Darren said it’s too late.
“Daphne. Where’s Daphne?” The panic I’d held at bay these last several minutes, from an anaphylactic episode and the rising of Darren from the dead, decides to attack me now. My voice strains at the ends of each word, like a bow on a violin pulled too tight.
My mother used to play the violin. The memory comes to me, unwanted but still as crisp and clear as what I see in front of me: the hunter-green walls, the silk curtains hung framing each of the tall, spotless windows in a cascade of ruched fabric, the long hallway ahead of us. Darren and Felix walk slowly, and my heart opens a little from all this trauma for their kindness in guiding my broken body and recovering lungs out of this godforsaken house.
I can’t see Darren’s face, but I feel the tension pull through his arm as he holds on to me and guides me along.
“I saw her through the window.”
“You saw a lot of people through the window, didn’t you?” Felix says. He doesn’t sound scared anymore. He sounds like the almost-teenager that he is, spritely and full of sarcasm.
Darren ignores him.
“She’s lying outside, in the soft patch of grass by the back field. It didn’t look like she was sleeping.”
Without a word, just a quick flick of his face towards me and a look that was half apology and half terror, Felix lets go of me and takes off running.
I’m trying to make sense of what Darren’s said. And what Daphne did, or tried to do, to me.
I never should have come to this house. I never should have come to look for Mark.
“We need to go to her!” I tell Darren as he grips my arm tighter and we continue to make our way towards the outside. A few feet more and I’ll be able to breathe in some fresh air and clear out what this house is doing to me, and doing to the people around me.
“We’re going. We’re almost there,” he reassures me.
And we are. A few seconds more, and we’re outside in the bright sunshine. A soft breeze blows against our backs, ricocheting off the house.
My head feels almost instantly clearer, being outside of those walls.
We keep moving, no time to waste. I try to listen for sounds of Felix, or of Daphne or anyone else. I try not to think about Brenna, and where she is and how she didn’t come to save me. She didn’t know that I was in trouble, I tell myself. She wouldn’t purposefully try to hurt me.
But could Daphne really make coffee on her own? A few weeks ago, right before all this started, Brenna and I were in the kitchen. I kissed her neck as she sipped from the coffee she’d made. I poured myself a cup.
And then Daphne came in, unannounced, to tell us that she had arrived for the day.
Did she see us together? Did she know I was in love with her mother?
Even if she did, there’s no way she could know about why I’m really here at Granfield. Nobody knows that, except for me.
So many things are happening all at once.
We turn a corner, and there she is. Lying like a beautiful doll in the grass, her golden curls kissed by the sun and her cheeks rosy from the heat. Felix crouches over her, looking lost. He’s holding her hand in his.
Darren lets go of me and takes off running towards the two of them. “I told you it was too late!” he yells.
Felix blinks, and it seems like he squeezes his sister’s hand tighter. “She’s still breathing,” Felix tells me.
Darren calls out something indistinguishable. He reaches them as I continue to try to stumble closer. I can’t quite make it as the pain shoots up my chest and down from my head. There’s blood crusted on my cheeks.
I shouldn’t be out here, I realize. I’m injured really badly.
But Daphne? What’s happened to her?
Darren looks up from Daphne’s small body and sees me crumpled on the gravel path.
“Just stay there,” he tells me. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Felix! Come help me,” I order him with as much insistence as I can wrangle into my voice. I’m the only one who can help Daphne. I need to see her pupils. Listen to her breathing. I need to figure out what’s happened to her.
My training kicks in, and above the hum of the pain and the delirium from the epinephrine I take charge.
I’ll figure out later why Darren is here. What he’s been doing these last several weeks when we all thought he was dead. Right now, I need to save this little girl.
“Get me over to her, now!” I shout.
Felix grabs me and hauls me towards Daphne, grunting a bit as he tries to stabilize my body against his. Even though he’s been growing, I’m still at least a foot taller than him.
When I’m finally sitting by Daphne, I pull at her eyelids and see that her pupils are widely dilated. I listen to her chest, and her breathing is slow and shallow.
She looks drugged. She looks like she’s dying.
I don’t have time to figure out if she did this to herself, after she decided to hurt me. Or if someone did this to her.
I bark out orders to Felix and Darren. There’s no time to lose.
And maybe just enough time to save her.
45
Brenna
If someone were to look at us from a distance, they’d think we were lovers. And I guess we are. Were.
My husband flinches as I dig my hands into the pressure points on his back. Darren might be good with plants, but he has no clue how to actually dose a person. I got a little sleepy there for a minute, but now I’m wide awake and ready to finish this. No middlemen this time.
My husband, my family, and me.
Mark is stronger than I thought he’d be, after feeding him small doses of rat poison for so many months. Some days I’d put it into his soup, or his coffee—back when he was drinking coffee. I figured out a way to inject it into his IVs without noticeably puncturing the bags. I’d switch up the ways I gave it to him, in order to keep it less noticeable to Mark and everyone else around him. It was important that it was just enough to weaken him, and make him malinger. I didn’t want to kill him. Not that way.
