The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions Book 1)

WE LEAVE THE ARCHIVES SHORTLY after, having satisfied Daniel’s curiosity and letting him reach his own conclusions about what to do next.

“Get invited back to the brownstone, find points of origin for all the Carriers Leo knows, cross-reference for subsidiaries of your father’s company that might’ve operated there or nearby, and then use that to come back here and see if there’s a Kells-ish person in the mental health field who’s treated more than one of them, who might be at the hub of a particular wheel. Start small, branch out.”

“Brilliant,” I say. The metal shutter screeches as I pull it down over the door. “We start tonight.”

“Have your flatmates send their pictures over to me, and I’ll start on the map. And you . . .” He waits expectantly.

“Will talk to Jamie.”

“And Goose,” he adds.

“And Goose,” I parrot, before we part ways.

When he first brought it up, he’d asked what Goose’s moral compass was like, and I said I didn’t know, that the last time I really spent with him, he could scarcely shave. “Why?” I’d asked him.

“Because,” Daniel said, running his hands through his hair, “I hate this expression, but there’s no denying he’s a game changer. If . . . what’s happening . . . is connected to Mara . . . somehow . . .”

What went unsaid is that he could turn Mara into a weapon of mass destruction, if she wanted to be.

I watched Daniel as he spoke the words, knew he was thinking that she wouldn’t want to be.

I’m not as sure.

I’m anxious to get back to the flat, and not just to see Mara. My shield’s been up for too long today, and it’s bloody exhausting.

No one else is there when I arrive, though. I should be relieved; instead, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the emptiness of it. Even when it’s just Mara and I, her presence is enough to fill it.

I pace to the bar, pour myself a shot of whiskey. Down it, then another. My inability to get properly, thoroughly wasted only makes me feel worse.

My footsteps echo on the stairs, and I ignore the chilled air and the swift movements of clouds beyond the glass that make me dizzy for some reason. When I reach the office, I close the door behind me.

Daniel’s wheel metaphor has been spinning in my mind. I can’t seem to break it or stop it, so I let it spin and end up standing in front of the trunk full of my mother’s things. Hardly surprising, considering I spent the day in my father’s archives. I would bore even the worst therapist.

I rummage through her books and things, not finding anything of particular interest until a small red journal peeks out from under The Once and Future King. There’s a ribbon threaded through the pages edged in gilt.

A day may yet come when I stop being my own worst enemy, but that day is not today. I open my mother’s journal and begin to read.

26 June

Jesus fuck, I’ve just met David’s parents for the first time, and I think I might be happier if I were to drown in the Thames—or to jump from one of the turrets of their beloved manor house—than marry into that wretched family.

His harpy of a mother greeted me with a look of disdain to compliment her nearly invisible smile, then his father, not an altogether horrid man, peppered me with questions about hunting and shooting, both of which I abhor, which David knows, and I could practically hear him grinding his teeth during tea, worrying what his common beloved might say and do to offend the Lord and Lady.

It isn’t just his family. I wish it were, honestly. David is just so . . . dull. Not dull-witted, obviously. Never second at anything, not collections or mods or finals—his gang of mates is always scrunching on him about it, out of jealousy, likely. He’s the only one at the pub on Suicide Sunday, not worrying in the slightest whether he’ll pass or fail his classes. And he is objectively gorgeous, one has to give him that. It’s the brandy after dinner shite, the “summering” in Cornwall, Yorkshire, for the “season”—by which he means hunting season, though we’ve talked (shouted) about that, and he’s sworn to stop, which will send Lady Sylvia into a fit. He is trying, and I know he’s trying for me, which almost makes it worse.

He’s desperately in love with me. I can feel it when we’re together, a heat coming off him, the hunger in his stare, and it happened so fast, and so easily. He is a boy—not a man, not yet—used to getting what he wants, and he’s decided he wants me. I did that. I can’t fault anyone but myself.

The professor’s told me it’s my Gift, to create desire (and kill it, I imagine, though he’s never been explicit about that—he’s so bloody dodgy when it comes to my own questions). But honestly, I think I’ve always had some sense that I was different, and special, even before I met him, before he told me. By all rights, an abandoned baby, a girl without a family, should’ve been an undesirable little charity case! To be raised by nuns probably! Never mind that I attended Cheltenham, or that my parents were splendid—the fact that even my adoptive parents died seems to scandalise Lady Sylvia (what doesn’t?). She pretended not to know, but David told me she did, that she was in a flap about them having died in a “brutal and violent” car crash (are fatal car crashes ever not brutal?). But really it’s that neither Mum nor Dad really had any family to speak of, besides a few distant cousins I’ve never met. It’s that sin, that I’m a girl from nowhere with almost nothing, that they can’t abide.Content protected by Nôv/el(D)rama.Org.

It was a bit of a shock at first—I thought I’d charm the knickers off the pair of them, but they were oddly immune to whatever it is that makes me irresistible to everyone else. I think if my parents were still alive, they’d fight David less.

Part of me wishes I’d died with them. Wants to die without them here.

I know it would be selfish, and a waste, blah blah, but Dear Reader Who Does Not Exist Because This Is My Diary So Fuck Right Off, if it weren’t for the professor, I think, I might’ve done it already—God knows there’s a ready supply of drugs, even (especially) at Kings. I’ve no problem with blood; I know how to slit my wrists the right way, and if not that, I could always mimic the night climbers and dive right off the tower. (There are still no railings—has it really not occurred to anyone to try? Really?)

So you see, Diary Dearest, this is the train of thought that won’t stop, the train that runs in my head at night, even after I fall asleep. I’d never tell David, but I think he suspects some melancholy beneath the surface, some vulnerability he’s just aching to soothe. He wants to fix me, poor thing.

I don’t know if I can bring myself to love him.

That’s the truth. It’s ugly, I know it, and despite his (many) flaws, it just generally seems a crime to marry not for love, but for purpose, even though I know it won’t be forever. Is that even worse? Marrying him, conceiving his child, knowing that someday I’ll die for it?

I’ve talked to Mara about it—she’s changed her mind, I think. Says she’s dreamt about my death “a thousand ways over a thousand nights” and that there’s no timeline in which I’ll have his child and live. It’s odd—I never wanted to be a mother before, but now that I know who my child will be, what he or she will do, become—I’m anxious. Ready. She says I might regret it, my choice, once I have that child in my arms. That being needed so desperately by something so innocent and good and pure, something I created, will change my heart and might change my mind, and by then it will be too late. I’m already in this.

As the professor says, every gift has its cost.