Copyright

Killer Reads an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Killer Reads 2019

Copyright © A J Grayson 2019

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

A J Grayson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008321024

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008321031

Version: 2019-03-04

Dedication

To those who have suffered:

A tribute

For David who didn’t make it: the fondest of memories.

And for Rachael, once again.

Don ’t give up.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

He’s hiding something …

Prologue

Part One

Beginnings

Chapter 1. Amber

Chapter 2. Amber

Chapter 3. David

Chapter 4. Amber

Chapter 5. David

Chapter 6. Amber

Chapter 7. David

Chapter 8. Amber

Chapter 9. Amber

Chapter 10. David

Chapter 11

Chapter 12. Amber

Chapter 13. David

Chapter 14. Amber

Chapter 15. Amber

Chapter 16. David

Chapter 17. Amber

Chapter 18

Chapter 19. Amber

Chapter 20

Chapter 21. Amber

Chapter 22. Amber

Part Two

Twenty-Three Years Ago

Chapter 23. David, Aged 17 With The Counsellor

Chapter 24. David With The Admissions Officer

Chapter 25. David

Part Three

The Present

Chapter 26

Chapter 27. Amber

Chapter 28. Amber

Chapter 29. David

Chapter 30

Chapter 31. Amber

Chapter 32. Amber

Chapter 33

Chapter 34. Amber

Chapter 35. Amber

Chapter 36. Amber

Chapter 37. Amber

Part Four

Two-and-a-Half Years Ago

Chapter 38. David

Chapter 39. David

Chapter 40. David

Chapter 41. David

Chapter 42. David

Part Five

The Present

Chapter 43. Amber

Chapter 44. Amber

Chapter 45

Chapter 46. Amber

Chapter 47. Amber

Chapter 48. Amber

Chapter 49. Amber

Chapter 50. David

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53. Amber

Chapter 54. Amber

Chapter 55. Amber

Chapter 56. Amber

Part Six

New Lives

Chapter 57. David

Chapter 58. David

Chapter 59. David

Chapter 60. Emma Fairfax

Chapter 61. Amber

Chapter 62. David

Part Seven

Finale

Chapter 63. Amber

Chapter 64. David

Chapter 65. Amber

Chapter 66. Amber

Chapter 67. Amber

Chapter 68. Amber

Chapter 69. Amber

Chapter 70. David

Chapter 71. Amber

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by AJ Grayson

About the Publisher

He’s hiding something from me. I know he is. He’s hiding something, and it’s going to change everything.

There’s nothing I can pinpoint; no concrete, indisputable fact that makes this a certainty, but I’m certain all the same.

He’s lying. And he’s never done that before.

I’m not sure what to make of it. It could be nothing. Could even be good. Men hide things, usually because they’re cowards, but sometimes because they think we want them to. They consider it wit. Maybe he’s hiding a necklace. Or earrings. Or tickets for a surprise holiday, maybe back to the coast again. He knows I always like the coast, especially in the springtime.

But I don’t really think it’s any of those, not if I’m honest. My skin is a pepper of fire and suspicion.

His briefcase is in the walk-in closet of our little bedroom. I know it’s always locked, off limits, but he never holes it away or tries to conceal it. Yet today I found it, unprompted – a pair of synthetically shiny gym shorts slung over the top, as if this would somehow mask its shape. As if I wouldn’t be able to see.

He’s lying. He’s lying.

My beautiful man is lying …

Prologue

The first body in the water was a woman’s. She was a beautiful creature, despite her unfortunate condition. Her black hair was cropped short. Her cheeks were soft. She had rose-painted lips. Above her body, stranded forever in place, the clouds floated smoothly across the sky.

The river, by all accounts, received her body with reverence. It seemed, through some wordless comprehension of nature, to know this was the arrangement and would, for a time, continue to be. ‘Everything in its appointed place,’ it seemed to affirm, and that, perhaps, made things a little more right in the world. Or wrong.

It’s sometimes hard to know the difference.

The last body in the water would be mine.

That’s a hard thing to admit, and harder to accept, but it’s the way things go. The vision, crystal and clear. My golden hair, swaying in the motion that water always has near the shore. My clothes untorn. An altogether different appearance in death than that girl. A stripe in my flesh, bleeding crimson into the water around me. My fingertips, as always, with their nails nibbled down to the skin. My blue eyes open.

It’s an odd thing, to play the observer at one’s own death. Part of me is ashamed, certain I should feel more emotion. There should be anger. Grief. But then, how can I feel those things, really? Of course the shore must be the end. Of course there is water and silence. My story was probably always going to end like this. Like most, the final page was presumably written long before the first, the conclusion the one sturdy fixture towards which everything before it was always going to lead. However they begin, there’s no story that doesn’t finish with the end.

So I see it. Real. Certain. I float in the water, my light blouse transparent against my body, suggestive in ways that, in life, would be provocative but which in death evokes only pity. I’m dead, and I’m quiet, and I’m screaming. My lips are stalled a lifeless pale, but I’m screaming. Screaming with all the breath that is no longer there.

PART ONE

BEGINNINGS

1
Amber

Every morning, as I stand in the bathroom and gaze into the mirror, my eyes look back and taunt me. The fact that their colour doesn’t match my name has always disappointed me, and it’s like they know this, and are so prominent on my slightly freckled face purely as a way to rub it in.

They should be amber, and they should be magnificent. Instead I possess the name, feminine and graceful, forever without the matching gaze. Amber on the tongue, but in the eyes, cursed with blue.

This is overstatement, of course. Something I’m prone to. I don’t genuinely consider my blue eyes a curse, and others have sometimes even found them beautiful. ‘They’re gorgeous, Amber, like twin pools of the sea’ – a splendid compliment, though more than they deserve. They’re not the deep blue of royal porcelain or a navy blazer, but something softer. Just light enough, just bright enough to mark themselves out.

David loves them, too, and for that alone I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Maybe if my face had been punctuated by some other colour the first time we met, he wouldn’t have noticed me, wouldn’t have collided into ‘hello’ and that catchy smile, and all the romance that followed. Maybe, if I had the amber eyes I’ve always craved, I’d have ended up all alone.

I shrug, seeing them in the mirror now, and go about my familiar routine. Morning is morning, and every step is practised. The mascara shade is a light brown, harder to find than a person might think, and it complements a soft brush of Clinique’s cleverly named ‘Almost Powder’ in Neutral Fair. Understated, but just enough polish to let me feel like a well-cared-for piece of art, pleasing without being showy, which is what my mother taught me always to aim for. And mothers, as no one but mothers ever suggest, always know best.

But there’s a headache forming behind my eyes – and I can almost see it in the mirror, too, with the rest that’s visible there. A strange pulsing at the sides of my face, as if the pain has shape and can be caught in the reflection in the glass.

I blink twice, the blue orbs of my eyes disappearing and then reappearing before me. I can’t dwell on the pain in my head. It has long since become a customary feature of my days, and work starts in forty-five minutes. There’s no use dwelling on what can’t be changed.

Just keep going. And I do.

The routine concludes a few minutes later. My face is done, my hair brushed, and my teeth are the glistening off-white of Rembrandt Extra’s best efforts for a heavy coffee and tea drinker.

My feet, seemingly registering all this even ahead of my brain, are already moving me out of our teal-tiled bathroom towards the kitchen.

Like they’ve lives of their own.

By disposition, I’m not a morning eater. A cup of tea, I’ve always thought, is a perfectly complete meal before midday. Add milk and it’s two courses, and entirely satisfying. Recently, though, David has been trying to change my habits of a lifetime.

Because it’s good for you, Amber. It’s healthier. Trust me, you’ll grow to like it.

Sweetest of men, David, though on this front, at least, disastrously wrong.

