t?’

Ruth barked a laugh. ‘How? And who would’ve cared? Who would he have told?’ She waved her cigarette so wildly as she said this that some burning ash fell off and onto the wooden floor. Emily moved to stub it out with her foot while Ruth continued on, not even noticing. ‘It was the team that was imposing the omerta. His employers. The ones with the keys to his biggest professional dreams. And Jack thought if he tried to move, if he looked for another spot, the whispering campaign would nix his chances. So the sport he loved, the thing he’d wanted to be a part of his entire life, turned into this toxic sludge that infected everything. And then there was the crash.’ She paused for a drag. ‘Ben went down too, did you know that?’

‘But stayed on the road,’ Emily said.

‘And yet quit cycling at the end of that year. Why? He could’ve stayed on. He only had cuts and bruises. He was able to finish the Tour and the season.’ Ruth put her cigarette out on the white windowsill, leaving a burnt black mark. ‘I know he said in interviews it was because he felt he’d lost his nerve, but …’

Emily was trying to put all the pieces together in her head – and fit them into the puzzle she’d already been building before this conversation started. She felt like she had whiplash from everything she was finding out, and longed to sit in a dark room with her notebook and pen and disentangle her thoughts, to make some kind of sense of them.

‘But, Ruth,’ she said, ‘what I don’t get about all this is that Jack describes Ben as his best friend. He said they were like brothers.’

She nodded. ‘He is. They are.’

‘But how, after all this?’

‘ Because they’re brothers. They’ve been cycling together since they were kids. Been teammates at every level. Stuff happens, out there on the bike. Bonds are forged. They’re your family. If your sibling does something terrible, you love them anyway, don’t you? You kind of have to. And what if your employer insisted that you did? And then, with these two, you have to add in all that weird domestique stuff—’

‘ What stuff?’

Ruth raised an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t you have to do, like, research for this?’

‘No, not really. And there wasn’t time.’

‘Well, look, you’re probably better off with the internet than me,’ she said, ‘because the whole thing bores me to tears. But basically, in a cycling team, not everyone is trying to win. They’ve decided in advance who will be the star, or the guy who has the best chance of it – usually that’s the same guy – and the rest of the team race to help him. They ride in front of him to protect him from the wind, they try to defend him from attacks, they bring him food and water, that kind of thing. They basically sacrifice their own chances for the team leader and the team. They call them domestiques. Literally, servants. Jack always explained it like a football team, which to be honest didn’t help me much, but it was something about how the other guys are all working to get the ball up the pitch to the striker, the guy with the best chance of getting a goal.’

‘So Jack was Ben’s domestique?’

‘They were both domestiques at Sync,’ Ruth said, ‘because it was a top team and there were about ten guys ahead of them in the queue for glory. But in the past, yeah. On their previous team, Jack’s first professional contract. And that must be a hard thing to shake off, you know? You’re sacrificing yourself to serve some leader, who also happens to be a master manipulator. I mean, Ben must be one to get away with all this shit for so long, right? He sorta has Jack brainwashed, if you ask me. Jack doesn’t even realize it. If you’re being manipulated, how do you know what thoughts are your own? How do you know why you’re really doing anything? I bet Jack thinks he’s keeping Ben’s secrets out of some kind of loyalty, that he owes him that. And in return, Ben doesn’t pin all that shit on his friend.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘And people think women have toxic friend groups. Jesus Christ.’

Emily’s cigarette was only two-thirds gone and she felt a little sick. She offered the remainder to Ruth, who shrugged and took it.

‘What about Kate?’ Emily asked. ‘Where’s she in all this? Jack said she was with Ben when he first met her.’

‘Oh, yeah. But, like, not at all serious. They’d been on a few dates. I don’t think that means anything. Later on, when she was with Jack, she didn’t like Ben, but that was because of how he treated Jack. But she played along, like Jack did, because that’s what he wanted. I honestly don’t know if Jack is really friends with Ben or if he’s pretended he is for so long – out of fear or loyalty or whatever – that he’s just come to believe he is.’

She finished Emily’s cigarette with a deep drag that made the end of it glow bright and put it out on the windowsill too, but in a different spot, making two very noticeable black marks.

‘Ruth, can I ask you a difficult question?’

‘Let me guess: what do I think happened?’

A knock on the door then, gentle but firm.

They looked at each other, then turned around to see Jack enter the room, wrinkling his nose.

‘Are you smoking in here?’ he said.

Behind him, another voice said, ‘It’s OK, I don’t mind,’ and then a second man followed him in.

Ben.

Emily recognized him from the photo Jack had shown her, and now that he was standing in front of her, she knew that he was definitely the man who’d followed her through the town and the man she’d seen from a distance on the beach.

She had absolutely no doubt.

‘Hey,’ Ben said to Ruth, raising a hand in a small wave. ‘How are things?’

‘Same old. Nice house.’

‘Thanks, yeah.’ He turned to Emily, locked eyes with her. ‘Hello.’

‘This is Emily,’ Jack said before she could respond.

He sounded annoyed, but with who, she couldn’t tell. She was definitely a candidate, though; he’d completely avoided eye contact with her since he’d re-entered the room and it was quite obvious that he was avoiding looking at her now.

Ben reached out a hand. ‘Ben.’

On autopilot, she shook it. ‘Emily.’

He gripped it firmly, pumped twice, squeezed once. She felt the bones of her fingers move inside the vice his had created.

And all this while maintaining intense, unbroken eye contact.

She felt like he was seeing inside her, that he’d turned her eyes into windows, that he could read the thoughts racing through her head.

And see all her suspicions.

‘I think I’ve seen you,’ she said. ‘Around town.’

Finally, he released her.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said lightly. ‘I just got here.’

Now, she felt like she could read a message in his eyes: shut the fuck up . The air in the room crackled with tension and absolutely stank of synthetic menthol. Emily wasn’t just feeling sick anymore, she was going to be sick.

‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The town. If you’ve time, I could show you around a bit.’

‘I don’t think I will, unfortunately. We’re on a tight schedule here.’ She looked to Jack. ‘Are we carrying on or …?’

He looked away. ‘I think we’re calling it a day, actually.’

She hated him in that moment for his cowardice, for not only ending their conversation but effectively telling Ben that she had some free time right now.

And then she wondered who he was doing it for. What had he and Ben discussed, before they’d come upstairs? Why had he brought Ben upstairs? Had Ben insisted on meeting her so he could treat her to his threatening death stare?

‘In that case, we could—’ Ben started.

‘I have some calls I need to return,’ Emily said, talking over him until he stopped trying to talk to her. ‘Excuse me.’

She pushed through them to the door, and fled.