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Pip wakes up and thinks she must be dead.
The world around her is all bright and empty and blank. Her whole body is corpse-stiff. Rigor mortis, she thinks dimly, set in with full force. If she can tough it out for a few more hours she’ll go limp and soft again. She doesn’t want a few more hours; her head hurts. So instead she comes to slowly.
No, she realizes then, it’s not the white light — just a line of fluorescent bulbs against a gray paneled ceiling. White sheets, white plastic. Her own hands, pale as she rubs them over her sore eyes.
Then she turns her head and sees him, on a chair in the corner, knees pulled up to his chest and his dark head bent over his phone screen. Pip’s heartbeat, still sluggish with sleep, sparks back to life. She must not be dead, if Ravi is here. A pulsing beacon of warmth in this cold, hollow room.
Her throat is so dry, her tongue clinging thickly to the roof of her mouth, and she feels her lips pull and crack when she parts them to speak. Her voice comes out hoarse, strangled. Like those cold fingers are still wrapped around her throat. “Ravi?”
He looks up immediately, lets his phone clatter to the chair beside him. As he meets her gaze his face breaks open into a smile. “Hey, trouble,” he says softly. “Welcome back to the world of the living.”
She rasps something like, “What are you doing here?”
“Been here off and on. You probably don’t remember.” He stands from the chair and crosses the room to kneel by her bed. “It’s been a couple days. You keep sort of half-waking.”
“Oh.” Pip lets her eyes fall closed again, just for a moment; they’re so swollen, so heavy, and so is her head, and she could just slip back into sleep again… But no, because Ravi is here, and she wants to see him, wants him to make it better like he always does. She forces her eyes back open. “I feel bad,” she whispers.
“I know. It’s okay.” He’s whispering, too, and she’s grateful for the stillness, her head still throbbing against every sound. He folds one arm up on the edge of her bed, leans his chin on his wrist. “Doc said you might be disoriented. You’re gonna be okay, just take it slow.”
She nods, as much as she can make the muscles in her neck move. The room around them starts to fade into focus: here a TV screen on the wall, there a vase of limp flowers on the table by her bed, monitors, cabinets, the smell, sterile and plasticky. Oh, right, that was it. She’s in hospital.
She lets her gaze fall back to Ravi. His face is clear and bright and the rest of the world slips away again. He brushes her fringe away from her eyes, fingers featherlight against her skin, but the contact sends a crackle of electricity down her sternum. “You gave us all a scare, Sarge,” he murmurs.
A scrap of memory begins unfolding itself at the back of her head: cold fingers, and cold, damp leaves, and Ravi’s arms around her, warm and strong and safe, the heat of his voice against her ear, the sirens scraping through the trees, and Becca—
“Becca,” she says suddenly, the memory bursting open. “Becca, she put — she’s the one who… Andie—”
She trails off in a hiccuping gasp, and Ravi’s shushing her, fingers stroking through her hair. “I know. It’s all sorted, Pip. Hawkins took Becca in — she confessed, she’s going to be all right. And… they found Andie.”
“Andie? Where?”
“The septic tank. At the farmhouse, just like you said. You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“That’s okay, that happens. It was the last thing you said to me before you blacked out.”
He leans his cheek to his forearm and gives her a little smile, his eyes tracing the lines of her face. She must look a sight — her puffy eyes, her cracked lips, her greasy hair and greasy forehead, the papery smock they’d given her crinkling unflatteringly around her collarbone — and suddenly she wishes he wasn’t seeing her like this, wants him not to think of her as this mess of a girl in a hospital bed. But his gaze is so warm, so full of relief as he looks at her, and she gets the impression that none of it matters to him. That he’s happy to see her no matter what she looks like. She’s never had that thought about a boy before.
“Thanks for being here,” she mumbles.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Is my mum really mad?”
“Probably. I think you’ll get away with it though, because of the near-death experience and everything.”
“Don’t joke, Ravi, I almost got murdered.”
“I have to joke about it,” he says. “I’d go to pieces otherwise.”
His eyes are wide and dark and deep, his lashes long and delicate beneath the bold line of his brow. He’s beautiful, she realizes then; has he always been so pretty? And their faces are so close together, she could just—
The door creaks open, and Ravi turns away.
“Hey,” says Pip’s father, “look who’s up!”
The whole room brightens again at the sound of his voice, and Pip fights to focus her eyes on his face. “Dad,” she whispers, wanting to cry again.
“Hi, pickle.” He’s holding things in both hands — a cup, a paper bag, his phone between two fingers — and he drops all of it to the empty chair to gather her into his arms, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “How are you feeling?”
She shakes her head, feeling her face beginning to crumple, and hides her eyes against his shirt. “Oh, kiddo,” he murmurs, “it’s all right, now.”
“She just woke up a couple minutes ago,” she hears Ravi say quietly from the other side of the bed. “I think she’s kind of overwhelmed.”
“Ah.”
Pip pulls away, determined to keep it together. She swipes weakly at her eyes with the back of her hand, which she doubts makes much of a difference. “Where’s Mum?”
“Grabbing lunch with Josh. We’ve been doing shifts, the whole lot of us. Cara too.”
He reaches over Pip and hands Ravi a lidded paper cup, the teabag label dangling against its side. “Ravi.”
“Thank you, Mr. Amobi.”
“It’s Victor, eh, young man? We talked about this.”
“Victor. Sorry.” Ravi ducks his head, a smile pulling at his mouth, and meets Pip’s eyes again. “You want some tea, Pip?”
And suddenly the thought of tea seems so very wrong to Pip, the damp smell of it turning her stomach, and whatever is left down there begins crawling up her throat again. “No,” she manages, “no tea.”
Ravi puts it together before she can: Becca, the Rohypnol. “No, of course not. Sorry.”
He turns away from her again and rifles through a bag — her bag, she registers, her bronze rucksack — and emerges with her water bottle. “At least have some water, though?”
They help her sit up; her dad pulls her hair into a loose braid as she sips at the bottle. Ravi’s hand stays on her free one, fingers entwined beneath the blankets, circling his thumb over her palm. Pip wonders if her dad has noticed, and then decides she doesn’t care. She feels so much older now, after everything, like the EPQ has aged her by years in the span of a month. Being almost-murdered will do that to a person. And anyway, she’s broken so many rules in her search for the truth; what’s one more for a boy she likes?
And she does like Ravi. And she wants to hold his hand. And she doesn’t want her life to go back to how it was before.
Leanne Amobi opens the front door and says “Hi, Ravi,” like she’s been expecting him.
He’d thought Pip’s mum would be more surprised to see him here, not even a full day after Pip came home. The investigation’s over; he has no reason to keep hanging around. But here he is, on their doorstep, with a Tupperware of curry.
“Hi,” he says. “Um, my mum made you some curry.”
“That’s very kind of her. We love your mum’s curry.” She takes the container from him; they still haven’t returned the last two, but he can hardly blame them with everything that’s happened. “Are you coming in? Pip’s upstairs.”
Ravi wants to see her so badly, his heart lurching at the sound of her name. But he plays it cool, cool as he takes off his shoes and lines them up against the wall, cool as he ruffles Josh’s hair and calls hello to Victor, cool as he climbs the stairs to Pip’s room, the dozenth time he’s done so but the first he thinks his heartbeat might be echoing off the walls. She’s curled up in her bed, the laptop he lent her open on the duvet. “Pip?”
She looks up then, finding him in her doorway, and smiles. “Hey, Ravi.”
Ravi breaks. He rushes for her, falling to his knees at her bedside again and folding her up in his arms, like she might disappear again if he goes another moment without holding her. She wraps her arms around him, too, one of her hands trailing up the back of his neck to run through his hair.
“How are you feeling?” he whispers into her shoulder.
“Yeah, good. I mean, not really, but — considering.”
She pulls away a little to look him in the eyes, all the haziness from the hospital gone from her gaze. “You?”
Ravi disentangles himself, sits down across from her on her bed. Her cheeks are a little pink; his must be, too. He scratches at the back of his head. “Bit of a mess.”
“Yeah. Me too.” Pip reaches out and presses her finger to the space beneath his eye. He knows the skin is dark there, shadowed half-moons. “Have you not been sleeping?”
He shrugs, taps his forehead. “Nah. Too much going on up here, I guess.”
“It’s over now.”
“Tell that to my mum. She’s going to be making you all curry for the next decade.”
“Well, good. My mum’s curry could probably land me in hospital again.”
She gives him a weak smile. He remembers again that she almost died this week, the thought arcing through his stomach in a cold plunge. God, he’d been so terrified; the sight of Pip limp and lifeless on the ground is burned into his memory, all the fight draining from her eyes as he’d pulled her into his arms. He can’t get it out of his head. It circles his brain every time he closes his eyes. One of all sorts of things that stop him from sleeping lately. No, he thinks quickly, but he’s too late: there’s the image of Sal’s head wrapped up in a plastic bag springing to his mind again.
“Yeah,” he says faintly, “let’s save that honor for the murderers of Little Kilton.”
“Reckon I’m safe, then. Can’t be that many of them wandering round.”
Pip, a couple days removed from death’s door, sitting cross-legged on her bed and joking about murder. Ravi’s heart feels too big for his chest.
“Hey,” she says then, “I know you just got in, but do you fancy a walk?”