A tall glass of the monstrosity he calls a ‘smoothie’ has been left on our kitchen’s Formica countertop. It’s his latest effort, fitted nicely into the current trends of our health-conscious West-Coast culture. Its shade is something close to the purple of a badly overripe plum, and he’s probably got plum in there, the ass, along with banana, and berries, and spinach and Christ in heaven knows what else. ‘The flavours mix together so well, you don’t even know what you’re drinking.’ The fact that this is a lie has never stopped him from saying it. The drinks taste exactly like what they are. Reality can’t be masked, not that well. What’s in the mix always makes itself known.

I take a single sip. It’s enough. I know David wants me to take at least two, to give it the honest college try, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Won’t. It’s simply beyond my strength to stomach the stuff, so the rest of the smoothie is down the drain in a colourful swirl, and I’m comforted by the fact that blended breakfasts flow out of existence so cleanly. If David were to cook me, say, eggs (something I loathe with an almost equal fervour to smoothies), the uneaten remains would be harder to conceal. We don’t have a disposal in the sink – the landlord suggests installing one would raise our rent $75 per month, which is simply shit – and the trash can would be obvious. Maybe I’d have to dig a hole out in the garden in which to conceal the evidence, but it seems like 365 days of uneaten eggs would get noticed some time before day 366.

I rinse out the glass and set it in the rack. There’s a note on the counter, next to a ring of condensation. ‘Morning, hon. Enjoy, and have a good one. Love you, -D.’ The blue ink of the ballpoint pen has met the moisture where the glass had stood, the lower curve of the ‘D’ blurring like a watercolour.

The note warms me. I’ve never particularly cared for ‘hon’ as a term of endearment, but from David’s lips, or his pen, the word is a little embrace. I’m smiling without really noticing the change in my face that produces it, and I’m thankful, too, because I have someone who can have this effect on me – who can make my cheeks bend and turn as if he were physically connected to the muscles beneath my skin, provoking my body to move in its most intimate of gestures.

Even if he does make smoothies.

There’s coffee left in the carafe – David makes a fresh pot every morning and always leaves me some – and I pour out half a cup to gulp down before I head for the door. Not tea, but it’ll do. Sadie’s already been walked and fed and is lolling with typical canine disinterest in the corner near the fridge.

‘Bye, Sades,’ I say, my first vocalised words of the morning. I’m nibbling a nail as I say them and the words come out misformed, but my girl knows her name. No children in our little family, though we’ve been casually trying for the past year at least, and Sadie does her best to fill that void. We’re no longer spring chickens, David and I – though I won’t hit forty for another two years, so I refuse yet to be labelled middle aged – but it’s starting to feel like our efforts in this area just aren’t going to lead anywhere. I suspect, sometimes, that Sadie may be as close to a child as I’m ever going to get, though in dog years she could easily be my mother.

She acknowledges my presence with a slightly lifted head and a huff, then lets her nose flop back to the ground. Her pink tongue is askew in her teeth. Her morning walk with David is enough to last her until I get home, and I’m certain she plans to nap for the bulk of the interim. The laziest dog in creation, and I love her.

A few moments later, I’m outside. The front door to our apartment building closes with a click, and I take in a deep breath of the morning air. The sun is already well over the hills, and the flowers that line the sidewalk are glowing. Gardenias fill my nostrils – a heavy, tactile scent, perfume and honey colliding at the back of my throat. A water feature chortles gently in the corner of the lot.

The day is beautiful. The sort of day we sometimes wonder if we’ll ever see, and usually don’t appreciate when we do. I try to soak it all in. Absorb it.

It’s almost enough to make me forget the throbbing that pulses at the side of my face, and the fire that threatens to burn away the edges of my vision.

2
Amber

I’m at the bookshop by 8.25 a.m., a full five minutes ahead of schedule. There was little traffic between Windsor, the quirkily British-sounding, northern California suburb town where David and I have set down our roots, and Santa Rosa, and I’ve got a heavy foot when there’s not a mass of stop-and-go cars before me. It’s an all too frequent occurrence on this tenmile stretch of Highway 101. My little ‘put-put’, as David calls it, might only have 104 horsepower beneath its hood, but I like to put every last one of them to work. Nothing says Modern Woman of Determination like a floored car maxing out its power at 77 miles per hour and getting passed by delivery vans and teens on mopeds.

The shop is already starting to bustle with the customary movements of the morning. A few customers are perusing the racks of new arrivals. The espresso counter has a line of eager attendees. The morning delivery of periodicals and papers has just been brought inside, the boxes waiting to be opened and sorted onto their shelves.

I love the place. I know that book sales are declining and paper going the way of the digital dodo, that Kindle reigns supreme and that there is a whole generation of people who’ve never held a physical book in their hands, but there is a romanticism to the bookshop that I can’t believe will ever truly disappear. The scent of the fresh pages mingled with the thick aroma of coffee, the beautiful hush punctuated by the subtle tones of friendly chatter. It’s a paradise. A little refuge from the noise of the world outside, with a thousand stories to tell and mental universes to expand.

Of course, it’s traditionally more of a young person’s milieu, or at least it was until young meant digital and books meant old-fashioned. There are more grey-haired heads in here these days than brown or blonde, though I haven’t yet spotted the first white streak on my own. Can’t be long until I do, though. I don’t feel a day over thirty – hell, I don’t really feel different to how I did when I was in my twenties – but there are going to be forty candles on my cake soon enough, and I can’t play the child forever. Forty. One of those round numbers nobody appreciates: no longer young, not yet venerable. And you have to live with it for a few years, since ‘the forties’ are much the same as forty itself, until you hit the edge of fifty and suddenly you’re catapulted from ‘in her prime’ to ‘middle aged’. Damn, if the categories aren’t a bitch.

But whatever age may be or mean, work in the bookshop is a joy. Enough in the way of responsibilities and activities to keep me busy, without becoming crushing. Stress isn’t something I crave, nor the ‘fast-paced action’ of a more pressing grind. Leave the mad rush to others. I crave the quiet. The solitude. The rhythm of a nicely patterned life.

The solitude, of course, is relative. One is never alone, even in the dim lighting of a small bookshop. I talk with the customers now and then, though the conversations are usually brief and rarely terribly personal. And I have colleagues, some of whom have become friends – an extension of the little family that David and I constitute at home.

‘Double-caf, half-fat, cooled down, no foam latté, as the lady ordered.’ As I approach my corner of the shop, I’m greeted by Mitch Tuttle, one of those collegiate family members and, in fact, the owner of the little shop. He says the words in his usual sing-song style. He’s sporting a tired pair of trousers, untended wrinkles long since transformed into permanent creases that spider out from his crotch and knees. A belt holds them in place, hidden somewhere beneath the paunch of a stomach wrapped in a badly patterned shirt. The stress of managing such a bustling hive of worldly activity, he regularly joked, had ravaged his otherwise classical good looks. A boss with a sense of humour is not the worst thing in the world.

But his timing is off. Mitch is jovial, now, at 8.25 am – a time of day when this is more or less inexcusable.

He’s carrying a paper cup in his enormous hands. There’s a smirk, two bushy, unkempt eyebrows coming almost together as a smile wrinkles the whole of his face. Too many wrinkles for a man who hasn’t yet seen fifty.

Of course, the drink he’s announced is all wrong.

‘Shit, Mitch, I take tea. Just black, plain, tea. A miracle this shop makes a profit at all, with you at the helm. You’ve got a memory for details like a sieve.’

I take the cup, wrapping both hands around its warmth and shaking my head. Tut tut, Mr Tuttle. But it’s a ritual, not frustration. We both know the familiar script and all the gestures that go along with it. ‘Not like it hasn’t been the same order every day since we met,’ I say.

