The Price of Desire

The notebook arrived in Daniel's life like a debt with an overdue notice. He had received it the previous evening, shortly before Mara Ellis called. Now it lay on Scarlett's kitchen table, inside a transparent evidence sleeve after the officer who took his initial statement had photographed it. Daniel had been instructed not to handle it further; a collection officer was due that morning.

Scarlett watched him from the doorway. He had made coffee but forgotten to drink it. Rain worked its way down the windows, turning the city beyond into a watercolour.

'You told her?' Scarlett asked.

'What I remembered. Not everything.'

'Because you couldn't remember, or because you couldn't bear to say it?'

Daniel looked up. She had promised not to protect him from difficult questions. He had asked her to keep that promise.

'Both,' he said. 'I told Mara I was the last person Leah called. I didn't tell her what Leah said about loving her.'

Scarlett pulled out a chair. 'Why not?'

'Because she asked whether I knew Leah was alive, and I didn't. Because she sounded as though she'd spent eight years waiting for somebody to tell her the right thing. I was frightened of giving her another lie.'

'That wasn't a lie.'

'No.' He pressed his thumb against the mug. 'It was the one true thing I should have given her years ago.'

Scarlett did not reassure him. She reached across the table and took his hand. He looked at her with gratitude complicated by shame.

They had rebuilt their relationship slowly. After the revelations about Aster Vale, Daniel had stopped offering explanations before Scarlett asked for them.

Scarlett had stopped treating silence as proof that she was about to be abandoned. Their progress was unglamorous: shared shopping lists, arguments about washing up, the deliberate practice of saying what they meant.

'I want to go with you when you meet Mara,' she said.

'You don't have to.'

'I know. That's why it matters that I'm asking.'

He turned her hand over and kissed the centre of her palm. The gesture was so unexpectedly tender that she felt her throat tighten.

His telephone rang. Nathan Monroe.

Nathan had been presumed dead for years, another casualty of the secrets surrounding the research programme. Since his return, he had given investigators his technical notes and worked to explain the permissions system he'd helped build. Scarlett still sometimes looked at his number with the astonishment of a child finding a lost toy returned without explanation.

'I've found something,' Nathan said. 'Not a location.

Don't get excited. A transfer record. Leah's protection was initiated by Rebecca Shaw and authorised under Miriam Bell's name, but the authorisation was delegated. The person using that credential might not have been Miriam.'

'Have you told the police?' Scarlett asked.

'Before I called you. I don't want us doing private detective work with evidence anymore.'

She smiled despite herself. 'A radical idea.'

'I'm growing.'

When the call ended, Daniel was watching her.

'You sounded like his sister.'

'I am his sister.'

'I know. You haven't always sounded as though you believed it.'

Scarlett looked down at their hands. 'Neither has he.'

The doorbell rang. The officer had arrived for the notebook. Daniel signed the receipt, then watched the evidence disappear into a brown envelope. He felt an absurd desire to ask for it back. The notebook had frightened him, but it was also proof that his memories were not inventions.

When the door closed, Scarlett stood beside him.

'We'll go and see Mara,' she said. 'And you'll tell her what Leah asked you to tell her.'

'What if she hates me?'

'Then you'll listen.'

He looked at her. 'You make it sound simple.'

'It isn't.' She took his coat from the hook. 'But it's straightforward.'

Outside, the rain had stopped. The pavement shone.

Daniel held the door while Scarlett stepped into the morning, and for once he followed without trying to anticipate where the day would take them.