“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
“After that, even if Lexie had come home after all, I don’t know if we . . .”
Her voice trailed off. I turned round and found her watching me, closer than I’d expected. “You don’t sound like her,” she said. “You don’t even move like her. Are you anything like her at all?”
“We had some things in common,” I said. “Not everything.”
Abby nodded. After a moment she said, “I’d like you to leave now.”
I had my hand on the doorknob when she said, suddenly and almost unwillingly, “You want to hear something strange?”
It was getting dark; her face looked like it was fading away, into the dim room. “One of the times I rang Rafe, he wasn’t in that club or whatever; he was home, on the balcony of his apartment. It was late. We talked for a while. I said something about Lexie—that I still miss her, even though . . . in spite of everything. Rafe made some flip comment about having too much fun to miss anyone; but before he said it, before he answered, there was this little pause. Baffled. Like it took him a second to figure out who I was talking about. I know Rafe, and I swear to God he almost said, ‘Who?’ ”
Upstairs, half muffled by the ceiling, a phone burst into “Baby Got Back” and someone thumped across the floor to answer it. “He was pretty drunk,” Abby said. “Like I told you. Still, though . . . I can’t stop wondering. If we’re forgetting each other. If in another year or two we’ll all have been wiped right out of each other’s minds; gone, like we never met. If we could pass on the street, within inches, and not even blink.”
“No pasts,” I said.
“No pasts. Sometimes”—a quick breath—“I can’t see their faces. Rafe and Justin, I can handle it; but Lexie. And Daniel.”
I saw her head turn, her profile against the window: that snub nose, a stray strand of hair. “I loved him, you know,” she said. “I would have loved him as hard as he’d let me, for the rest of my life.”
“I know,” I said. I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack. Instead I got the photocopies back out of my bag and flipped through them—I practically had to hold them against my nose, to see—until I found the streaky color copy of that snapshot: the five of them, smiling, wrapped in falling snow and silence, outside Whitethorn House. “Here,” I said, and held it out to Abby.
Her hand, pale in the near-darkness, reaching out. She went to the window, tilted the page to the last of the light.
“Thanks,” she said, after a moment. “I’ll keep this.” She was still there, looking at it, when I closed the door.
* * *
After that I hoped I’d dream about Lexie, just every now and then. She’s fading from the others’ minds, day by day; soon she’ll be gone for good, she’ll be only bluebells and a hawthorn tree, in a ruined cottage where no one goes. I figured I owed her my dreams. But she never came. Whatever it was that she wanted from me, I must have brought it to her, somewhere along the way. The only thing I dream of is the house, empty, open to sun and dust and ivy; scuffles and whispers, always just one corner away; and one of us, her or me, in the mirror, laughing.
This is the one thing I hope: that she never stopped. I hope when her body couldn’t run any farther she left it behind like everything else that tried to hold her down, she floored the pedal and she went like wildfire, streamed down night freeways with both hands off the wheel and her head back screaming to the sky like a lynx, white lines and green lights whipping away into the dark, her tires inches off the ground and freedom crashing up her spine. I hope every second she could have had came flooding through that cottage like speed wind: ribbons and sea spray, a wedding ring and Chad’s mother crying, sun-wrinkles and gallops through wild red brush, a baby’s first tooth and its shoulder blades like tiny wings in Amsterdam Toronto Dubai; hawthorn flowers spinning through summer air, Daniel’s hair turning gray under high ceilings and candle flames and the sweet cadences of Abby’s singing. Time works so hard for us, Daniel told me once. I hope those last few minutes worked like hell for her. I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.
Acknowledgments
I owe huge thank-yous to more people every time. The amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Zoë, Emma, Lucie and Maddie; three incredible editors, Kendra Harpster at Viking Penguin, Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton and Ciara Considine at Hodder Headline Ireland, for making this book so many times better; Clare Ferraro, Ben Petrone, Kate Lloyd and all at Viking; Breda Purdue, Ruth Shern, Ciara Doorley, Peter McNulty and all at Hodder Headline Ireland; Swati Gamble, Tara Gladden, Emma Knight and all at Hodder & Stoughton; Jennie Cotter at Plunkett Communications; Rachel Burd, for the razor-sharp copy-edit; David Walsh, for answering a wild variety of questions about police procedure; Jody Burgess, for Australia-related info, corrections and ideas, not to mention Tim Tams; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for medical info; my brother, Alex French, for tech and other support; Oonagh Montague, for generally being great; Ann-Marie Hardiman, for her academic input; David Ryan, for his completely academic input; Helena Burling; all at PurpleHeart Theatre Company; the BB, for helping me to bridge the culture gap again; and, of course, my parents, David French and Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi, for a lifetime’s worth of support and faith.
In some places, where the story seemed to require it, I’ve taken liberties with facts (Ireland doesn’t, for example, have a Murder squad). All errors, deliberate or otherwise, are mine.