‘Thought I’d be spontaneous, force you to try something new.’ He grins, his teeth uneven but spectacularly, unnaturally white. The peroxide blonde of the dental world.

My eyebrows aren’t as pronounced as his, but they’ll still mount a good rise when the moment calls for it, and I prop them up in mock disapproval. Then a sip of my drink – tea, despite Mitch’s pronouncement, strong and hot and exactly as I like it. Of course. And in a cup from Peet’s, which we’ve collectively decided has Starbucks outgunned on all counts. We’ve all long since grown tired of the coffee we brew in-house. That’s for the patrons. We ourselves will take something a little more refined, thank you.

‘Susan still keeping you to the new diet?’ I ask him. The script had run its course, and I’d noticed Mitch had opted out of his usual coffee and sported a cup with a teabag – orange-coloured, probably indicating something herbal and revolting – dangling out of its lid.

‘The fascist,’ he mutters, looking defeated. ‘If it hasn’t been brewed from a weed or a berry, I’m not allowed anywhere near it.’

‘Commiserations.’ I’m laughing as I answer. ‘I’m still getting smoothies.’ There’s no need to elaborate. Mitch knows the story and shakes his head empathetically. If there were more hair there, it would flop with the exaggerated motion.

He’s carrying two additional paper cups in a holder, filled with whatever contents are bound for their recipients on the far end of the shop, sighing for good measure but still smiling as he walks away. Big steps, lumbering but confident – a great, heaving land mass on the move. Mitch, needless to say, doesn’t cut the slimmest of figures, and I can see why Susan wants him on a diet. Still, poor thing. I probably shouldn’t refer to him as a land mass.

I’m momentarily captivated by the motion of this boisterous, generous man, hunting down the prey to serve as the targets of his daily good deeds. I catch the look of satisfaction that covers his creased face when he spots the smiles they offer in response, and for a moment feel the melancholy that comes from wondering why there aren’t more selfless souls like Mitch Tuttle’s in the world. And definitely more bosses. But I also catch the sly sleight of hand that flicks a donut from the counter into his grasp as he saunters back, and my devious smile is instantly back. I feel exonerated from the guilt of the heaving-land-mass reflection.

‘I know I said I wouldn’t nag you.’ I let my words stretch out as he approaches. My eyes point to the deep-fried treat poorly concealed in his grip.

‘A promise I’m glad you consider as inviolate as the oath that put that ring on your finger,’ he answers, motioning towards my hand, before I can go further. He steps into his small office at the side of the shop, divided from the floor by a glass wall, and plops his overweight frame into his seat. I can hear the donut drop onto the desk next to his herbal tea.

A second later, I’m quite certain, it’s gone.

Libra Rosa is hardly the largest bookshop in our part of the world. Even in a society where they’re fast disappearing, the Bay Area still has its share of some of the greats. Green Apple in San Francisco has branches scattered around the city, some covering multiple storeys and bringing in authors and speakers while cultivating book-sharing and the lovely art of the second-hand. Johnson’s in Berkeley caters to the hip. Iconoclasm in Marin fosters the new age, as do a half-dozen others like it. There’s a little bit of something for everyone. The only thing the shops share in common is the Californian-liberal ideal that they should be nothing at all like the high-octane bookstores of New York and ‘the big cities’. They’re quiet little holes-in-the-wall with small-town vibes and a pace deliberately laid-back to suit the pot-happy lethargy of the NorCal literary culture.

Libra Rosa is, among the mix, pretty standard. A tribute to its location in Santa Rosa – an oversized town just fifty-five miles north of San Francisco and the last opportunity for residence that San Fran careerists can reasonably consider for a daily commute – the shop has been shaped by Mitch into his vision of a perfect, if miniature, out-of-town literary tribute to the old Haight-Ashbury days. Rows of new books, stacks of classics, and a small section for the second-hand, with beanbags in corners, vinyl LPs on the wall and an overall atmosphere of being committed to life in 1965. Most of what we sell can be bought on Amazon, but Mitch has ingratiated himself with enough of the local community that the shop has a decent following who come in dribs and drabs throughout the day, never more than a handful at a time, though the addition of the coffee bar and seating area two years ago upped the daily visits a little.

In one corner of the shop, on the far left as one enters and barely visible from the glass frontage onto the street, is the periodicals section. My terrain. I have a small desk surrounded by rotating racks for the newspapers and fixed shelving for the magazines.

Periodicals are even less viable these days than books, given that almost every smartphone in existence carries their content in full colour and with instant access, but keeping up the periodicals corner is something of a hobby horse for Mitch. ‘It’s called print media, and print requires paper and ink.’ God love the man for more than just his kindness. I’m not a technophobe, and I browse the Net with the best of them. But the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times are just never the same on the screen. You need to be able to hold them, get the ink on your fingers. It’s a life experience not to be dismissed.

So I arrive each morning. I unbundle the packs and boxes, which feels almost like working in a proper, big shop in the city – except that I know the mailman who delivers them is called Bruce, a wooly-haired gentleman who’s been on the downtown route for twenty-six years and who delivers our items ‘promptly at the exact time I get here’, and follows the delivery with a twenty-minute linger over a double black coffee, which doesn’t quite seem full octane to me. Nevertheless, I set the papers into their assigned racks, glancing through the magazines as I place them on the old shelves. It’s a job with a slow pace, deliberately as much as a simple function of location, but with an upside: it allows me to read as I go and catch glimpses of the world’s reporting on life outside.

It usually takes me an hour or two, and then I settle into the routines of maintenance, selling, curating. And simply being present, as a shop without attendants is nothing more than a warehouse. Though a shop without customers is, too, and some days we barely pass that test. So I sit at my small desk, smile as guests enter the shop, answer questions when they have them – which on rare occasion are about books or papers, but more often about their children’s recent sporting success or a vague complaint about the state of politics, or another pothole on Main Street – and spend the many quiet moments between browsing the Internet that still has stories to tell even once I’ve read all the day’s papers through.

I have my own computer for that task, and I have to admit that as much as I cherish paper and ink, I do love this thing. The latest model, thinner than my calculator and an elegantly understated shade of what Apple optimistically calls gold. I can’t say that my previous model, whatever it was, had been all that bad; but I do love a shiny new thing, and the shinier the thing that’s new, the darker the memory of what it’s replaced. God bless Apple for keeping the shiny things coming. If I weren’t happily married and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, hadn’t announced himself as being the other way inclined, I could see myself having an extraordinarily torrid affair with that man.

Pinned to the wall beside my desk is a photo of David and me, taken a year and a half ago near Lake Berryessa, and another of David and Sadie both lying on their backs, bellies up, out in the backyard. Two frozen moments of happiness I keep right at eye level. Tacked around them are notes and posters and all the usual fare of a bookseller’s trade; but right in the centre, right at the core: two manifestations of bliss, and both with furry bellies.

I wrap my hands around my tea. One of the boxes from this morning’s delivery has already been cut open by someone else, and I reach over and grab out a copy of the Chronicle. I have a few minutes before I need to get to my chores. Right now, tea and a paper – a morning crafted for happiness.

And I’m at work.

Life is sometimes truly good.

A sip, and the tea is warm on my tongue. With a jostle of the newsprint page the day’s headlines leer up at me in bold black. Single-phrase proclamations, shouting their way into my attention. Speaking of the weather, the traffic, the political climate. Some of it interesting, most of it routine.

Ordinary.

Normal.

That’s usually how it is, just before the world changes.

3
David

Looking back, staring into the past from all that my present has become, I can honestly say that the world we inhabit is a mystery. I’ve never in all my life had to come more to grips with that fact than now. A mystery, and a puzzle.

I met her on Tuesday morning at 8.25 a.m.; I remember the timing exactly. The contours of my watch’s face, the position of its hands, I remember them in the same way poets remember the flowers on hillsides or the scents in the breeze on the days they experience love. Impossible to forget.