I stand up and Mark follows suit. He makes a grab for my waist and I stumble over him as we both topple to the ground, like two wrestlers in a match. I can’t let him leave this room.
“I know what you’ve been doing,” he whispers into my right ear. Whether he whispers because he can’t speak any louder, or because he wants me to have to strain to hear him, I’m not sure.
When the plan with the hired men went all wrong, and Tobias and Darren ended up saving Mark and killing them in the process, I had to—as we say in the tech biz—pivot. I’d dosed Mark that night with some weed killer I’d snatched from the greenhouse, to make sure he was feeling sick and too weak to really fight back when they came. After the police arrived and the bodies were carted away, I sat on the staircase in my robe, shaking from nerves and disappointment, and trying to think of my next way out of all of this.
“I know your company’s failing.” My blood turns to ice as Mark says the words, louder and clearer than anything I’ve heard him say for a long time.
I jab my free hand into his kidney and he yelps, and then counters by pulling my arms behind my back. I flail with my legs, trying to kick him with enough force to loosen his grip on me, but I can’t get enough purchase on the ground or my husband’s body to make any real impact.
I’m pinned, my arms pulled back and Mark steadily breathing behind me. I think through what I can do to get free. Eyes, solar plexus, groin, instep. Waves of memories from a long-ago self-defense class I took when I was trying on having female friends come back to me, reminding me of the weakest places in a man.
Their minds are even weaker still. I knew I had Mark from the moment I met him, even though he was dating that Teresa back then. It was more than a little convenient that she died in a car crash, just as Mark was starting to get tired of her. He’s the type of man who would feel guilty for the rest of his life if he left one woman for another. With Teresa gone, he didn’t have to feel guilty.
<
br /> He just had to grieve.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I say it into the air, staring out the window from beside Mark’s bed. There are dark smudges moving on the ground in the distance. I think about Daphne, and the way my body revolted when I gave her the juice I’d been saving in the back of the cupboard. The one I was able to dose with the same chemicals I’ve been using for months to eat away at Mark, only this time I made the dose heavier.
I don’t want my children to see any of this. They deserve to think of their lives as beautiful, with loving parents and a world that wants them. And if I can’t give them that anymore, then it’s time to end it.
I didn’t have a chance to find Felix because I was interrupted by Darren, who somehow survived—Tobias has a lot to answer for. I should have realized he was weak. I should have stayed there, with Tobias, and seen it through to the end. When Darren showed up, sick with the flu, it was the perfect opportunity to kick off what I’d been planning for months, as soon as those first headlines of the virus hit. I’d already laid the groundwork online, and set up the filters on the internet portals. Just one click, and I could put everything in motion.
Mark’s voice comes back from behind me. “Your company, the video chat, is having some legal issues. You didn’t ensure the right protections to avoid being liable for what people do on your app, did you? Always pushing ahead to the next greatest thing, right, Brenna? Never stopping to check on the rules or the regulations.”
The fury I’ve kept under control for these weeks, for months really, burns hot and white in the center of my belly. No one gets to talk about my work like this, not even my husband.
“We didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Except you did, and now your company’s going to run itself into the ground paying all the fines you’ve been charged with. Which is why you need my money. My business.”
“We share everything,” I say through gritted teeth.
“You know that’s not true.” Mark pulls at my arms and I release some of the tension in my shoulders, relaxing into his hold just slightly. I want him to think I’m getting tired. Weak.
He goes on. “With me incapacitated for the last year or so, you’ve been able to siphon money into your company from mine, without me ever knowing. Or that’s what you thought. Thank goodness you have a habit of leaving your laptop in here. You still have terrible passwords—our wedding anniversary?”
“What’s wrong with one spouse helping another?” I slump my shoulders. I ease into it.
Mark doesn’t say anything for a long while. We stay there, my arms wrapped behind me and held against his still-broad chest, and again I think about how from the outside it looks like we’re embracing each other rather than permanently erasing the connections we once had.
“I would have done anything for you,” Mark finally says. He whispers it, and this time I’m certain he chooses to say it quietly, a secret between the two of us.
Although a small part of me, buried deep inside and covered with slick layers of resentment and disappointment, still loves my husband, I can’t let that piece of me smother the rest of who I am.
“No,” I tell him, heavy with longing. “But you will.”
And that’s when I buck my head back so it catches Mark’s nose.
His face instantly bursts into a waterfall of blood. Felix told me once, head bent over that damn outmoded biology textbook of his, that there are more blood vessels in the nose than anywhere else on the rest of the body. Mark reflexively lets go and reaches up to staunch the bleeding.
I run to the door, ready to get the hell out of there, but when I get to the keypad and check my pockets to retrieve the key card, it’s not there.
I scramble around, becoming more and more frantic with each passing second.
“I have it,” Mark tells me. I’ve never heard his voice sound so hollow.
I turn and see one hand holding up the tail of his shirt to his nose. In the other is the key card he managed to slip from my pocket while I was thinking about us looking like two people who loved each other.
