Shaken up, Frank had said, but no one had mentioned this level of hysteria. Now that Rafe had started talking, he didn’t know how to stop. The words were tumbling out hard and involuntary as vomiting. “And Justin,” he said. “Jesus. He was the worst by a long shot. He couldn’t stop shaking, I mean really shaking-some little smart-arse first-year asked him if he had Parkinson’s. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was incredibly unnerving; every time you looked at him, even for a second, it set your teeth on edge. And he kept dropping things, and every time he did it the rest of us nearly had heart attacks. Abby and I would yell at him, and then he would start crying, like that was going to help anything. Abby wanted him to go to Student Health and get Valium or something, but Daniel said that was ridiculous, Justin had to learn to cope like the rest of us-which was obviously completely insane, because we weren’t coping. The biggest optimist in the world couldn’t have said we were coping. Abby was sleepwalking-one night she ran herself a bath at four in the morning and got into it in her pajamas, fast asleep. If Daniel hadn’t found her, she could have drowned.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded strange, high and shaky. Every word he said had hit me straight in the stomach with a kick like a horse’s. I had argued this with Frank and talked it through with Sam, I’d thought I had my head around it, but it had never been real to me till that moment: what I was doing to these people. “Oh, God, Rafe, I’m so sorry.”

Rafe gave me a long, dark, unreadable look. “And the police,” he said. He took another swig of his drink, made a face as if it tasted bitter. “Have you ever had to deal with cops?”

“Not like that,” I said. I still sounded wrong, breathless, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“They’re bloody scary. These weren’t uniformed cops fresh out of the bog; these were detectives. They have the best poker faces I’ve ever seen, you don’t have a clue what they’re thinking or what they want from you, and they were all over us. They questioned us for hours, almost every single day. And they make even the most innocent question-what time do you normally go to bed?-sound like a trap, like they’re just waiting to whip out the handcuffs if you give the wrong answer. You feel like you have to be on your guard, every second, it’s fucking exhausting-and we were exhausted already. That guy who dropped you off, Mackey, he was the worst. All smiles and sympathy, but he obviously hated our guts right from the word go.”

“He was nice to me,” I said. “He brought me chocolate biscuits.”

“Well, isn’t that charming,” Rafe said. “I’m sure that won your heart. Meanwhile, he was showing up here at all hours of the day and night, giving us the third degree about every single detail of your entire life and making bitchy little comments about how the other half live, which is complete bollocks anyway. Just because we’ve got the house and we go to college… The man’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Bolivia. He would have loved a reason to lock us all up. And of course that got Justin even more hysterical, he was positive we were all going to be arrested any minute. Daniel told him that was crap and to pull himself together, but actually Daniel wasn’t all that much help, seeing as he thought…”

He broke off and stared away down the garden, his eyes hooded. “If you hadn’t pulled through when you did,” he said, “I think we would have killed each other.”

I reached out one finger and touched the back of his hand, just for a second. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am, Rafe. I don’t know how else to say it. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Rafe said, but the anger had drained out of his voice and he just sounded very, very tired. “Well.”

“What did Daniel think?” I asked, after a moment.

“Don’t ask me,” Rafe said. He threw back most of his drink with a neat flick of his wrist. “I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re mostly better off not knowing.”

“No, you said Daniel told Justin to chill out, but he wasn’t much help because he thought something. What did he think?”

Rafe jiggled his glass and watched the ice cubes clink off the sides. He obviously wasn’t planning to answer, but silence is the oldest cop-trick in the book, and I’m even better at it than most. I leaned my chin on my arms, watched him and waited. In the sitting-room window behind his head, Abby pointed to something in the book and both she and Daniel burst out laughing, faint and clear through the glass.

“One night,” Rafe said at last. He still wasn’t looking at me. The moonlight silvered his profile and lay along his cheekbone, turned him into something off a worn coin. “A couple of days after… It might have been Saturday, I’m not sure. I came out here and sat on the swing seat and listened to the rain. I thought that might help me sleep, for some reason, but it didn’t. I heard an owl kill something-a mouse, probably. It was horrible; it screamed. You could hear the second when it died.”

He went silent. I wondered if this was somehow the end of the story. “Owls have to eat too,” I offered.

Rafe shot me a quick, oblique glance. “Then,” he said. “I don’t know what time, it was just starting to get light. I heard your voice, under the rain. It sounded like you were right there, leaning out.”

He turned and pointed up, at my dark window above us. “You said, ‘Rafe, I’m on my way home. Wait up for me.’ You didn’t sound eerie or anything, just matter-of-fact; in a hurry, sort of. Like that time you rang me because you’d forgotten your keys. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.” A light cool breeze drifted across my hair and I shivered, a fast, uncontrollable jerk. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but this story was something different, pressing like a cold knife blade against my skin. It was way too late, more than a week too late, to worry about whatever damage I was doing to these four.

“ ‘I’m on my way home,’ ” Rafe said. “ ‘Wait up for me.’ ” He stared into the bottom of his glass. I realized that he was probably fairly drunk.

“What did you do?” I asked.

He shook his head. “ ‘Echo, I will not talk with thee,’ ” he said, with a faint wry smile, “ ‘for thou art a dead thing.’ ”

The breeze had moved off down the garden, sifting the leaves and fingering delicately through the ivy. In the moonlight the grass looked soft and white as mist, like you could put your hand right through it. That shiver went over me again.

“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t that tell you I was going to be OK?”

“No,” Rafe said. “Actually, no, it didn’t. I was sure you had just died, that second. Laugh if you want, but I’ve told you what kind of state we were all in. I spent the whole next day waiting for Mackey to appear at the door being grave and sympathetic and tell us the doctors had done everything they could but blah blah blah. When he turned up on Monday, all smiley, and told us you’d regained consciousness, at first I didn’t believe him.”

“That’s what Daniel thought, isn’t it?” I said. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. “He thought I was dead.”

After a moment Rafe sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he did. Right from the start. He thought you’d never made it to hospital.”

Watch your step around that one, Frank had said. Either Daniel was a lot smarter than I wanted to tangle with-that little exchange, before I went out, was starting to worry me again-or he had had reasons of his own for thinking Lexie wasn’t coming back. “Why?” I demanded, doing offended. “I’m not a wimp. It’d take more than one little cut to get rid of me.”

I felt Rafe flinch, a tiny half-hidden twitch. “God only knows,” he said. “He had some bizarro convoluted theory about the cops claiming you were alive to mess with people’s heads-I can’t remember the details, I didn’t want to hear it and he was being cryptic about it anyway.” He shrugged. “Daniel.”