I’d been told a little about her. I was familiar with the kinds of details shared about individuals on a printed page, cutting a lifetime of reality down to basic facts: the length and colour of her hair, her height. Weight, at least approximately. As if these things mattered. Yet they were there to be had, and I had them in hand as I first walked in to meet her. Everything a man could possess to go on.

Except her. The experience of her simply couldn’t be compared to what I’d imagined. Or anything I’d ever experienced before. She was altogether more.

The first thing I noticed were her eyes. I’d never encountered eyes like those. I’ll never forget how they first moved me.

I think she knew, even then, that I saw something in them. That the sight of her captivated me. But, despite their potency, their vivid hue, it wasn’t their colour that captivated me. There are only so many colours eyes can take, and I’ve never found the variations to be all that engaging – whatever she or others might think.

It was their intensity. God, staring into them was like beholding a cry that had been given physical form. Her eyes were her plea, and they seemed to hold, just behind the shine of their lenses, an entire world that was screaming to be set free.

And then we spoke, and reality began to fall apart.

4
Amber

The change today came in an instant. My headache had been getting worse, despite the tea. It was still early, but the throbbing at my temples was becoming more than a mere distraction. It’s like this too often, though, and I’d already swallowed two pills to combat the customary. I’d be a Tylenol addict if they didn’t tell me it would melt my liver into goo, so I’m an ibuprofen addict instead, popping two or three at a time throughout the day, for the little good they do me.

I’d downed them in a single swallow, then set about my morning tasks. They hadn’t taken long, and the papers – which I’d already skimmed through – were now racked and the latest editions of the magazines placed prominently on their shelves. The boxes they’d come in were flattened and out back with the recycling, and I’d managed a handful of sales to the business types who wanted a paper to go with their croissant as they headed off to the office.

And then I was alone. The bliss of the job. I’d opened my laptop at a moment when the ebb and flow of the shop had been mostly flow, and called up a familiar selection of news feeds. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m in this little shop in this little city that makes me so keen on keeping up with the news. It hardly matters to me, most of it, but I read it with diligence.

My headache notwithstanding, I refocused my eyes on the computer screen. Minutes, maybe fifteen or twenty, had passed since I’d started my usual scanning, and thus far the online media wasn’t proving itself much more enticing than the day’s print versions I’d already perused.

The headlines were hardly works of art. I know a lot of effort goes into them by the poor saps whose job it is to dream up one-liners that make the boredom-inducing sound enticing. But effort isn’t always enough to breed interest.

STOCKS TRADE DOWN – BROKERS KEEP HOPES UP.

That, in the journalistic world, is apparently what passes for catchy. The down and the up; directional contrapposto. Whoever wrote that got full marks in Journalism 101.

BART TRAIN DELAYS THROW PASSENGER PATIENCE OFF THE RAILS.

This attempt to convey poignantly uninteresting content about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system under the guise of a catchy tagline – it’s an art. Like a record producer fronting an album with one catchy tune and filling the remaining eleven tracks with artless crap. By the time anyone hears them, the’ve already bought the record. (Though I can hear Tim Cook yelling at me now: ‘No one “buys a record” any more, Amber. It’s all about streaming, about personalized subscription!’ then smiling seductively and somehow charging me another $9.99 a month.)

CRACKS IN BRIDGE DIVIDE COUNTY OFFICIALS.

I’d paused at that one, tapping to see the paragraph-length summary. The concrete of a sixty-year-old bridge outside Napa, in our neighbouring county to the east, was suddenly the cause of ‘grave concern’ amongst the county administration (note the adjective ‘grave’ in a story that might involve tragedy: I read enough to know that’s strong copy), despite the fissure in the concrete having been visible for more than three decades.

I tapped my keyboard again, my waning interest spent.

Then, without any deliberate intention, my glance wandered upwards. A few headlines above the one I’d clicked, less than an inch away from scrolling off the top of the screen, a different caption grabbed me.

I can’t identify precisely how it did it – how it affected me. It was a spark, and it launched a fire in my spine that shot through me like badly wired electrics. Before I’d even taken full account of the words, I could feel the voltage in my head change.

I shoved my tea aside with a jolt, slammed the palm of my hand against the spacebar to stop the feed scrolling off the screen, and glued my eyes to the headline. I was barely aware that I had all but stopped breathing. My eyes didn’t want to focus.

The words were simple and unadorned.

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SHORELINE. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

And there it was, that buzzing at the surface of my scalp again. Electrics. An immediate tension in my chest.

There was nothing in the headline that should have caused such a reaction. It presented none of the witty word play of the other titles (wit, I have often observed, is generally disapproved of in writing about death, since almost nobody successfully navigates the line between banter and respectability). It was unfussy. A simple statement of fact.

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SHORELINE. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

I read it again, and again, and gradually became aware that my spine had gone rigid. I’m sure there was a thin film of sweat between my fingertips and the etched glass of the trackpad.

The noise of the bookshop seemed to have vanished, and if there was anyone left in the store, they had become invisible to my attention. My mind, drawn in by this headline for reasons I couldn’t explain, raced through the limited details that could be inferred from such a minuscule amount of text. ‘Foul play’ means possible homicide. Fine. I mean, horrible, of course; but comprehensible.

But my reaction, it was not comprehensible at all. I blinked, and my eyelids left trails as they rose back into their folds.

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON —

The words grabbed hold of me. Assaulted me. Inexplicably, at that instant, I wanted to scream out from the very depths of my belly.

Isn’t that the very strangest thing?

Then, with the shift of no more than a second, the agony fled. The headline was just a headline, clear and crisp on my screen with a stark lack of factual detail, and I was disinterested and dismissive and —

And it was back, as quickly as it had gone. My breath outpaced my pulse, my eyes clamped closed, and in an explosion of the unexplained, I couldn’t even make out the conclusion of my own thoughts. Though for a moment, just for a moment, I thought I heard them telling me that my world was coming to its end.

5
David

I was perched across from her, the day I met the woman that changed my life. I don’t know for how long. It doesn’t matter. I was in my government-issued moulded plastic chair, clipboard in hand, diagonally opposite her position in the little room.

I didn’t know who she really was then when we first began. I only knew what was in the official reports and my stack of references.

‘I’ve read your file, Miss.’ I listened to the doctor’s voice as he spoke directly to her, facing squarely across the metal table between them. ‘What the records say about you is pretty clear.’

He spoke in cold, formal phrases. He was a medical professional, of course, and of many years’ standing. But he was also an officer of the state, and she was not here under circumstances any would consider friendly.

Her expression didn’t change. Her eyes remained motionless. From my position in the shadows at the side of the room, I felt unnerved by her solidity.

‘We both know what’s brought you here,’ my superior added. Dr Marcello was an old hand at this, and I’d heard him make similar beginnings before. I craned my neck, trying to observe some emotion on the woman’s face.

‘Do you realize why you’re in this room, at this moment?’

A common formula of approach. Begin with a querying of the context; find out how much the person in front of you is willing to admit of their position, and proceed from there. With an assistant at the side, from the pharmaceutical wing, taking notes in silence in order to help with the medicinal diagnoses.

Thus far, Dr Marcello was keeping things by the book.

The woman said nothing. She was alone in the room, for all her expression would have suggested. She just stared through the walls into a space I couldn’t see.

‘You’re not here because you asked to be,’ Dr Marcello added, stating the obvious. No one came into that room by choice. Still, the comment might jog her.

Her eyes had begun to drift upwards, as if something on the ceiling was attracting her attention. My superior almost spoke again, but then a sound – nearly imperceptible – emerged from the woman’s lips.

‘Not … by … choice.’

It was the first time I heard her speak.

She was mimicking Dr Marcello’s speech, or so I thought, but still – her voice. Almost. She whispered the words, as if holding back a more personal moment.

I leaned forward in my chair, frustrated by the odd angle that kept me from gazing at her face-on. I tried to make out everything I could. She had short black hair, cropped and fine. Visible softness in her cheeks. Rose gloss on her lips that glistened in the fluorescent light as she whispered.

She was beautiful. It might have been wrong for me to think that way. Inappropriate to institutional objectivity. Too subjective and personal. But she was, and I noticed. Even from an angle, even out of reach. She was beautiful.

Dr Marcello remained impassive.

‘Call you tell me your name?’ he asked, hoping to elicit more words from her with a question that hardly required analysis.

The woman’s eyes fell back from the ceiling, straight into his. And then, to my shock, she swivelled her head and stared straight into mine.

Our first gaze. The moment my life changed.

‘My name,’ she said softly, ‘is Emma Fairfax.’

6
Amber

Somehow, the day has disappeared. I’m not sure how it’s happened. I’ve been in the bookshop since it began, going about my usual routine, and it doesn’t seem it’s lasted that long. Not long enough for end-of-the-workday noises to be emerging from the street outside, or for quick drinks at Trader Tom’s around the corner to be the subject of conversations by colleagues, not quite out of earshot, as the metal blinds are lowered inside the windows. Yet I hear them, just like that, and the clock on my monitor agrees with the voices.

Time, I suppose, gets away from us all, now and then. Einstein may have theorized that time changes relative to speed, but I’m pretty certain it also changes relative to concentration. Focus on something hard enough – as I’d apparently been doing with the news on my screen and the other work of the day – and the clocks slow down. Then you blink a few times, smear away the haze of all that intensity from your eyes, and you find you’re back in the present, situated awkwardly in the skin of the person you’d forgot you’d been a few moments before.

So I refuse to be too surprised by the noises around me, now, of a workday at its end. Nor am I overly disappointed. I love this little den of respite, yes, but I’m not a lonely woman, wedded only to my work to give my day its meaning. I have my corner of the shop, my papers, my computer, my employment that feels half like a retreat. But I also have home.

I have David.

I’m out the door by 5.07 p.m.

Mitch walks behind me. With all that mass, it’s rare he walks in front.

‘You going straight home, or you up for a drink?’

His questions are always pure, though he says them with the kind of raunchily exaggerated tone of voice that suggests we might follow up that drink with a steamy escapade, entwined in each other’s naked skin in a hotel that charges by the hour. But it’s all smoke and sarcasm with Mitch. In reality, he is devoted to Susan, the most doting wife in the world, and he knows I’m well and truly hitched and not looking to break that bond. He’s just a kind man, and one who’s fairly certain alcohol won’t be on the menu when he gets home. Nor, for that matter, any particular act that could be described as an ‘escapade’.

‘Not today, Mitch.’ I smile, pausing to allow him to catch up and lowering a hand onto his wide shoulder. There’s the uncomfortable sensation of moisture rising through the fabric of his shirt. I force myself not to lift my hand away. ‘Thanks for the offer, though.’

‘You sure? Wouldn’t take more than an—’

I switch my grip to a pat. The motion accentuates my headache, which has grown worse throughout the foggy day. ‘I’m sure.’ A bigger smile. ‘Stuff on the mind. But go have one yourself. Susan’s not bound to have a glass of Jack on the counter, is she?’

He heaves a resigned but happy sigh, muttering something indiscernible about pigs and flight, then chortles. ‘Till tomorrow, Amber.’ And he turns, and I blink, and he’s already halfway to his car.

The drive home is, as always, twice as long as the commute in. The roads are packed, the commuter congestion I’d avoided in the morning now at its predictable height. To emphasize the plight, the woman’s voice on the National Public Radio affiliate for the Bay Area suggests there’s no hope for improvement ahead. I settle passively into the time set out before me.

I have a water bottle in the cup holder at my left, its flimsy plastic only slightly sturdier than the interior of the car itself. The myth that water eases headaches is a lie, but it does make popping the ibuprofen easier. Another two are down before I’m fifteen minutes into the drive, leaving their lingering, slightly sweet taste on the back buds of my tongue. It’s too familiar. Advil’s parent company should offer me some sort of loyalty card.

The details of what I’d read during the day peck at my attention as I play tap-dance between the accelerator and the brake.

My spine tingles again with the memory of the headline that had captured my attention. An ice cube projects itself up my back.

This woman in the river.

It had been on the computer, not in print, which meant it was fresh. Probably only became known after the papers had gone to press for the day. I’d looked through them again, just to be sure, but found nothing there.

I’d gone back to the Internet, oddly enthralled, and chased up what few details were available. Age, 40. The woman who’d been found was just a year my elder. Her body had been discovered at approximately 9.45 p.m. by an advocate of late-evening walks who reported his find to the local authorities. It was situated on the Russian River – the 110-mile-long gentle beast that stretches out from near Lake Mendocino, twisting and turning south and west until it joins the Pacific Ocean in Jenner, two hours north of San Francisco. I know the river as well as anyone does who lives in the area, more by simple proximity than first-hand experience. I’ve driven along stretches of its length that run near the highways, that’s about all I can say. At places it appears mighty, at others barely more than a stream.

As I drive, now, I recall the process of searching for these facts on various police websites. It had taken over an hour. Maybe several. The day, as I say, had kind of slipped away from me.

The details, though, continue to cycle through my mind.

A hiker coming upon the body, still floating in a gentle bend in the water.

It wasn’t an overly bloody find, or particularly terrifying or grotesque. This wasn’t a dismemberment or chainsaw attack. What was disturbing was, in fact, the simplicity of the whole situation. The fact that it was almost … scenic. The river water, flowing. The mention of someone out for a casual stroll. ‘Rambling’, as the English would say, which seems appropriate as I drive towards a Californian town called Windsor.

A foolish song I knew as a child tussles at my memory, its tune playful and ridiculously out of concert with the topic of my thoughts.

Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees,

Walking, talking, to bushes and to bees …

I shake my head in protest. It seems inappropriate that my mind should wander to such things at this moment. I try to push the tune out of my thoughts.

Beyond the victim’s age, none of her private details – name, residence, so on – have been released to the media, except to indicate that she was a Caucasian female and apparently in good physical condition.

I fidget. But it’s not a fidget, it’s a squirm. I’m uncomfortable. The air in my car is too hot, I realize all at once. I switch on the A/C and turn the knob as far as it will go towards the little snowflake symbol. It lights up with a reassuringly blue glow – blue having at some stage become a colour we all associate with being refreshed and cool. For a moment, this meaningless fact distracts me.

The tune, though, won’t leave my head. Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees …

I stomp my foot beside the accelerator to shake the melody from my mind. Enough!

The cause of death I’d found was listed only as that ambiguous ‘suspected foul play’. Any further detail is apparently under embargo. Hardly surprising, as the case is so new, but it doesn’t close the door to informed speculation. As a woman who reads the news religiously, I know that ‘suspected foul play’ usually means there’s some physical evidence of additional trauma – maybe a gunshot wound, maybe stabbing. Something more than simple drowning, which would be the more obvious cause of death in a river. Drowning could indeed be murder, of course, but it could also be just a fall. Or suicide. ‘Suspected foul play’ hints there’s something more.

My temples are starting to throb. Stinking, ineffectual pills. And the air con is doing shit, blue snowflake or not. I can feel my blouse clinging to the sweat on my back.

I recite the details over and over, making them almost a chant.

A thirty-nine-year-old woman’s body.

Found at the river’s edge.

White.

Cause of death – unannounced.

Foul play.

Sinister.

