“I didn’t tell him either,” Stevie said. “But you know . . . you know why I had to lie.”
“No,” Janelle said. “I know that you did it, but you didn’t have to. If I can’t trust my friends—if I can’t trust you—who can I trust?”
Stevie’s eyes burned with tears. She coughed and thumbed them away.
“I’m stupid for lying to you,” she said, “but I’m honestly scared for Angela, and here, this is the only place to find out what happened to her. So I did a shitty thing. I’m a shitty friend, but for a good reason.”
“Did lying to us get you closer to finding Angela?” Janelle said.
“I’m closer. She’s out there somewhere, and she’s in trouble. And there . . . there isn’t a me without us. Angela needs us.”
She landed on the us as hard as she could. It was true. There was no Stevie without Janelle and Nate and Vi and David. They were one, like those people in the other room. They were an organism. A system. Even in the dark room, Stevie could see Janelle’s cheerful yellow sweater, her neat wrap of braids in an orange-and-brown scarf—bright yet autumnal, always in the moment. The friend who backed her at every turn, who fixed the broken things, who did the hard math. The person you could go to in the middle of the night.
Janelle’s stance softened a little; she was always sensitive to people who needed help.
“You know,” she said, “if you’d told me what Quinn actually said, we’d have figured it out. It’s not like I don’t care that Angela could be hurt. I was mad at you for screwing around. If you’d told me . . . we could have come up with a solution together. But you didn’t trust me.”
“I trust you,” Stevie said. “With anything. I just didn’t know what to do. What do I do to make it up to you?”
Janelle sighed.
“You tell me the truth,” Janelle said. “Lies are poison. But Stevie . . . we only have a little over a day left here in England. So you have, what, thirty-six hours? I believe in you, but this one . . . there may be no time. You may have to leave it to someone else to find her. That’s just reality. Is there anything specific you think you can do in that time to work it out?”
The answer to that question was no. No, Stevie did not know what came next. She never did. The moves always came to her as she worked out the puzzle. There was no advance plan, no method, no organized way of dealing with this.
“Tomorrow,” Janelle said softly. “We go back to London. We do what’s on our schedule. We have our tea. We go to the theater. We finish our trip. We can’t screw up our lives on hunches, Stevie. We need to plan, and we need to trust each other.”
The words landed hard, each one in her gut.
“I won’t do it again,” Stevie said. “I promise.”
“You better,” Janelle replied. Then, after a long moment, she added, “But you did good in there. You’re lucky you’re so smart.”
“I’m lucky I have you.”
“You’re right, but don’t push it,” Janelle replied. It came out stern, but Stevie could hear the smile on her face.
23
STEVIE HAD EXHAUSTED HER MENTAL RESOURCES FOR THE EVENING. Between her revelations and the talk with Janelle, she had nothing left. She wanted to burrow into the massive bed upstairs and sleep—sleep for a week. She stepped out into the shadowy main hall, where David was waiting on the steps.
“I’ve missed these kinds of nights,” he said. “You solve everything, all hell breaks loose. Usually we end up in a hole or something too. We’re making out well tonight.”
Stevie had no energy for the banter. She sat next to him on the step. By craning her neck forward, she could see that the conversation in the sitting room was still engaged, photos were still being passed around.
“Quinn didn’t say yes to you coming here, huh?” he said in a low voice.
“Not exactly,” Stevie said.
“You never change,” he said.
“You mean I’m a shithead.”
“Take that however you want. It’s not the word I’d choose.”
“Seems to fit,” she said. “But what else was I supposed to do?”
Instead of replying, he took her hand. Using his thumb, he made slow, soft circles in her palm. It was reassurance. It was love. This tiny gesture also made every nerve in her body stand at attention. There was a quiver, a gentle, repeated note, like an orchestra warming up. A rising energy. The anxiety and exhaustion converted into something more liquid. Emotional catharsis. Also, horniness, plain and gloriously simple.
“Can we go upstairs now?” she asked quietly.
David stood, and the look in his eye told her everything.
They did not turn on the lights. They didn’t even make it that far into Stevie’s room. As soon as the door was shut, David turned. She moved first, with a hungry, nervous energy, kissing him hard and accidentally bumping his head against the wall. To her delight, he scooped her up and took her over to the bed, dropping her the last foot. She bounced gently. He hopped up, tenting himself over her. She thought he was about to lean in and kiss her. She was ready to go the full Bridgerton here at Merryweather. But he was just hovering there, looking at her with a faint smile.
“The other night,” he said. “I think you were going to ask me if I’d ever had sex. Weren’t you?”
To her surprise, her awkwardness with the question had gone.
“Yes,” she replied.
“But you didn’t ask. What answer did you want?”
“The real one. Because I’m guessing yes.”
“That’s the right answer,” he said.
There was a little twinge inside her—part upset, and part satisfaction. It was okay. It was a little strange. It was good. It was all those things at once.
“A lot?” she asked.
David laughed, but not unpleasantly.
“What’s a lot?”
“Did you win any awards for Most Sex?”
A real laugh this time. He got off his hands and knees and rolled next to her, so they were face-to-face on the pillow.
“My last girlfriend before I went to Ellingham,” he said. “And once at Ellingham. Well, not at Ellingham. I went to Burlington with Ellie for a party. I met someone there. It was just the once.”
Ellie. Their friend from Ellingham. It was odd to talk about her this way, out of context of all the terrible things that had happened there.
“Is there anything specific you want to know?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not right now.”
“What about you?” he said, propping himself up on his elbow.
“Do you really need to ask?”
“I mean, I think the answer is no, but I’m asking.”
“You think right.”
“Are you asking for . . . a reason?”
“I think so.”
He considered this for a moment.
“Okay,” he said. “Do you want to . . . talk about that? Because . . . we should talk about that. Before . . .”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I’ve thought about it. And . . . would you . . . want to?”