Free Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott Page B

something? Lose my temper…no, not with you.” You laughed and I noticed how your lips still creased like the finest parchment. You were used to getting your way—probably took it for granted now.
    “And Sarah?”
    “What about her?”
    “Won’t it cause problems?”
    “She never knew about us.”
    “Cameron, she
always
knew about us.”
    “So you say. You’ll just have to believe me; it won’t be a problem. You’re the obvious person to finish the book. She knows that.”
    You made your excuses, paid the bill, and left, handing me a sealed envelope containing a key to The Studio and the paperwork at the very last minute so that I couldn’t pass it back. That was presumptuous of you. “Go and look over The Studio if you like,” you said. “It’s empty.”
    Empty? The Studio was never empty after Elizabeth died. But you didn’t know that.
             
    After I left Cambridge, you sent me a text message out of the blue, one of several. “The world is no longer beautiful,” it said. It was the tone you had taken that made me want to be cruel in return. Made me want to send vials of poison back to you. It was the artfulness of those occasional texts you sent me, the fact that—after everything—you still had the audacity to assume that the loss and the pain were yours. That you were the suffering one. I didn’t answer. It seemed better that way. Just silence.
    And I knew that despite your words of love, in that silence and in my absence you would be purifying yourself again, doing whatever it took to persuade yourself that you could now become an honest man, that you could stop betraying Sarah. And, I guessed, that would mean finding my letters, all those letters I had sent you from Italy and Greece and Istanbul and Syria, envelopes filled with the pressed flowers and the bits and pieces of things I had slipped between the thick sheets of paper, that you would print out all my e-mails, gather all my letters and e-mails together and burn them on that bonfire out in your garden. Once you had seen all those words in flames, I knew, there would be a kind of redemption. Yes, I thought, you would do that, burn my words in exchange for your own redemption.
    What was it that made me agree? The prospect of living in Elizabeth’s house, which I loved, the promise of quiet, no company but a cat, a project to finish. Was it the money or the fact that I had just finished my screenplay and for once had nothing else to do for a few months? Or perhaps the thought of going back to Brighton, which made me feel buried alive—I glimpsed for a second Peter’s orderliness, the handles of the saucepans all facing in the same direction in the cupboard, the list of jobs to be done on the fridge door, and it made me shudder. Was it that I already knew I was leaving him? Or was it you? Or the wine we had drunk? You were uncompromising, determined. You wouldn’t have taken no for an answer. You had made up your mind that I was to be Elizabeth’s ghostwriter, discussed it with your lawyers, drawn up a contract with my name on it. You had prepared your ground, asked all the right questions. I just walked straight on in.
    I texted you that night for the first time, pushing out the letters onto an illuminated screen in the dark of Maria’s bedroom before I had even talked to Kit.
    “Yes. I will. Yes. Lydia B.”
    Only two minutes later, as if you had been waiting for me, your reply lit up the screen on my phone with a tiny envelope:
    “Thank you, Lydia B. Use the key. Make yourself at home. Will call on my return.”

Six
    I remember that beginning as a series of flights and drops, certainties and fallings away. After rising to your challenge, sealing my fate in those few short letters typed into my phone, I had a couple of very bad days, days in which Kit’s questions challenged my motives, in which I found myself doubtful and resolved by turns. I picked up the mobile to text you several times: if a few words typed into a