I’m sure there were other things I looked at in the news today, other happenings that will have attracted me at the bookshop. But my mind is stuck on just this. On this, and …

Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees …

The song won’t leave my head. My breathing has become heavier, and for some reason my right leg is starting to ache. I can’t think of any reason for that. I try to reposition myself on the seat.

The lane to my left suddenly shifts to life. I click on the indicator and push myself into the moving traffic at the first opening. Distraction from the odd sensations. Triumph. We clock a stellar seven miles per hour before the motion slows again, and within a few seconds we’re back at a standstill. The lane I left is moving. I clench my fists tight on the wheel. The urge to unleash a satisfying barrage of profanities is almost overwhelming, but I try not to recite the curse words David describes, with mock old-world flare, as ‘so awfully unwomanly’. Though, to be honest, he always says it with a very un-old-worldly grin, which makes me think he half-likes those moments when I lose verbal control.

I blink heavily two or three times. There are trails there, again, following my eyelids as they move.

The traffic starts to flow once more, and I attempt to distract myself, shifting my attention to the hillsides and vineyards alongside the road. All the locals along this particular stretch of Highway 101 refer to it as the Redwood Road, though I’ve yet to spot a Redwood tree anywhere near it. An enormous growers estate, entirely modern but designed to look ancient and historical, sits off in the sweeping green hills to the left of the highway. It’s a winery, of course, as most things are around here, but I can never remember the name of it. It’s built like a castle, complete with turrets and triangular flags. An odd way to sell wine. But the visual effect is dramatic, and the delivery trucks pulling in with supplies could as easily be wagons with mounted drivers, their diesel horsepower replaced with the actual thing. It wouldn’t look the slightest bit out of place.

But then there’s a Beyoncé cutaway on the radio and a new update on the refugee crisis in Eastern Europe, and the world again seems so very, recognizably, modern. Even the vineyard castle suddenly looks pallid and uninspired. Just another hoaxy specialty shop along the roadside, different only in size from the shed a few miles back and the Safeway warehouse at the next intersection.

That’s how quickly the world changes. A soundtrack, a flash of circumstance, and it’s a different land. A familiar one, where David is waiting at home and the universe is as it should be. God, how I want that, in this moment. My normal world. My comfy home. My wonderful man.

But suddenly I’m sweating fiercely. My breathing has become tight and rapid. The northern California landscape around me is as it was a moment before, nothing at all has changed – and yet it has, all the same and all at once. The woman’s situation has thrust itself back into my mind, powerfully, her circumstances flashing like lights in my vision.

I think I might hyperventilate – maybe I already am. My pulse, I’m sure of it, is out of control. This isn’t a headache any more. I don’t understand what is happening to me. The edges of the highway are glowing white, a phosphorous light that is too bright for me to look at directly, bleeding into every inch of my vision.

And I can see a girl, like a picture from a perfectly told story. She’s right there, in the glow of white that has overtaken the world. I am an observer at the solemn portrait of something ethereal and other-worldly.

And … wrong.

I can no longer see the traffic around me. I’m not sure if I’m still in my lane, or even in my car. Life itself has gone out of focus.

I only see the girl. Her. The girl from the headline – of whom no photos have yet been released. The girl whose face I have no reason to know from Eve’s. There’s something peculiar to her eyes. Something wrong with her neck. Yet it’s her, I’m sure of it, and she’s there, her face bathed in white, staring at mine. Her life ebbing away.

And for some reason I want to call her Emma.

7
David

The way things went, after I first gazed into her eyes, first heard her voice – it’s not the way I necessarily would have wanted it to go. I would have liked there to have been less trauma. I would have liked to have avoided the pain. The pain I bore, and the pain I had to inflict.

But this is what happens. This is where you end up.

I hadn’t expected that any woman would change my life. My experience with women had never been good. When one you love dies, so early in your life, you’re not exactly left with the most optimistic hopes for the future. And if another, who ought to love you, doesn’t, that doesn’t help mend the wound. I’d been through both scenarios, with a sister in the grave before her time, and a mother who, together with my father, hadn’t left for the next life soon enough. Childhood was a mass of misery in my head, and in my youth I’d hoped one day I’d flee from it. Get far enough away to at last be free. But time was a vicious teacher, and eventually I had to learn to be satisfied with an unhappiness as deeply set as my bones and my blood. And eventually I did: I simply got used to it. Give a man enough pain, and for long enough, and he’ll stop hoping for anything else.

But that encounter, that first moment with her – it changed things. I’d long since given up on escaping my pain; hell, I’d made a career of wallowing in it. Surrounding myself with more of the same. I had become a man condemned to live in the never-ending cycle of sorrow I’d carried as long as I could remember.

And then, in a single instant, something new. A doorway into a new life.

Not that the pain would leave, even then. Not for me. That was, in the end, simply too much to hope for. In the days that would come I would smile, and hope, and sing, and even find the means to rejoice. But never to sing the pain entirely away.

Some pain, we learn too late, exceeds the songs that are sung of it.

8
Amber

I don’t burst through doors, it’s just not my way. Never has been. But today, just now, as I tentatively push ours open enough to catch the sight beyond, I wish I was the kind of person who bursts through doors. The day’s been too strange, and I want the surety, the comfort that I know waits on the other side – and I want it now, instantaneously, all at once.

But I don’t burst through. I push gently. Wood parts from wood and scrapes across our much-abused carpeting. And though the opening is tentative, the reveal is what I long for. The open door gives way to the reality of genuine happiness. This is home. Within …

My heart always rejoices when I see David, and today I need that rush more than most. I rush forward, grab him by his fleshy, muscular shoulders, and pull his lips towards mine. They’re parted even as we meet and I lock us into a long, warm embrace. It extends into a span of time I really couldn’t measure, and wouldn’t want to try. I am a woman who knows true love; and when you know that love, you don’t try to understand it.

Finally, our lip-lock breaks. ‘Well, hell, good to see you too.’ David’s face is a wide grin. Stubble, firm cheekbones, that slightly olive skin with its twinkle of shine – ‘It isn’t oily, babe, that’s Mediterranean sexy!’ Everything is familiar and welcoming. A touch of my pink lipstick has clung to his chin. ‘I take it life in the shop wasn’t all that bad today?’

I’m shaking my head, kicking off my favourite retro flats with an overly girlish motion, like Dorothy flipping her slippers to an unheard musical beat. It’s a playful gesture that made him laugh once, and which I’ve repeated a hundred times since. My shoes wind up somewhere in the corner, lopsided, near Sadie’s plastic water dish.

A flash of white light at the edges of my vision – to be ignored. It’s nothing. The remnants of a migraine. I do so often get those.

‘Work was fine, David. I’m just happy to be home.’

The flipping of shoes has roused Sadie to life. She’s already at David’s feet, looking pleased to have the household back in proper assembly. Her orange fur droops against the tiles beneath her as she saunters over and shoves her snout against my ankles. I tap at her head and give the usual ‘That’s a lovely puppy’ utterance in baby-talk tones, which sends her tail wagging.

Wagging. A breeze. Wind …

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s always been amazed how quickly our thoughts can take us to another place. The present moment is a spectacular case in point. The day, the house, the dog – they all coalesce, and suddenly they’re all gone. All I see in this instant is a seaside walkway in the Marin Headlands, a vividly blue sky, and the sound of seagulls squawking over steep hillsides that abruptly end in cliffs sheering down to the Pacific.

A good memory, this one. I permit it to sweep through me without resistance.

I was hiking north, that’s how I remember it, and at a good clip. Years ago. The shoreline on my left lay at the bottom of cliff faces that lifted up in brilliant severity from sea level, with the hills on my right dressed in spring wildflowers that almost concealed the cement remains of the naval turrets and bunkers that had been active in these hills until the end of the Second World War. In the distance, only grey-blue seas and low clouds over the minuscule Farallon Islands. Beyond them, nothing at all until Hawaii.

