Finn let himself into Leah's flat at ten the next morning and called, “Are you dead?”
“In the kitchen,” she answered.
“So no.”
He came in wearing the old blue sweatshirt she had given him three birthdays ago. Its cuffs had begun to fray. He carried their climbing bags, one over each shoulder, and a paper sack from the bakery below her flat.
For a second she felt the usual Sunday lift. She would be out of the kitchen, away from the abandoned cup of tea and her phone. Finn would take the steep road to the climbing centre and complain about it as if the hill had been built to annoy him. Once they were there, he would make a great show of letting her pick the first wall and then choose a harder one for himself.
He put the bags down and opened the sack.
“They had the ones with the sugar in the middle. I bought you two.”
“You bought four.”
“It was a complicated calculation.”
He took a pastry and bit into it. Leah poured him water, because it was what she always did when he stood at her counter eating too fast.
“How's your hand?”
“Fine.”
He put the pastry in his left hand.
She looked at the swelling across the knuckles of his right.
“You hit Theo.”
Finn leaned against the counter. “Adam told you.”
“Yes.”
“Did he mention Theo grabbing me?”
“He said Theo had your sleeve. Why were you fighting?”
“Theo called me a liar.”
“About what?”
Finn chewed and swallowed. “Mara. Things he was doing to her.”
Leah remembered the voice at the foot of the stairs and Mara sending her after the guest. Her friend had said she would get Finn. Instead, Leah had walked away without knowing he had hit someone.
“What things?”
“Being nasty. Talking down to her. You know what he's like when he's in a mood.”
“I know he can be rude. That doesn't tell me what you said.”
“I said he shouldn't treat her that way.”
Finn folded the top of the paper sack down, making a sharp crease. He would not look at her.
Leah took her pastry out. The sugar had soaked a small dark patch into the paper. She put it on a plate but didn't eat it.
“Adam says Theo shoved him upstairs,” she said. “Then Mara pushed Theo.”
Finn stopped folding.
“No.”
“That's what he says he saw.”
“Of course he does. You caught him lying, so now it's Mara.”
“He told me he'd lied. He didn't pretend I'd remembered it wrong.”
“That makes him wonderful, does it?”
“No.”
Finn pushed away from the counter. “Leah, I got there and he was right over Theo. Blood all over him. Mara was up the stairs. She was terrified.”
“That doesn't mean you saw him push.”
“If somebody's lying on the stairs and there's one person—”
“There were two people.”
He turned away. Leah looked down at the two climbing bags. Finn had brought hers from the cupboard at his flat, where she left it because it was easier to put both in his car. He had even remembered her spare top. A corner of it poked out of the zip.
“Did you sleep?” he asked.
“Not much.”
“Then let's go. We don't have to do anything hard. An hour. Get away from all this.”
She could already feel the climbing holds under her fingers, the pleasant certainty of having only one next thing to do. Reach, grip, step. And Finn would be below her, holding the rope. However much he talked while they were driving, he watched properly when she climbed.
“I don't want to pretend we had a normal night,” she said.
“We won't. We'll have a normal morning.”
He said it with the hopeful grin he had worn at fifteen when he wanted her to sign him out of something tedious. She almost smiled.
His phone rang on the counter.
Mara's name lit the screen. Finn picked it up so quickly that the water rocked in his glass.
“Hi. Yeah.”
He looked at Leah, then walked into the hall.
She heard his voice lower. The hall wasn't big enough to give him real privacy. He went farther, into her sitting room, and pulled the door mostly shut.
Leah stood very still. She hadn't heard his voice sound like that with Mara before. At the venue he made himself louder, offering to carry things, pretending every request was an outrageous imposition. Through the narrow gap she heard him say, “You don't have to do that today. I'll—”
Then the door closed.
She went to the kitchen window. Below her, a customer left the bakery holding a long loaf against his chest. She watched him wait for a gap in the traffic. Everything in the street was going on.
Finn came back five minutes later and put his phone in his pocket.
“She's all right,” he said.
“Where is she?”
“At a friend's.”
“Which friend?”
“I didn't ask for the address.”
“Are you seeing her?”
His mouth opened, then closed. He reached for the strap of her climbing bag.
“Finn.”
“I'm not discussing my private life in your kitchen.”
“Mara is my friend. She's engaged to Theo. You're my brother. If something is happening between you, I need you to tell me.”
“Not today.”
The words were blunt, almost shouted. They startled both of them. Finn lowered his voice.
“I'm not answering that. She had a horrible night. We all did. I just came to take you climbing.”
Leah could no longer picture him below her with the rope. She could picture him in her sitting room with the door closed.
“I asked you something.”
“I heard you.”
“Then take your bag.”
He looked at the two bags, surprised. “We could go for a walk. If you don't feel like climbing.”
“I'm not coming.”
He picked up his own bag, leaving hers on the floor.
“You're choosing him.”
“I didn't invite him to this conversation.”
Finn's face flushed. “I don't like what he's done to you.”
“Then don't do something else to me.”
He turned away again. She waited while he went into the hall. He usually called goodbye from the front door even if they had argued. This time she heard only the scrape of his bag against the wall and the latch clicking.
Leah sat down at the kitchen table. The pastry she hadn't touched lay on the plate.
She didn't know whether Finn and Mara were lovers. His refusal had left room for that and very little else. She wished he had denied it. Even angrily. Even with one of his ridiculous speeches about everybody mistaking his universal popularity for romance.
Her phone held a message from Mara sent before breakfast.
Please let me know you're home safe. Love you.
Leah had answered that she was. Now she opened Theo's number. They had mostly exchanged messages about flower deliveries and doors that would be unlocked. It felt strange to see those ordinary lines above the message she began to write.
It's Leah. I'm home. If you want to speak, I'm here. I wasn't outside with Adam. I was outside alone.
She read it once. It said what she knew and made no promise beyond that.
She sent it, then carried her climbing bag into her bedroom. It was heavier than she expected.