One wall sloped jaggedly down from the corner where Lexie had curled up to die, and I pulled myself up onto it and settled my back against the gable end. The place should probably have freaked me out-I was so close to her dying, I could have leaned down across ten days and touched her hair-but it didn’t. The cottage had a century and a half of its own stillness stored up, she had taken only an eyeblink; it had already absorbed her and closed over the place where she had been.

I thought about her differently, that night. Before, she had been an invader or a dare, always something that set my back stiffening and my adrenalin racing. But I was the one who had flashed into her life out of nowhere, with Sticky Vicky for a pawn and a wild why-not chance dangling from my fingertips; I was the dare she had taken, years before the flip side of the coin landed in front of me. The moon spun slowly across the sky and I thought of my face blue-gray and empty on steel in the morgue, the long rush and clang of the drawer shutting her into the dark, alone. I imagined her sitting on this same bit of wall on other, lost nights, and I felt so warm and so solid, firm moving flesh overlaid on her faint silvery imprint, it almost broke my heart. I wanted to tell her things she should have known, how her tutorial group had coped with Beowulf and what the guys had made for dinner, what the sky looked like tonight; things I was keeping for her.

In the first few months after Operation Vestal I thought a lot about leaving. It seemed, paradoxically, like the only way I could ever feel like me again: pack my passport and a change of clothes, scribble a note (“Dear everyone, I’m off. Love, Cassie”) and catch the next flight to anywhere, leave behind everything that had changed me into someone I didn’t recognize. Somewhere in there, I never knew the exact moment, my life had slipped through my hands and smashed to smithereens. Everything I had-my job, my friends, my flat, my clothes, my reflection in the mirror-felt like it belonged to someone else, some clear-eyed straight-backed girl I could never find again. I was a wrecked thing smeared over with dark finger marks and stuck with shards of nightmare, and I had no right there any more. I moved through my lost life like a ghost, trying not to touch anything with my bleeding hands, and dreamed of learning to sail in a warm place, Bermuda or Bondi, and telling people sweet soft lies about my past.

I don’t know why I stayed. Probably Sam would have called it courage-he always goes for the best angle-and Rob would have called it pure stubbornness, but I don’t flatter myself that it was either one. You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall. That’s nothing more than instinct, falling back on what you know best. I think I stayed because running seemed too strange and too complicated. All I knew was how to fall back, find a patch of solid ground, and then dig my heels in and fight to start over.

Lexie had run. When exile somehow hit her out of a clear blue sky, she didn’t fight it the way I did: she reached out for it with both hands, swallowed it whole and made it her own. She had had the sense and the guts to let go of her ruined old self and walk away so simply, start over again, start fresh and clean as morning.

And then, after all that, someone had strutted up to her and whipped that hard-won new life away, casually as plucking a daisy. I felt a sudden zip of outrage-not at her but, for the first time, for her.

“Whatever it is you want,” I said softly, into the dark cottage, “I’m here. You’ve got me.”

There was a tiny shift in the air around me, subtler than a breath; secretive; pleased.

It was dark, big patches of cloud covering the moon, but I already knew the lane well enough that I barely needed the torch, and my hand went straight to the latch of the back gate, no fumbling. Undercover time works differently; it was hard to remember that I’d only been living there a day and a half.

The house was black on black, only a faint crooked line of stars where the roof ended and the sky began. It seemed bigger and intangible, edges blurring, ready to dissolve into nothing if you came too close. The lit windows looked too warm and gold to be real, tiny pictures beckoning like old peep shows: bright copper frying pans hanging in the kitchen, Daniel and Abby side by side on the sofa with their heads bent over some huge old book.

Then a cloud skated off the moon and I saw Rafe, sitting on the edge of the patio, one arm around his knees and a long glass in the other hand. My adrenaline leaped. There was no way he could have followed me without me seeing him, and I hadn’t done anything dodgy anyway, but still, the look of him made me edgy. The way he was sitting, head up and ready, at the edge of that great spread of grass: he was waiting for me.

I stood under the hawthorn tree by the gate and watched him. Something that had been taking shape in the back of my mind had just made it to the surface. It was the drama-queen comment that had done it: the snide edge to his voice, the irritable eye roll. Now that I thought about it, Rafe had barely said a word to me since I arrived, apart from “pass the sauce” and “good night;” he talked around me, at me, in my general direction, never to me. The day before, he was the only one who hadn’t touched me to welcome me home, just taken my suitcase and gone. He was being subtle about it, nothing overt; but, for some reason, Rafe was pissed off with me.

He saw me as soon as I stepped out from under the hawthorn. He raised his arm-the light from the windows sent long, confusing shadows flying down the grass towards me-and watched, unmoving, as I crossed the lawn and sat down next to him.

It seemed like the simplest thing to go at this head-on. “Are you mad at me?” I asked.

Rafe turned his head away with a disgusted flick, looked out over the grass. “ ‘Mad at me,’ ” he said. “For God’s sake, Lexie, you’re not a child.”

“OK,” I said. “Are you angry with me?”

He stretched out his legs in front of him and examined the toes of his runners. “Has it even occurred to you,” he asked, “to wonder what last week was like for us?”

I considered this for a moment. It sounded a lot like he was in a snot with Lexie for getting stabbed. As far as I could see, this was either deeply suspicious or deeply bizarre. With this gang, it got hard to tell the difference. “I wasn’t exactly having fun either, you know,” I said.

He laughed. “You haven’t even thought about it, have you?”

I stared at him. “That’s why you’re pissed off with me? Because I got hurt? Or because I didn’t ask how you’re feeling about it?” He shot me an oblique look that could have meant anything. “Well, Jesus, Rafe. I didn’t ask for any of this to happen. Why are you being such a dickhead about it?”

Rafe took a long, jerky swallow of his drink-gin and tonic; I could smell it. “Forget it,” he said. “Never mind. Just go inside.”

“Rafe,” I said, hurt. I was only mostly faking it: there was an icy cut to his voice that made me flinch. “Don’t.”

He ignored me. I put a hand on his arm-it was more muscular than I had expected, and warm right through his shirt, almost fever hot. His mouth set in a long hard line, but he didn’t move.

“Tell me what it was like,” I said. “Please. I want to know; honestly, I do. I just didn’t know how to ask.”

Rafe shifted his arm away. “All right,” he said. “Fine. It was horrible beyond belief. Does that answer your question?”

I waited. “We were all hysterical,” he said harshly, after a moment. “We were wrecks. Not Daniel, obviously, he would never do anything as undignified as get upset, he just stuck his head in a book and occasionally came out with some fucking Old Norse quote about arms that remain strong in times of trial, or something. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t sleep all week; no matter what time I got up, his light was still on. And the rest of us… Just to start with, we weren’t sleeping either. We were all having nightmares-it was like some awful farce, every time you managed to get to sleep someone would wake up screaming, and of course that would wake everyone else up… Our sense of time completely disintegrated; half the time I didn’t know what day it was. I couldn’t eat, even the smell of food made me gag. And Abby kept baking-she said she needed to do something, but, God, piles of gooey chocolate things and bloody meat pies all over the house… We had a blazing row about it, Abby and I. She threw a fork at me. I was drinking all the time so the smell wouldn’t make me sick, and then of course Daniel started giving me flak about that… We ended up giving away the chocolate things in the tutorial groups. The meat pies are in the freezer, if you’re interested. None of the rest of us are going to touch them.”