The Last of August

“Ready?” I asked.

He blinked, which I took for assent.

I made my preparations. With my fingers, I streaked the blood on my forehead down my face. I coated my hands in it. I hefted my makeshift club, feeling something like a warrior god, and positioned myself behind the locked door.

Then I began to cry. Softly at first. I turned up the volume slowly, as one would a dial, letting the tears call up a corresponding thickness in my throat. When I began to keen, I wanted the sound to be genuine.

“Jamie,” I whispered. He turned his head to look at me. I could tell it hurt. Not you, I mouthed, and said his name again. “Jamie—oh God, Jamie. Please don’t. Please—please breathe.” (This part was necessary; I didn’t know if anyone was standing on the other side of the door.) “You can’t be dead,” I said, and took my voice louder, higher in pitch. I hunched my shoulders and brought my hands up over my face. “You can’t be. You promised. You promised me London, you— God, could you just breathe? Please, start breathing again. I’ll do anything, I don’t care what I am to you, I’ll be anything, do anything, please, please—”

By then I was taken over by it, the grief, the fury, and I let myself dig in deeper, deeper, as far down as I could go. I’d lost him. He’d gone, not in the way I’d imagined, him slamming his way out the door in the middle of the night (we’d be in uni, or he would, as I belonged in uni as much as I belonged anywhere else, which was to say not at all, but we’d have a little flat, maybe in Baker Street, that would have a kitchen and a good library and at least one room in which no one was allowed to speak to me under any circumstances barring fire, and it would be good between us, until one night we’d be in bed and the old horror would rise up in me again, where he’d touch me and I’d well up with it, that feeling of wrongness, how I’d been suckered into letting anyone touch me like this again, how had I allowed it, who was this person and why was he touching me and it was a con, I’d been conned by him or myself or both of us, and I’d either break down entirely or throw him out, and in the end, in how it played out in my head, it was always me throwing him out, and I’d want him to leave as much as I never wanted him to go) but we wouldn’t have that, would we? We wouldn’t even get to that point. He’d be taken away from me by something else, something before that, some peripheral affair I’d dragged him into, something like this—a missing uncle, a man with a taste for my blood, and he wouldn’t leave on his own two feet—no, instead, we’d have a gun or a virus or a knife to the throat or this, him yelling for me to run while I stood like some dumb animal, watching a Moriarty bullyboy take him apart piece by piece, and I was useless, and then we got into shelter only for me to watch him die on the ground, and Watson, I heard myself say it now, aloud, Watson, please, please, and I broke down into some approximation of hysterical sobs.

If you’re going to take on a persona, my father used to tell me, it can’t be a persona. You have to believe it.

I was very good at what I did. I believed all of it, everything. Always.

I was so caught up in it, in fact, this private recitation of my worst fears, that when the door did swing open, I nearly forgot what to do.

But I was in position, hidden behind the door and out of view. I hefted my table leg.

“Where’s the boy?” the thug said gruffly, taking two steps into the room, and it was mere luck that he didn’t see me and more that he had no one behind him.

“Here,” I said, and knocked him on the head. He went down with the usual speed. I took the ring of keys from his hand and rolled him into the corner. Luckily he was not the man who’d roughed up Watson, or I would’ve struck him again.

“Mmph,” Watson was saying, and when I returned to his side it was clear that he was only semiconscious. It took some coaxing, but I managed to get him to his feet, propping him up against my shoulder. He’s largely muscle, which makes him quite heavy, and while this was something I had of course noticed (and yes, appreciated, I am in fact a heterosexual human girl), I didn’t like having to haul him out the door. He supported some of his own weight, but not nearly enough.

The hallway was empty, as I knew it would be, and there was a set of stairs on either end. I stood there listening, aware that Watson was bleeding on me while I in turn bled onto the carpet. While I calculated the odds of either staircase being the more direct route to our destination, I thought also about the state of my boots, which Lena had coaxed me into buying on something called a flash sale site, an experience I found traumatic enough to never want to do it again. A timer ticked down, telling me how long I had to keep these hypothetical boots while I typed in my bank information, and it made me think of all the false scarcity we had in our lives, one shoe left! act now!, one more day for this sale!, and the way the boy leaning on my shoulder was coughing now, low in the throat, was ringing an awful bell somewhere in my head, scarcity and plenty, boom and bust, this being the only time in my life that I’d ever have this and then it would be over, done, never—

But that was the undercurrent to my thinking. The rest of me, as always, knew what to do. The west hallway. We would take the stairs one at a time.

I had been waiting since last night for the Moriartys to make their move. Here we were.

Review your facts, my father said, before you build deductions on top of them.

The facts were obvious. This is what I had deduced: