“Yes.” Lizzie realised that her fingers were knotted together tightly with tension. She sat forward, deliberately unlocking them and wrapping her hands about her own coffee mug. The heat of it was soothing.

“Johnny and I talked about lots of things last night,” she said slowly. “How he was feeling about Amelia’s death, his parents, Dudley...” She rubbed her eyes. They felt gritty and sore this morning, as though she had spent the night in a smoky room. “I thought he just wanted to talk to someone who was a step removed from everything, you know?” She looked at Arthur. “You’re all dealing with the grief as well, and you in particular are trying to hold everything together and you’re worried about Johnny...” She smiled at him. “I thought perhaps Johnny needed a break from all that and space to talk.” She took a breath. “Well, I suppose he did, but that wasn’t all.”

Arthur was watching her, his gaze steady and perceptive. “What happened?”

“For a start, Johnny told me that he and Amelia had been telepathic,” Lizzie said bluntly. She looked at Arthur, waiting for a reaction, but he said nothing. She could see what Johnny had meant about him being the strong and silent type; he had such a good poker face.

Arthur stirred at last. “You did cover a lot of ground,” he said.

“You think?” Lizzie said sarcastically.

Arthur laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be unforthcoming.”

“Yeah, you did,” Lizzie said and Arthur spread his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“All right,” he said. “I only hesitated because...” He stopped, shrugged. “I guess I always feel wrong-footed with you because we have this strange psychic thing going on and I’m just not really comfortable with any of that stuff...” He made a slight, dismissive gesture. “Anyway, it’s true about the telepathy in the sense that Johnny and Millie always seemed to know what the other was thinking or where the other one was. They would do some curious sort of party trick where one of them would think of a word and they would both write it down and it would be the same. It was uncanny.”

“OK,” Lizzie said, “that’s interesting. I thought it must be true but I wanted to be sure.”

“I didn’t want to believe it at first,” Arthur admitted, “because I couldn’t understand it.” He sat back in the big chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “After a while, though, I got used to it. It was just Millie and Johnny—just the way they were, like Anna gets belligerent when she’s unhappy. It was a part of their characters and their relationship.” His gaze came up to hers, suddenly very direct. “I’d never experienced telepathy myself, though, until you touched me. I don’t like feeling you can read my mind whenever you choose.”

Lizzie’s heart jumped in her chest. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about us?” she said. “But since you brought it up, I don’t like it any more than you do. It’s never happened to me before. I usually read objects, not people, and I don’t even enjoy doing that.” She could feel herself becoming hot and bothered under Arthur’s steady dark stare.