For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

be left within her, she came to understand that they were as barren of benevolence as each other.

She clenched her aching fists by her side.

‘Let her go, Renata,’ pleaded Rye through the downpour. ‘It’s not her you want, it’s me. It’s always been between us.’

‘ENOUGH.’

He froze. Through the darkness he saw her teeth bared like a Dobermann’s, white in the moonlight.

‘You want this to end?’ she growled incredulously, clawing her hands as she stepped towards him. ‘It’s too late. Things have gone too far, you know that.’

Tears formed in Rye’s eyes. ‘I…could still kill you, you know.’

‘Don’t you get it? I loved you,’ she continued, ignoring his words, ‘or whoever that man was. You created him, just like you created me. Why could I never be loved? Why could I never have what everyone else has? I was so close to ending it, so close to being free when you dragged me back here.’ She turned her back to him. ‘All of this, it’s because of you. It’s too late to go back, you know that.’

Rye smashed the tree with his fist. ‘TELL ME,’ he screamed, tears streaming down his face and merging with the rain. ‘Just tell me what to do to get her back. Tell me, goddammit. END THIS.’

Renata looked back at him over her shoulder. He watched her face fall into darkness as a cloud passed over the glowing moon, obscuring its white light. ‘You need to wait, that’s all,’ she said from the void. ‘Just wait.’

‘Quentin?’ a voice called from the house. ‘Quentin, are you out there?’

He turned to see Eleanor standing under the overhang of the side door at the top of the garden. He spun back round to Renata just as the clouds cleared, the moonlight once again lending itself to the rain-swept garden.

She was gone.

30

Renata stood staring at the hair clip. She had to save it. The treacherous things had been slowly escaping over the past months, until now only the current cluster in her head remained – and this final clip. Smearing her hair away from her face wasn’t enough. Loose strands still floated in her periphery, but she had to control herself. She had to remind herself what really mattered. She pocketed the final clip and locked the front door, checked the window shutters, and returned to the cellar. The cold air added to the chill of her clothes, still wet from her excursion to Rye’s manor, but this was of no consequence. All that mattered was the book.

She’d slipped back into a life of writing with little effort. Inspiration no longer floated out of reach like dust in a sunbeam, instead insisting on realisation. Renata was nothing more than the vessel for its delivery.

What’s more, the chapters were materialising mostly complete. The first draft of a novel was meant to resemble an over-spiced dish; the essential ingredients were there, but buried within a bloated version of its final form. A dish you could remake, holding back on the spices and allowing the thing to speak for itself, whereas with a novel you had to pick out the offending spice grain by grain. But within the pages churned out by Sylvia Wakefield’s typewriter, something different was happening. The thing was coming into existence practically fully formed as fast as a court transcript. With fresh eyes she’d read over previous chapters, pencil in hand, ready to scribble the usual amendments, but had been astonished to find barely anything needing altered.

The dish was spiced almost to perfection.

A blast of inspiration where there’d been none. Focus sharpened to such a degree as to produce a final draft in place of a first. What had changed? What was different? The answer was obvious. It was all thanks to the girl in the basement.

Renata lowered her hands from the keys, took a sip of water, then stepped in front of Sandie. Out cold. She held up the glass and let its contents trickle over the girl’s head, waking her from the sweet mercy of unconsciousness.

‘Puh-please, Renata,’ she stammered, her mutilated gums quivering.

Renata scraped her chair across the concrete and sat in front of the shivering girl. ‘I had a brother once, Miss Rye,’ she said, picking at the palms of her hands. ‘You and I may have been around the same age when he died.’

‘Please, the PAIN, it’s—’

‘He imparted upon everybody a kind of joy I’d seen nowhere else. To everyone, he was an angel.’ She leant forward. ‘Everyone, except me.’

‘I…don’t think I can take it much—’

‘Only I knew the truth. All the agony of my life, and now the agony of yours, spawned from that truth. Your wounds are nothing compared to the pain I’ve endured. You’ve done so well, you still are, but you have some way to go. The truth, my moth, I need you to—’

‘I’ve TOLD you the truth. I’ve told you EVERYTHING,’ screamed Sandie. ‘What else do you WANT?’ Her body shook against the chair, the cable ties burrowing deeper into the fleshy trenches embedded in her wrists. Renata watched the teenager’s rage ebb as her lack of energy caught up with her emotional turbulence. ‘Please, I’m begging you. All this, it has to be some…mistake.’

‘MISTAKE?!’ Renata screamed. ‘The only mistake was using my pain as inspiration for a damned BOOK.’

‘Book? What book? Is this…to do with my Dad?’

Renata stood, rubbing the sides of her head. ‘You know, Miss Rye, moths have a remarkable sense of smell.’ She gazed at the cloudy nests lining the ceiling. ‘The female lures potential mates with a scent that promises sex. I read of an experiment where a male is said to have followed such a scent six miles, only to find he’d followed it right into a scientist’s pheromone trap.’ She turned to Sandie. ‘I remember writing to you, little moth, laying that scent and