The Depths of Solitude by Jo Bannister Page A

body when he needs you to see it?”
    “You think he’s safe?” Brodie’s voice was as small as a child’s begging for comfort. “Really?”
    “I got no reason to think he’s not,” said Marta flatly. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, but I think he does. I think it makes sense to him. You just have to wait till he’s ready to talk to you.”
    It was the least-worst option, and Brodie wanted to believe it. “Yes. This is his way of punishing me. For what I did and didn’t do. He’s had enough of my moralising. He’s turned his back and walked away, and he doesn’t care that I may never know whether he’s dead or alive.” Brodie looked up, hollow-eyed. “It’s over.”
    Since leaving Nottingham she’d weighed every possibility she could think of. She’d thought Daniel might kill himself, and been afraid that someone might kill him. She’d even wondered if her cruelty had driven a damaged, vulnerable young man to strike back at her.
    Twenty-four hours ago she wouldn’t have wasted thought on it. But twenty-four hours ago she hadn’t known of his mother’s descent into obsession that had laid the pattern for his life from before it began. Half his genes were hers: if Elaine’s madness was Daniel’s inheritance, the conditions were there for it to prosper. With his world trembling to its foundations he’d found something to cling to only to be rebuffed once again. Had she left him nothing to believe in? Had her pious treachery stripped him back to where he was nothing but his mother’s son, raw and angry, wanting payment for his pain in hers? It was possible.
    And the other possibility was that their friendship had simply run its course. Logically, it should never have
been. They should have been unable to surmount the circumstances that brought them together. Somehow they’d met one another’s needs for a time; and if occasionally they added to one another’s burdens, still not until now had Brodie thought the friendship could end. They’d had arguments before and mended them; there’d been misunderstandings that they’d resolved. Not this time. This time it was over. She’d hurt him too much and he’d gone.
    “I don’t want to lose him,” she whispered brokenly. “Marta, I’d do anything to make him stay.”
    Marta tried again with the arm and this time it wasn’t rejected. She stroked the dark curls of Brodie’s bowed head. But she was no good at meaningless platitudes. And sometimes when her emotions were involved her command of the English language was devastatingly accurate.
    “Brodie, darling,” she murmured. The G came out as a K. “I think you had the chance, and you blew it.”

9
    She got no sleep. She rose at six, quietly to avoid disturbing Paddy, and made coffee and toast, and let them go cold unaddressed. She sat at the kitchen table, turning in her mind the steps she could take to re-establish contact with Daniel. She would not accept that a friendship which had been important to both of them could be ended by a simple disagreement. Of course, she was being disingenuous. What had come between them was too big to ignore, to gloss over or pretend it never happened. Brodie was trying to believe this was possible only because the alternative was unbearable.
    By eight she had exhausted all the options. There were no steps she could take. She had found his family, that a week ago she hadn’t known about, and they didn’t know where he was either. He had no job, no car, no mobile phone to leave a trail she could follow. He had, so far as she knew, no friends beside her and Marta – and Deacon, if you wanted to stretch the definition – to whom he might turn in a crisis. He passed through the world alone, leaving no wake and few ripples, and if he’d chosen to move on she might never know to where.
    There was nothing she could do. If she heard from him again it would be his decision.
    Finally she was able to accept that it was the end of something but