The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

Until my hand brushes against the icon leading to my profile. And picture upon picture of me and Matthew fills my screen in a cruel, beautiful grid. I’ve been so sure, for so long, that what I did was right. Was just. Was necessary. But now, after speaking to Rachel, I find a niggling feeling threatening to take hold. Doubt. The feeling is doubt. And it terrifies me.

I leave the poolside and go into the changing area and march straight into the showers, letting the cold jet of the water soak me. I take deep breaths, trying to stop the panic, the burning anxiety taking me over.

‘What are you doing?’

I turn around and see Titus at the doorway, his trunks dripping, his hair, darker from the water, hanging slightly across his face. He looks concerned at my behaviour. We’ve become spies, really. Each of us watching the other, waiting for someone to crack first under the strain. I think I’ve been pretending it isn’t true. Pushing myself to believe everything’s fine. It really isn’t.

‘I just … felt hot,’ I say, stepping out of the shower, my shirt sticking to me as I move. ‘So I took a shower…’

‘In your clothes?’ he asks, raising an eyebrow. ‘Why don’t you just get your swim things and come in the pool?’

I laugh, playing for time, but it comes out false, and Titus knows it. He knows I’m faking. Instead of answering his question I go and sit down on the long bench in the centre of the room. I hope he will come and sit next to me without invitation, but he doesn’t. He just stays there, standing still, looking at me. Eventually he speaks.

‘I need to talk to you about something.’

I look up at him properly. His words don’t comfort me; they do the complete opposite. But I reply in the way all dads should reply. ‘You can talk to me about anything.’

He nods, as if he expected this response. A pause passes between us, then he says he wants to start seeing Pippa properly. Like, boyfriend and girlfriend. ‘I realise this will probably upset you, after what her mother did, but I love Pippa and we want to be together. I won’t talk to her mum, and you won’t need to either. But I like her too much to worry about that now.’

This is not what I was expecting, and I’m so relieved that I laugh – properly this time – feeling the tension start to flow out of me, my shoulders starting to relax.

‘What’s funny?’ Titus asks, looking a little irritated, and I reply, still smiling, ‘Nothing. That’s all fine. Pippa’s a lovely girl. I just … thought you wanted to talk about something else.’

Titus gives me a weird look, then walks over to the far wall and takes a towel from the folded pile in the corner. I hear him tug off his wet trunks and toss them to the side, then start to dry himself. When he comes back into view, his hair is out of his eyes, the towel tied around his waist, his expression blank and unreadable. ‘I will never want to talk about that,’ he says at last.

His response sends a jolt through me. ‘Of course,’ I say, standing up, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘I understand. I just … want you to be OK.’

Titus looks me in the eye and nods. ‘It’s done. Finished. We don’t need to talk about it.’

He walks to the other benches over to the side where his clothes are folded in a pile and turns his back to me, but I can’t let the conversation end like this. ‘I agree,’ I say, slightly hurriedly. ‘So long as you’re OK?’

He stops, then turns around and gives me a small nod. ‘I’m fine, and don’t worry, I’m not going to tell Rupert, or Pippa, or anyone for that matter.’ It’s now that I notice a weird look in Titus’s eyes. I just nod at him, unsure what to say. There’s a hardness in his expression that’s disturbing me. I’m about to leave, to give him the privacy to dress alone, but he speaks before I reach the door.

‘Actually, while we’re on the subject, it would be helpful, when Pippa comes over to stay, that she sleeps in my room. With me. Instead of a guest room.’ He pulls on his jeans, tightening his belt with a loud snap.

I’m thrown by his words. ‘Well, er … I don’t really think that would be appropriate. You’re both still fifteen…’ I trail off, and Titus’s expression turns cold.

‘We’re nearly sixteen. And I want it that way.’ He’s now doing up his shirt buttons, calmly and carefully, without a single tremor in his fingers. ‘I’m sure you could make it OK with Rupert. And also, we’d like to go on a holiday later in the spring, once we turn sixteen. Just the two of us. And we’d need some spending money, of course. That would be OK, right?’ He stares back at me, a defiant glint in his eyes. ‘I mean, I think it would make me feel a lot better if all those things could happen. If you see what I mean.’

The panic is back, flooding through me, returning with such a rushing force that the momentary relief I felt seconds before now feels as if it were a cruel trick. As the boy I’ve spent the last ten years of my life with looks back at me with a slight smile playing on his lips, I feel my ability to talk leave me. Eventually I nod, and manage to whisper, ‘Of course.’

Titus grins. ‘Thanks Dad. I knew you’d understand.’ And then he goes back out to the pool to join Rupert, leaving me sitting on the changing-room benches. Trying to stop myself shaking.

Epilogue Elena

Three years after the murder

The main lobby of the St Regis hotel, Washington DC, was surprisingly quiet the day I got the call. I’d been meeting up