This seems like a lot of work for a scene that may or may not ever materialize. Then again, I suppose procrastination is universal. Not even the great Ellis Haley is immune.
I leave her there and retreat upstairs. I have an essay for Wyatt due tomorrow; I’m so absorbed in it that I ignore MacDonald’s call for dinner, flicking on my desk lamp when the sun finally slips the rest of the way below the horizon. I’ve just written page seven and shut my laptop to push against the wall with my toes, arching my back and stretching both arms over my head, when someone knocks.
I expect MacDonald with a plate of leftovers, but when I call for her to come in, the door swings open and it’s Ellis instead, coffee mug in hand.
“I thought you might need sustenance,” she says.
More black coffee is the last thing I need at eleven p.m. when I have an early class the next day. I’m about to tell her that when she slides the mug onto my desk and I glance down.
“This isn’t coffee,” I say.
“It’s chamomile,” Ellis says. “One squeeze of lemon and a half teaspoon of honey. That is how you take it, right?”
I had no idea she’d even noticed how I drink my tea—or that I drink tea to begin with. And yet here she stands, hands clasped behind her back and the tea itself steaming right next to my potted echeveria. I arch my brows, pick up the mug, and take a tiny sip.
God, she even got it to the perfect temperature.
“It’s good.”
“I know.”
It’s things like this that make me entirely unsure where I stand with Ellis Haley. I don’t understand how she could seem so patently disinterested in me on the quad earlier today, but within the crooked walls of Godwin House we might have known each other for months. I decide it’s the dichotomy of Ellis’s twin identities: Ellis Haley the famous writer, the prodigy whose face graced the cover of Time magazine, and Ellis the prep school student, who completely ruins antique grandmother clocks and tests new whiskey cocktails on her roommates, who shows up sweaty and flush-cheeked in the Godwin foyer after fencing practice with her épée scabbard slung over one shoulder and hair plastered to her brow, a modern Athena in lamé.
It feels like a peace offering, so after a moment I say, “How is the book going?”
She grimaces. “Not well. I’m starting to think writing about murder wasn’t the best of plans, considering—”
“Considering you can’t kill someone to see what it’s like.”
“Precisely.” Ellis sighs. “Of course, the story isn’t about murder, per se, it’s a character sketch, but I’m sure when the book’s out I’ll hear all sorts of complaints from murderers regarding my insufficiently accurate representation of their pastime.”
Ellis’s gaze is steady, and there’s nothing about her eyes or the set of her mouth that implies any deeper meaning than what she’s said. But all at once I feel as if she has knotted her fingers in the threads that hold me together, pulling them taut and close to breaking.
“I suppose you could read memoirs.”
Ellis laughs, which isn’t at all the reaction I expected from a girl who—according to Hannah Stratford—takes her writing habits so seriously that she intentionally got arrested in small-town Mississippi just to see what it’s like. “Yes, I suppose I could. Do you have any recommendations?”
This can’t be innocent. Ellis is a writer; she knows how to choose her words. She’s implying something. She’s implying guilt.
My next words come out stiff and synthetic: “I’m afraid I’m not as well versed in the murder memoir genre as I should be.”
“But your thesis is on the Dalloway witches,” she says. “Surely you know quite a lot about these murders in particular. You can’t imagine all the research I’m going to have to do in order to re-create their lives and deaths faithfully on the page.”
My stomach has turned into a stone. I’m frozen with the tea halfway to my lips, all the excuses dead in my mouth—
Not that she would accept my excuses. How could I explain the way my past feels as if it’s intertwined with theirs? The dark magic that bites at my heels no matter how fast I run?
She knows.
She can’t possibly know.
But Ellis’s gaze has already slid away from mine, fixing instead on my bookshelves. “What are these?”
I twist round to look. For a moment I think she’s pointing at Alex’s postcard—but no, it’s right below that. I’ve stopped putting them in their hiding place.