Chapter 3: The Door I Shouldn't Have Opened

HAUNTED BY THE MAFIA KING

By Ann E.

Chapter 3: The Door I Shouldn't Have Opened

Lila POV 

I cooked all afternoon, and I told myself it wasn't an apology.

Lamb, because it was his favourite too, though he'd never said so. Roast potatoes. A lemon tart from the bakery on Aldrich Street, in a white box tied with string. By six, the whole kitchen smelled like the dinner I'd imagined us having in the flat he'd talked about, and I packed it into two containers and carried them to the door.

I stopped at the dressing table on my way out.

The hairpin lay where I'd left it. I didn't know why I picked it up. For luck, maybe. Or out of stubbornness, because it was mine, and tonight I wanted something on me that nobody had given back with a smile and forgotten.

I pinned it above my ear, took the silver key from my coat pocket, and went.

Jason's building smelled of floor cleaner and somebody's takeaway. I rode the lift to the fourth floor with the containers warm against my chest, rehearsing.

I'm not sorry about what I said. But I don't want to lose you over it.

I'm not asking you to change. I'm asking you to talk to me.

The key slid into the lock more easily than I expected. The door opened without a sound.

"Jason?"

The flat was dim. A single lamp burned in the corner, and the curtains were half drawn against the evening. I stepped onto the mat, and the first thing I noticed was how quiet it was.

The second was the coffee table.

Two wineglasses. One half-empty. One with a smear of lipstick on the rim, a dark plum shade I knew, because I had stood beside her at a hundred mirrors and watched her put it on.

My hands didn't move. The containers stayed warm against me.

Beside the sofa, a woman's handbag. Tan leather, a small gold clasp. I'd bought her the keyring dangling from the strap, two Christmases ago, because she'd said she was always losing her keys.

By the hallway, a pair of heels lay on their sides, as though someone had stepped out of them in a hurry.

I stood very still.

Then I heard it.

It came from the bedroom, through the half-open door at the end of the hall. Low at first, almost a breath. Then a woman's voice, soft and unmistakable, and Jason's answering it, rough and hushed.

I knew that voice. I knew it from sleepovers and hospital waiting rooms and the night I'd told her I wanted to wait, and she'd held my hand under the blanket and said, Good for you.

My mind did what minds do. It grabbed at anything. The television. A neighbour. A film. It built three explanations in the space of one breath, and each one fell apart as soon as I looked at it.

I put the containers down on the kitchen counter, very carefully, as if they might break.

Then I walked down the hall.

The door was open about a hand's width.

I didn't push it. I didn't need to. The mirror on the wardrobe showed me the room: the unmade bed, the tangled sheets, Chloe's dark hair spread across the pillow I'd lain on in March. Jason's back. Her hand on his shoulder, and the thin silver bracelet I'd watched her fasten a thousand times.

Something in my chest went quiet and enormous.

I don't know how long I stood there. A few seconds. A year. The sound of them carried on a moment longer, and then Chloe's eyes opened and found mine in the glass.

She went white.

"Jason," she said, in a voice I'd never heard her use. "Jason."

He turned. For one moment his face was completely empty, as if somebody had pulled a plug. Then he scrambled for the sheet and the words came out in a rush.

"Lila. Jesus. You weren't supposed to be here."

I laughed. It came out thin and wrong. "I wasn't supposed to be here."

"How did you get in?"

"You gave me a key."

"I gave it to you for emergencies." He was on his feet now, dragging on his jeans, his voice climbing. "You can't just let yourself in. That's not what it was for. Do you know how that looks?"

"How it looks?"

"I mean it, Lila, this is an invasion of..."

"You're in bed with my best friend."

He stopped.

I watched him find the next sentence. It was almost interesting, in a horrible way, like watching someone reach for a handrail in the dark.

"This isn't what you think," he said. And then, because that was obviously useless, his shoulders dropped and the tone changed, softened, became the voice he used when he was about to explain something I was too sensitive to understand. "Look. You've been shutting me out for months. I tried to be patient. I took you to dinner, I said all the right things, and you looked at me like I'd asked you to give up a kidney. What did you expect me to do?"

There it was.

I'd thought I knew what it would feel like. I'd thought it would feel like shame. It felt like cold water, instead. Like coming up for air.

"You wanted me to be unhappy with you," I said slowly, "and I've made you unhappy, so now this is mine."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

"Lila, come on, be fair, I'm only..."

"I made a promise to myself." My voice shook, and I hated it. "It was never about you. It wasn't a punishment. It wasn't a test you were failing. If you didn't want to wait, you could have said so, and I'd have been hurt, and I'd have let you go. You don't get to sleep with her and then tell me I held a knife to your throat."

Chloe had pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. She was crying. She was pretty when she cried; she always had been.

"Lila, please." She reached for me, and I stepped back. "I never meant for it to happen like this."

"How long?"

Nobody answered.

"How long?"

"A while," Jason muttered.

"Since March?" I looked at Chloe. "Since March?"

"I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know, it just... It wasn't planned."

"The lamb," I said.

She flinched. It was the smallest movement, and it told me everything.

"Why?"

I had asked a lot of questions that evening. This was the only one that came out in a voice I didn't recognise.

Chloe wiped her face with the back of her hand. When she spoke again, something had changed. The tears were still there, but the apology had gone out of her voice.

"You want to know why?" she said. "Because you always had somewhere to go home to, Lila. Even when you said you didn't. You had a house with a name on the gate, and a family who, however awful they were, belonged to you. I had a flat above a dry cleaner and a friend who only ever needed me when she was sad." Her chin trembled. "He looked at me like I was the one who mattered. Just once. Do you know what that's like?"

I stared at her.

I had never, in all my life, been jealous of anyone for having a family who hurt them less.

I understood then that she had been telling herself a version of this story for months, and that in her version, I had a great deal to answer for.

"No," I said quietly. "I don't."

I took the silver key from my coat pocket, walked back down the hall, and laid it on the kitchen counter beside the containers. It made a small, clean sound against the marble.

"The lamb's still warm," I said, to nobody. "Eat it or throw it out."

Then I let myself out.

I made it as far as the pavement before my legs went.

I put my hand against the cold brick of Jason's building and breathed the way they teach you, in through the nose, out through the mouth, and it did nothing at all. A man walking a dog glanced at me and then, politely, away.

My phone buzzed against my hip. Mum.

I watched it ring until it stopped. Then it rang again.

I let that one go, too.

I didn't want to go home. Home was a house with a name on the gate, a place where everyone smiled at me like an echo. I couldn't picture my bed, or the wardrobe, or the dressing table where I'd stood that morning pinning a gold leaf into my hair. I couldn't picture anything.

A taxi slowed beside me. I raised my hand without deciding to.

"Where to?"

I thought of the Hallam. Of the rooftop, and the candles, and the key card lying between two plates like a bill. It was the one place in the city I'd been humiliated, and it had a bar on the ground floor with low lights and no one who knew me.

"The Hallam," I said.

The doorman held the door. Warm air met me, and with it the hush of money: low voices, glasses settling on marble, a piano somewhere playing something slow.

I paused in the doorway and caught my reflection in the mirrored wall. The green dress. The smeared mascara. A small gold leaf above my ear.

I touched it once with two fingers.

Then I walked inside, and found an empty seat at the end of the bar.