46
Felix
Daphne is going to be okay. That’s what Margot keeps saying, like a music track clicked on to repeat.
Darren still looks worried though, and Daphne’s eyes aren’t normal. They look like a werewolf version of her. But Margot has more confidence than the rest of us, and the knots in my chest want to believe what she’s saying.
“We need to get inside somewhere,” Darren says quietly. “We need to get out of sight.”
He picks up Daphne’s body and carries her to the stables. Margot and I sit there like two statues and watch him go for a few moments, until my arms and legs move almost like they’re part of some robot version of myself and, finally, we follow Darren and my sister.
“I don’t think we should be in here,” Margot says as we cross the threshold from the brightness of the day into the damp warm air of the horses’ home.
“We can’t stay outside where she can see us.” Darren twists his head round, looking for a place to put Daphne down. He finally stops on a chest where I know Tobias keeps extra saddles and old bridles. It’s long and wooden, with a horse blanket thrown over the top.
Darren lays my sister down, and she lets out a small “uff”, even though I can tell from where I’m standing that Darren is being really gentle.
“Who do you mean?” Margot asks. “Brenna? Brenna would never hurt her children. She’d never hurt anyone.”
Margot wraps her arms around her shoulders as she says it, like she’s cold, although the air in the stable is humid and musty. I pull at the neck of my T-shirt and stretch it out a little, but it snaps back into place as soon as I let go. My hands feel like I’ve just washed them, they’re so clammy.
Darren casts a sideways glance at Margot.
They look at each other for a moment, and I know what they’re thinking. That night Daphne and I were forced to stay in the panic room, when Tobias carried Daphne from the stables and Mom came to check on us a few times, but we spent the entire evening into the next day waiting and waiting. Mom came on the video monitor one time, late into the night, and she looked so scared.
No, I correct myself even as I think it.
Not scared. She looked mad. Not the kind of mad where I forgot to make my bed in the morning or Greta forgot to buy organic cereal. Mad, like crazy.
Darren was supposed to be dead, because my mom said so.
“She was trying to keep us all safe. You were sick, really sick, and the recovery rate for the virus is so low, especially for children. She couldn’t let you infect them,” Margot says. “How are you even alive?”
One of the horses, Jasmine or Julie or one of the others, gives a long nicker, like they’re in on some sort of joke.
And then, from the shadows, Tobias appears, holding a shovel in his hands with the shovel head poised at his shoulder.
“He’s alive because of me,” Tobias tells us. “Because I couldn’t kill him, the way Brenna wanted me to.”
Darren won’t look at Tobias, but Margot can’t seem to look away from him. Him and that shovel.
I want to scream. And this time, I do.
“Who cares? What’s happening to Daphne? What happened to her?” I shout as loud as my lungs will let me, and my voice turns screechy at the end of it all.
The three adults turn and stare at me for a beat, and then they whirl into action. Margot rushes over to Daphne’s side, wincing as she moves, and takes her pulse and whispers things to her. My sister’s lips move, slowly but still moving all the same. From where I’m standing, I can’t see her eyes and whether they’re still large like an animal’s, but I watch her chest going up and down as Margot counts out loud and Daphne breathes with the rhythm.
At the same time, Darren moves away from my sister. He and Tobias square off across the middle aisle of the stables. Tobias still has the shovel hoisted up, and his knuckles turn white as he grips it harder.
The horses don’t like any of this. Noise fills the stable, with the horses nickering and whinnying. Jasmine and Julie are up front closest to us and they paw the ground with their hooves. The sound of dirt being scratched by huge animals drowns out the voices of the grown-ups and soon it’s all I can hear in my ears.
That, and the sound of my beating heart, still hoping my mother will come and save us.
47
Darren
“We don’t have time for this,” I tell Tobias. He’s making me nervous with that shovel gripped so tight in his hands.
“I know that,” he replies, but his grip doesn’t loosen. He turns his eyes over to the left, where Daphne’s sitting up a little as Margot supports her back with her hand. The tension at Margot’s temples and mouth tell me how much she’s hurting, but she keeps tending to the little girl. Guilt burns deep inside my chest.
“What happened to Daphne?” Tobias goes on.
The words run out of my mouth like a swarm of angry insects, looking to bite. “Her mother poisoned her.”
Confusion cuts across Tobias’ face, followed by something else. His grip on the shovel loosens a little.
I can see him working through it in his head.
How he left me in my apartment, thinking that it would be easier on his conscience if he let me die naturally, burning with fever and choking on my own phlegm. He’d read, like I had for the last several days leading up to the lockdown, that the virus works rapidly and that I’d be dead in a few more hours.
All he’d have to do was quarantine my apartment, which they’d want to do anyway, and then clear out my body later when it was safe to do so.
No killing on his conscience, and Brenna would never know the difference.
But I survived. I passed out soon after he left me, and when I woke up the next morning I was already feeling better. My fever had broken and my breathing was easier. I was weak, but I was recovering.
Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists Page 17