I was alone, as I always was, and lost in grey thoughts that clashed with the bright skies. I was walking with sticks, those retractable kinds that look like ski poles but cost twice as much. He was at the front of a group of two or three, walking in the opposite direction. I don’t think I noticed him first. It was the other way around.

‘Excuse us,’ he said, politely. The wind was blowing (a given; it was the Pacific coast in early spring – the wind is always blowing). He was covered in a puffy red coat that looked as if it had been injected with a little more stuffing than required, giving his torso the appearance of a badly packaged tomato.

It could have ended right there, our first encounter. It could have been our only. But in a moment out of a children’s cartoon I sidestepped left when it should have been right, my eyes downcast, on my feet rather than on the strange tomato person in front of me. He did the same, and a second later our bodies collided – heads first, with the requisite crack, and then chests and arms and hands to keep each other from falling.

The way things begin.

‘Oh, Hell, I’m so sorry,’ he said, reaching out to stabilize me. ‘That was entirely my fault.’

‘No, it was mine,’ I freed a hand to rub my forehead. And I looked up, wincing in the slanted light that suddenly felt too bright.

That’s when our eyes connected for the first time. That magical, painful, wonderful moment.

David’s eyes were, and are, a stranger hazel than most I’ve seen before. Blue and green in equal mixture, but they have brown centres, just around the iris. Something unique. I must have stared into them longer than social norms would allow because the next words were his, awkward and accompanied by a glance that broke mine and tried to find some other landmark on the barren horizon at which he could stare.

‘At least we’re both still upright.’ His words were cheesy and superfluous, but I didn’t care.

‘I should pay more attention to where I’m going,’ I offered. Sheepish grin. Foolish girl. I wished I had stronger words to say, but I had’t been feeling myself, and those words didn’t come.

‘It happens,’ he answered. The profundity of our conversation was truly epic. ‘These surroundings, they can … they can take you in.’

And there was his smile. The first time I’d seen it. The one I’ve grown to know so well over the years. One too many teeth in an otherwise nicely balanced mouth. That cute, very cute, face, bordered with slightly disorderly locks of black hair and a refreshingly masculine touch of stubble on his chin. I’ve never understood women who don’t go for stubbled chins and hairy chests. They’re an incomprehensible demographic, too influenced by the wax mannequins that pass for men in magazines. I’ve always gone for the Chia Pets of the race.

The skin around his eyes bunched as he smiled, full of warmth and sincerity. ‘I’m David,’ he’d finally offered, reaching out a hand with its glove considerately removed. ‘And these guys over here’ – he gestured towards the men a short distance behind him, who didn’t seem to notice – ‘are my work colleagues.’ One of the men might have nodded, but seemed too chilled to consider approaching and reaching out a hand himself. He was huddled with a third member of their party, stood a few steps away, engrossed in a gathering of sea birds diving for fish over the edges of the cliffs. I might have been on Mars for all they appeared to notice me.

I raised my hand to David’s and felt a powerful grip.

‘I’m Amber,’ I answered. ‘It’s … it’s lovely to meet you.’ The words were almost flirtatious, like nothing I’d ever uttered before.

It made him smile again.

Then, the strangest thing of all. I spoke not only flirtatiously, but with an openness completely uncharacteristic of everything inside me.

‘I’m staying just up the way, by Muir Beach. At the Pelican Inn. If you … you know, ever wanted to bump into each other again.’

In the midst of my confusion, wit. Spectacular.

Or maybe not quite spectacular, but definitely more than was normal for me.

I cringe at the memory, but it’s that wonderful cringe of something so horrible, something that could have gone so terrifically, spectacularly wrong, that ended up going just the opposite. It wasn’t two nights later, or three, that David crouched his big frame through the short, barrel-wood door of the Pelican Inn, ‘just stopping by’ with the hope to say hello. It was the same evening. The very same.

There was something magical on the coast that day. That’s the only explanation. Something magical that brought me out of my shell. That brought us together.

And now we’re here, in our kitchen in the little town of Windsor, California, standing in front of the refrigerator on which an orange paper cutout of the word ‘Bump!’ remains the perpetual reminder of our first meeting. We’re still locked together, bodies close, though the kiss has ended. There’s beer on David’s breath – the scent of more than one. Usually means a long day in the shop, and the need to get out from behind the pharmacy counter for one or two before heading home. I have a fleeting desire to ask him about the mundane details of his day, but it passes quickly. Work is work. For today, his is behind him, mine’s behind me.

But I’m not wholly in control, and that conviction bends. The thoughts that come are an invasion, not an invitation. Into the swirl of memory floats a river with a bend I don’t recognize. The woman I’d read about on the computer and thought about so vividly on the drive home. The unexplained.

In this intimate moment I can feel goosebumps rise on my arms.

It almost happens. I almost touch that buzz of electricity that pulls my world out of order and into the mêlée of impulse and memory. I can tell I’m right at the edge of it. There are so many draws.

But I’m anchored in an emotion that’s more powerful than them all. I have my means of resistance. My solidity and my rock, firm and stable in my arms, with his big, beautiful smile.

I pull David’s face towards mine again. I can taste the beer on his lips, and I push him towards the door.

9
Amber

It happened in the night, somewhere in the darkness of the drawn curtains and the muffled lampshades, beneath the cotton sheets and in the midst of the heady scent of all that goes on in the dark room of a husband and wife who’ve found their way there by stumbling up their staircase, falling into bed as clothes are thrown at walls and ceilings.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, the strangeness closed in.

Our bodies were as tightly wound together as two bodies can be. My chin was pressed into his neck, my lips somewhere near his ear, his whole body slippery with anticipation. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic. Mine was keeping pace.

Then came the flash of light. An image, bursting into my mind. A stranger’s face, loving and peaceful and kind and wicked and cruel, all at once. One of Cinderella’s sinister stepsisters, only far more beautiful.

I suddenly remembered the bookshop. The headline, my hours on the Internet, and something beyond all the details I’d read. Someone else’s games and mysteries and … wrongs. My whole body suddenly felt the immense, overwhelming wrongness of the world. And I remembered the highway, the flashes of my thoughts and fears on the drive instantly back before my eyes. The image. The face.

And I can hear whimpering, and crying; the utterances of a creature, crying out and asking me to know its pain. A judgement, cascading into my present.

And in my embrace with my solidity and my rock, my arms wrapped around David’s fiery chest, I said it. The single word that echoed out to me from that strange, white darkness.

A name. Her name.

‘Emma.’

I don’t know where it came from, why it made my lips move. But her name was suddenly there, and I couldn’t keep it to myself.

‘Emma.’

I could feel David’s body go rigid beneath me. There was ice. The cessation of everything. And then the world stopped, and started to fade away.

10
David

It pains me to think that Amber might start to understand. There are so many things a husband and a wife share, but there are also things we can’t. She and I can never share the truth. Not this truth. It would destroy her. It’s only the lies that keep us alive, and keep us together.

I’ve struggled with this fact countless times. Since childhood it’s been engrained in all of us that truth is what liberates, and it alone. It will set you free – such a pithy saying, and probably as a general rule it holds true. But not always. No, not always. Sometimes truth is the greatest form of slavery.

At one point in my life I would have rejected that premise with all my energy – I’d have spat out that lies have absolutely no place in life, that they lead only to darkness and torment. That ought to be argued as a matter of principle. But I simply can’t. I won’t. Experience sometimes proves right what social norms insist are wrong.

Everything I’ve built with Amber is a lie. I admit that. It’s all facade. That’s what makes it work – for me, for her. A beautiful, artistic, warm facade of manufactured reality. It isn’t true, perhaps. That depends on your definition. But it’s real.

