Ravi bawled into her shoulder and Pip stroked his hair, silent tears rolling down her cheeks.
‘I should go,’ she said eventually.
‘No! No!’ Ravi grabbed her tighter, wouldn’t let her go, burying his face in her coat. ‘No, don’t go,’ he begged her. ‘Please don’t leave me. Please don’t go.’
But one of them had to be the first to leave. The first to take that last look. The first one to say it for the final time.
It had to be her.
Pip unwrapped herself from him, let him go. She pushed up on to her toes, pressed her forehead against his, in the way he always did to her. She wished she could take half of it from him, the hurt. Take half of everything bad, leave room for some good.
‘I love you,’ she said, stepping back.
‘I love you.’
She looked into his eyes and he looked back into hers.
Pip turned, and she walked away.
Ravi broke behind her, crying out into the trees, the wind carrying his sobs over to her, trying to pull her back. She kept going. Ten steps. Eleven. Her foot hesitated on the next step. She couldn’t. She couldn’t do this. This couldn’t be the last time. Pip looked back, over her shoulder, through the trees. Ravi was on his knees in the leaves, face hidden, bawling into his hands. It hurt more than anything, to see him that way, and her chest opened up, reaching out to him, trying to drive her back. Hold him, take the hurt away and let him take hers.
She wanted to go back. She wanted to run to him, fall into him, be Team Ravi and Pip and nothing more. Tell him she loved him in all those secret ways they had, hear him speak all those names he had for her in his butter-soft voice. But she couldn’t, that wasn’t fair. He couldn’t be her person and she couldn’t be his right now. Pip had to be the strong one, the one to walk away when neither of them wanted it. The one who chose.
Pip looked at him one last time, then she tore her eyes away, stared ahead. The way forward was blurry, her eyes filling, streaming down her face. Maybe she’d see him again, maybe she wouldn’t, but she couldn’t look back again, she couldn’t or she wouldn’t have the strength to go.
She walked away, a howl on the wind that could have been Ravi or the trees, she was too far to know. She left, and she didn’t look back.
Day seventy-two.
Pip counted them, every single day, marking them off in her mind.
A mid-December day in Cambridge and the sun was already fading from the sky, staining it the pink of washed blood.
Pip gathered her coat around her and pushed on, walking the old streets, narrow and winding. In three days she’d be here again and it would be seventy-five days since, well on the way to one hundred.
No trial date set yet, in fact, she’d heard nothing for a while. Only something small yesterday: Maria Karras emailed her a photo of a grinning Billy decorating a Christmas tree, wearing a garish red jumper covered in reindeer. Pip had smiled back at him through the screen. Day thirty-one, that’s when they’d released Billy Karras, all charges dropped.
Day thirty-three had been the day the news broke about Jason Bell being the DT Killer.
‘Hey, isn’t that the guy from your town?’ someone had asked her in the common room of their halls, the news on the TV in the background. Most people didn’t talk to Pip; she kept herself to herself, but really she was keeping herself away from everyone else.
‘Yeah, it is,’ Pip had said, turning up the sound.
Jason Bell hadn’t just been the DT Killer, he’d also been the South-East Stalker, a rapist who’d operated in the south-east area of London between the years 1990-1994, connected by DNA evidence. Pip worked it out: 1994 was the year Andie Bell had been born. Jason stopped when his first daughter was born and they’d moved away to Little Kilton. The DT Killer claimed his first victim when Andie was fifteen, when she’d first started to look like the woman she might become. Maybe that’s why her father had done it. He stopped when she died – well, almost, but no one else would ever know about his sixth victim. Andie’s entire life had been bookended by the monster living in her home, by his violence. She hadn’t survived him, but Pip had, and Andie could come with her, wherever she went.
Pip turned the corner, cars shushing past her, re-adjusting her book-heavy rucksack on her shoulders. Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. Pip pulled it out and stared down at the screen.
Her dad was calling.
A knot in her gut and a hole in her heart. Pip pressed the side button to ignore the call, let it ring out in her pocket. She’d text him tomorrow, say sorry she’d missed his call, she’d been busy, maybe tell him she’d been in the library. Increase the gaps between every phone call, until they were long, long stretches, weeks between, then months. Texts unread and unreplied. Term had already finished and Pip had paid to keep her room over the break, telling her parents she wanted to get her assignments done. She’d have to think of something over Christmas, some reason she couldn’t go back to town. Pip knew it would break their hearts, it was breaking hers, but this was the only way. Separation. She was the danger, and she had to keep them away from her, in case any of it rubbed off on them.