‘Then, one day, she was gone. After the logging scandal, the military took a stronger line on protecting the base; her family were living on the reservation. They tore down her house without notice, without warning. I never saw her again.’ He presses his fists to his eyes. ‘After that, I struggled. Perhaps it was grief or sadness or being alone again but I never got over her. I had girlfriends in the Philippines and in London but they never worked out, they weren’t like her, never interested in the natural world like she was, they were too old—’
Something in me snags.They were too old. I stare at him. My own morbid curiosity lured me down the jungle tracks of his mind but I refuse to follow him any longer. I will not go further and further into black. He was lonely. He lost his childhood girlfriend. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t responsible for what he did. It doesn’t absolve him.
‘Then, one day, I knocked on the door of a dingy flat in Queensway to value some rare Singaporean butterflies, and there you were. A botanist with butterflies.’
The words break me. They were the first words he ever said to me, I’ve held onto them as cold, hard proof that we were meant to be together right from the beginning, we were so similar, my passion for botany, his passion for butterflies, we were naturalists, scientists, our love forged in wings, in leaves. But we’re nothing but ghosts. Ghosts in love with ghosts, in love with ghosts.
I wrap my arms round myself.
‘When I saw you in your living room, what you said, the way you clutched those butterflies, my heart almost left my chest. I thought, I’ve found her.’
I want the glass to swallow me up. I want all these jagged edges to rip through me. I want to be the nothing that I am. The nothing who left my child, my husband. All for nothing.
‘You’re so precious to me. More than the Blues. More than the rarest butterfly.’
Yousellbutterflies. Youkillbutterflies.
‘Now do you understand why everything imploded in those last few weeks, why I lost my mind? I just couldn’t bear it, all that time you spent with fisherboy—’
‘—What?’ I stiffen. I haven’t heard his nasty name for Alex in so long.
‘I couldn’t lose you to him, not when I’d just found you.’
A shiver ripples down my spine, my body is afraid before my mind knows why.
‘And then when you disappeared, I had to go after him, you see that, don’t you, I had no choice.’
‘What do you mean, you “had to go after him”?’
‘In Falmouth.’ His voice is very quiet.
‘Daniel,’ I say slowly. ‘You didn’t kill Alex.’ He flinches but I carry on because the fear is white-hot and slipstream now, because it is suddenly urgent to break down what he’s done into one simple sentence, to name subject, verb, object. ‘You killed a boy called James Saunders.’
‘Him?’ He laughs the laugh of a broken person. ‘He was a mistake, I didn’t find out I’d hit the wrong person until theyarrested me. But how was I supposed to know? I only saw fisherboy twice. They all looked the same, stepping out of their boat in their cheap T-shirts.’
There is a sudden quiet in the room before it blurs, I see only glittering stars of glass, and then things snap together. Alex said his best friend died in a car accident, he died right before his eyes.
Which means they were together when the car hit his friend.
Acar.
My hands make a shocked, incoherent movement. It wasn’t a hit and run. Danielmeantto killAlex.
‘Don’t look at me like that.’ He reaches for me but I am pushing myself off the floor, I am getting off cracked glass. ‘I did it for you. Everything I do is for you. You’ve never been able to see these things for what they are.’
‘Which is what?’ I whisper.
‘Offerings, darling. Sacrifices at your altar.’
He’s insane. Fascinatingly, appallingly insane.
‘Tell me, who’s loved you like I’ve loved you?’ His voice is so tender. ‘Who’skilledfor you?’ Behind the glass, he traces the outline of my lips with his finger. Part of me leaps for him, still wild for his touch, but another is observant, watching, and then finally, finally, it speaks in the terrible quiet of my mind, it says,In all the time you’ve been here, weeks, days, minutes, he’s never touched you. Not once.
‘Except, Daniel,’ I put my hand over his. ‘I’m not fourteen anymore.’
He looks me full in the face, the plumpness under my chin, the fine lines under my eyes, he must feel fooled, the thrill of winning me over in London so close to the thrill of winning me over atfourteen. But it couldn’t last, he saw who I really am: thirty-two; post-partum; depressed. He withdraws his hand. ‘No. You’re not.’ He swallows. ‘But we can do this, we can make this work . . .’
So strange. That the man who once made me feel so beautiful can make me feel so ugly.