Sometime after three o’clock in the morning, when I had been lying in bed for a long time, I heard fumbling at the door of my apartment. After a few tries a key turned in the lock, and a band of whitish light from the corridor widened on my sitting-room floor. “Mikey?” Dina whispered.
I stayed still. The band of light shrank to nothing, and the door clicked closed. Careful steps across the floor, stage-tiptoeing; then her silhouette in my bedroom doorway, a slim condensation of blackness, swaying a little with uncertainty.
“Mikey,” she said, just above a whisper this time. “Are you awake?”
I closed my eyes and breathed evenly. After a while Dina sighed, a small exhausted sound like a child after a long day playing outside. “It’s raining,” she said, almost to herself.
I heard her sitting down on the floor and pulling off her boots, the thump of each of them on the laminate flooring. She climbed into bed beside me and pulled the duvet over us, tucking the edges in tight. She nudged her back against my chest, insistently, until I put my arm around her. Then she sighed again, snuggled her head deeper into the pillow and tucked the point of her coat collar into her mouth, ready for sleep.
All those hours Geri and I had spent asking her questions, over all those years, that was the one we had never been able to ask. Did you pull away, at the edge of the water, waves already wrapping round your ankles; did you twist your arm out of her warm fingers and run back, into the dark, into the hissing marram grass that closed around you and hid you tight from her calling? Or was that the last thing she did, before she stepped off that far edge: did she open her hand and let you go, did she scream to you to run, run? I could have asked, that night. I think Dina would have answered.
I listened to the small noises of her sucking on her collar, to her breathing slowing and deepening into sleep. She smelled of wild cold air, cigarettes and blackberries. Her coat was sodden with rain, soaking through my pajamas and chilling my skin. I lay still, looking into the dark and feeling her hair wet against my cheek, waiting for the dawn.
Acknowledgments
I owe huge thank-yous to a lot of people: Josh Kendall at Viking, Ciara Considine at Hachette Books Ireland and Sue Fletcher at Hodder & Stoughton, for being the kind of editors every writer dreams of having; Clare Ferraro, Ben Petrone, Meghan Fallon and everyone at Viking; Breda Purdue, Ruth Shern, Ciara Doorley and everyone at Hachette Books Ireland; Swati Gamble, Emma Knight, Jaime Frost and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton; the wonderful fairy godmothers at the Darley Anderson Agency, especially Maddie, Rosanna, Zoe, Kasia, Sophie and Clare; Steve Fisher of Agency for the Performing Arts; Rachel Burd, for copyediting with a detective’s eye for detail; Dr. Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for answering questions that have probably got him on some kind of list; Alex French, for the computer-y bits, both on the page and off; David Walsh, who is responsible for all the correct bits of police procedure and none of the incorrect ones; Oonagh “Sandbox” Montague, Ann-Marie Hardiman, Kendra Harpster, Catherine Farrell, Dee Roycroft, Mary Kelly, Susan Collins and Cheryl Steckel, for laughs, talks, pints, hugs and lots of other good things; David Ryan, who made me put this in Wingdings; my parents, Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi (without whom this book would have been finished around 2015) and David French; and, as always and in more ways than I can count, my husband, Anthony Breatnach.
Also by Tana French
Faithful Place
The Likeness
In the Woods
Tana French, Broken Harbour
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