Page 57 of No Safe Place
‘The nurse says you won’t eat anything,’ Lily said, shooting a look at Erin, motionless in the corner on a plastic chair. ‘That’s my trick.’
A long pause.
‘You should eat, Cal. Even if it’s just a biscuit or something.’
Cal didn’t move.
He gazed back at her, seeming to process what she’d said, then pulled his hand from hers and shuffled sideways, away from her.
How was she going to tell him about Sam?
And David – he had to pull through. She couldn’t look after Callum without him.
‘I’m really sorry.’ Lily looked down at her hands. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there last night.’
He sucked in a deep breath, and Lily held hers, waiting for him to say something.
He nodded towards the corner. ‘Spider.’
Lily twisted to follow his gaze. She couldn’t see anything. ‘You need to get some sleep, Cal. You’ll feel so much better, if you can have a sleep.’
Cal was picking compulsively at a thread on the cheapT-shirt, and Lily watched his fingers working at it. They’d been clipped short – either by the staff, so he couldn’t scratch himself – or maybe by the police. She’d seen that on a documentary once.
The nausea that’d sat low in her stomach for days was churning again when Cal finally spoke.
‘I did it, Lil.’
It was like all the air had been sucked out of the room.
He turned to her, alert now, scratching his buzzed head with those short nails.
‘It was me.’
Lily glanced at Erin, in the corner.
‘Will you tell them?’ Cal demanded. ‘Will you tell them for me?’
‘Cal I—’ She let out a hiss of pain as he grabbed her wrist.
‘You have to, Lil. They won’t believe me; they won’t get it.’
He was squeezing her wrist hard, and pain shot up her arm as she tried to pull it away.
‘But you can make them understand. You can tell them for me.’
‘When you say you think you did it, Cal …?’ Lily chose her words carefully. ‘You don’t think that it was you, who stabbed Sam?’
He let out a bark of laughter. ‘Of course I didn’t stab Sam. I didn’tstabanyone. But it was my fault.’ He spoke so quickly that spit flew from the corners of his mouth.
She had pins and needles in her fingers.
Erin was up, out of the chair, on Callum’s other side.
‘You don’t get it,’ Callum said. ‘The counting, I’ve been trying to stop the counting for months, years—’
‘Let go of Lily for me, Callum, come on,’ Erin said.
‘—and I felt like something bad was going to happen if Idid stop and I knew as soon as I saw her. She was outside our house Lil, she was stabbed on our doorstep.’