October has faded into November, and a nagging chill seeps through the woods now, the sky beyond the branches a landscape of rolling grays. The leaves beneath their feet have gone brittle and dry; the whole ground crackles as Pip and Ravi tread them back into the damp earth. It’s the first time Pip has walked these woods that she hasn’t wondered if she’s stepping over Andie Bell’s bones. It’s the first time Ravi isn’t passing through the place where his brother took his own life.
Pip is still weak on her legs after the hospitalization, and she leans into his side every now and then as they walk. She’s drawn to him like a moth to a lamp, savoring the brush of her skin against his, his warm eyes and warm smiles when he glances down at her, the scent of him, so familiar now, overtaking the damp smell of the forest as she leans in close. She hadn’t, during the investigation, given herself time to consider any of these things she likes about Ravi. Now it’s all she can think about.
“Are your parents okay?” she asks him. “With Sal, and everything?”
“Dunno. It’s a lot.”
It’s complicated, is what he means. For as much relief as it brought the Singhs, finding out about Sal has torn open all their old wounds again, their buried grief welling back up to the surface like blood from a cut. His parents are hesitant to grab on to the fragile joy of it; Ravi, too, can’t get his head all the way round it. Especially because avenging his brother’s death nearly brought about Pip’s own.
Pip hums to let him know she understands. Ravi says, gentler this time, “Are you okay?”
She shrugs, kicks at the leaves. It sounds so stupid now, in the grand scheme of everything. “Just thinking about Barney.”
“He was a good boy.”
“He was.”
It’s so gentle that she nearly doesn’t feel it, that first brush of Ravi’s fingers against her own. He turns their palms together, tentative, like she’s a bird he might scare off. His hand is warm and a bit clammy. Pip gives herself a moment. Then she grips it back.
“Ravi,” she starts, but she doesn’t know how to say what she means. For once she’s all out of words.
“Pip,” he replies, with a half-smile.
He thinks it’s a joke, it strikes her then; he thinks everything’s a joke. Ravi had been so serious when she met him, so sober. It had taken time to open him up. Pip understands him a little better now — what makes him tick. She cherishes the secret of it. If Little Kilton won’t have him, that’s their loss. Ravi is a marvel. Ravi is earnest and he’s funny and he’s kind, and he’d let her in and memorized how she liked her tea, and then he’d come back for her, saved her life. How lucky is she, for a boy like that to be holding her hand? How stupid is he to take it? Pip can’t tell now if he’s so thick that he really doesn’t know where she’s going, or so clever that he’s already got there.
But he came back for her, she thinks again. She knows that, too.
Pip decides to be pragmatic: one way to find out. So she leans up and kisses him.
It’s chaste, a brief brush of lips, quickly before she can lose her nerve. Ravi looks a little stunned as she pulls back. She thinks for a second that she’s made a horrible mistake — but then he’s lifting his hand to her face, his palm cradling her cheek and his fingers splayed out across the shell of her ear, and he’s ducking his head and pressing his mouth to hers and he’s kissing her back and it’s real, it’s now, it’s him. Pip has never been kissed before, not like this. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands, when to breathe, how to stop her teeth from clacking against his, but none of it matters, because he’s Ravi, and she trusts him with her life, and he makes everything good, and she likes him so much.
They only part again because Ravi is smiling his perfect smile, too broad to keep his lips on hers properly. Pip presses her forehead to his, delighting in the hot breath they’re sharing in the space between their mouths. “Stop smiling, you’re spoiling it,” she whispers, and his grin only grows.
“Sorry, Sarge.” He nudges his nose against hers. “So I take it you fancy me, then?”
“Depends,” she says hoarsely. “Could you come round to taking your tea black?”
“Is that a dealbreaker?”
“Probably not,” she tells him, and then she dares loop her arms around his neck. “Why? Do you fancy me?”
“For a detective, you’re not very observant.”
“Arse,” she says. Ravi laughs, tucking a stray piece of her fringe behind her ear.
“All right. Yes, Pip, I like you.” He’s beaming, his eyes bright with that same golden glow swelling in her own chest. “Do you want that in writing or something?”
Pip bites back the urge to kiss him silly. “No, that was fine.”
They’re teasing, bantering like this is all fine, but Ravi’s face is pink up to the tops of his ears. Pip feels her own cheeks burning something fierce. She thinks she might pass out again, lightheaded with it.
“I’d reckon you’d need it for your murder board, the evidence,” Ravi’s saying, and Pip squeezes his shoulders to steady herself, digging her fingers into the divots of his knit jumper. “A paper trail of me liking you. Y’know, pin it up there, give it a piece of string—”
“Shut up,” she tells him. But she likes the idea of it — a hard fact, an indisputable truth. April 20th: Andie Bell disappears. April 25th: Sal is found dead. November 3rd: Ravi likes Pip.
He takes her hand again as they walk home; this time it feels sure. She sees it in her head, a little loop of red string. Pip to Ravi and back again.