It’s been real since that day in the Marin Headlands when – for all Amber knows, or ever will – we met for the first time. That happy little headbutt above the sea, the little sidestepping dance that forced the moment not to pass but linger. Some might say the staging of it, the weeks of thoughtful planning, of following her movements and learning her itineraries, of making sure I’d be on just the same path at just the same time, were manipulative or false. But no one accuses a man who plots out a typical first date of being sinister for doing so – deliberating what flowers to buy, what restaurant to go to, what music to ‘accidentally’ have playing on the car stereo during the drive. It’s normal, all of it.

Is what I’ve done really so different? Only the circumstances are out of the norm, and for damned good reasons.

And I still have means of rescuing the situation. Tools. Resources. Not everything is lost.

This is a world I’m not willing to let fall apart.

11

Not every den of torture looks like what we’re given to expect. Like what the storybooks tell us we should see there. It is possible that there are those which fit the stereotype: dark, damp stone walls with old chains hanging from hooks on the ceiling, the devices of abuse crusted with dirt and gore.

It’s possible.

But reality can be more hellish than those props. Strip away the myth, and what’s left behind – what’s left to be real – is something different. Something worse.

It’s a basement, though not because there is any particular power to darkness or to being underground. It’s a basement because basements bar sound better than ground-level living rooms, and though there isn’t usually that much noise involved in the way torture really works, one does want to guard against even the remotest possibilities.

It is furnished nicely, if simply. The carpeting is higher grade than discount, the walls are a muted tan. There are bookshelves with nondescript volumes – the kind that bespeak a degree of education but not an excess of wealth – and a small desk in one corner, with an old tube-style television on a table in another. The chequered fabric sofa with pull-out bed is the centrepiece of the wall to the right, as one enters, and the door itself is wood-panelled with a knockoff brass knob. The prefab sort with a lightly marked up, push-button lock.

The only sign of the room’s real purpose is the sturdy chrome bolt lock that’s been added above the knob. An ordinary basement den, with no windows or external exits, doesn’t have a deadbolt fitted towards the interior hallway. Especially not the kind that is key operated only, from both sides.

The kind that, once locked, keeps you in as well as out.

12
Amber

As all days do, the new one that began when the daylight crept over the hills has rolled through its usual routines. It’s brought the sun and home and work, but I haven’t been seeing them in a bright light. This day was inaugurated differently, and as it began, so it carried on.

Differently.

I arrived at work at 8.50 a.m. It should have been 8.30 a.m., and I should have been in better cheer, but there’s only so much control one can exercise over the ebbs and flows of life. I was late, grumpy, and had been praying solely for a lack of conversation and an empty path between the front door and my desk.

That I made it through Classical Fiction and New Releases en route to my periodicals corner, past the coffee kiosk, arriving at my desk without interruption, felt like the first bit of unmitigated good news of the day. My unusual tardiness meant the bookshop was already bustling with customers, and someone else had already gone through the day’s delivery packs, at least enough to get a few copies of the morning papers on the racks in time for the day’s first push. I’d probably end up being scolded for thrusting that role onto someone else by my absence, but I would simply have to face that.

Mitch had left a cup of tea on my desk, though his office at this moment was empty. I sighed, marginally disappointed with myself for being relieved, but I simply wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have interacted well if he’d been there in his usual cheer. When you’re in a pissy mood the cheerfulness of others is doubly revolting.

I popped the plastic lid off the Peet’s tea and drew in a long sip, taking advantage of the distraction to avoid the disorder of the boxes around me. The tea was tepid, but it still satisfied. It washed the latent coffee taste from my tongue, and with it a bit of the tension of the morning.

Then it was onto automatic pilot. Sorting. Shelving. Cutting boxes and recycling. Bringing order to the most changeable corner of the shop. Then, when it was all done, settling into the quiet that invariably followed. Reading the papers. Scanning the glossy magazines. Gold computer, open – the surest sign I was fully caught up despite my late arrival and could settle into the calm of the day. Eventually, a little chime announced that all was well with the technological innards of my laptop and the screen shifted to display the desktop. I called up my usual starting pages: AP, Reuters, The Times. All auto-refreshing to the day’s latest.

The rhythm of ordinary life in a low-intensity job is a decent tonic for anxiety, and it’s cheaper than Xanax. A comforting montage. This is my morning, I reflected, my every morning. It’s today’s, and it will be tomorrow’s.

It was yesterday’s.

I’d stiffened a little at that. The word didn’t feel right in my head. Yesterday. As if it weren’t an actual day.

Next to my computer, opposite the memos, was a little notepad. I’ve been repeatedly reminded I can take notes on the computer itself, but I suppose I feel the same way about paper and pen as I do about novels with covers and words on actual pages. On the cover of the notepad is a garishly pink Hello Kitty logo, augmented with purples and reds that only a colour-blind teenage girl could admire. I’d grabbed it out of a stationery shop’s discount bin a few weeks back without closely examining what I was buying, and every time I look at it now, it makes me feel ten years old and ridiculous.

I flipped open the cover.

Yesterday.

I tried to cast the word out of mind as I scanned over the few notes I’d written. They were all various jottings about that headline. Yesterday’s headline. The story that had so enrapt me.

Woman.

The shiver, again.

Thirty-nine.

White.

Suspicious circumstances.

The words, penned in my own hand, made me increasingly uneasy.

Cause of death unknown.

No match to any known missing persons.

Yesterday.

I shoved the notebook aside and stared at the newsfeed on the computer. Those jottings had been what yesterday was all about, and they’d started from a banner on this screen. The new day’s headlines were scrolling by now, though, at their usual rate, and I wasn’t spotting anything more about the body. I’d have thought there would be more stories by now. More information. I used the trackpad to move backwards through the listing by time, but it seemed to have disappeared from the day’s radar.

Then, disrupting the intensity that had been building up to this moment, comes Chloe – right now, as I’m focused on all this and the beginnings of the workday blend into the present.

Chloe: my closest friend at the bookshop. She’s one of the few under-thirties here, as eccentric in her own right as the rest of us combined. I halfway suspect she chose to work here because she is simply too weird to be hired anywhere else.

Her head pops into my personal space with her typical intensity. She, who is always brimming with exuberance and wit, and whom I absolutely do not want to see at the moment.

‘Hey girl!’ she announces, taking no notice of my condition. Her head is not quite bobbing, but almost. The pitch of her voice is entirely too high, and she stretches out the two words to a span of time that could easily have accommodated an entire sentence.

‘I thought I heard you sneakin’ on in here!’ Her affected accent is as shocking as always. Chloe’s most conspicuous failure of self-awareness is her apparent belief that she can simply will herself to become a busty black woman with a drawl that makes ordinary phrases sound charming and profound. The phenomenon emerged precisely at the time she went on an Idris Elba fan binge on Netflix, re-emerging from that two-week stint more Southern and succulent than any character he’s ever played. I’ve tried, on numerous occasions, to remind her that she’s more than a decade younger than me, from Oakland, B-cup at the most optimistic, and on her very best day a pasty white that most bleach brands would set as a target for the ‘after’ of their comparison washing ads. But that’s just how she is. Chloe’s quirkiness is inflexible, and her friendship comes at you like an out-of-control freight train, or it doesn’t come at all.

At the moment, I’d give anything for the latter option. The tension in my neck is fierce, and with an as-yet unexplained urgency, I desperately want to get back to reading about … whatever this story of the woman in the water is.

‘What’s wrong, hon?’ Chloe flaps her lashes with the question, broadcasting the mildest irritation that I’ve not yet acknowledged her presence.

‘It’s nothing, Clo.’ A horrible abbreviation for her name, but I’ve never thought up anything better. ‘Just distracted with my own stuff. Can we talk later?’

Her look is unreadable. For a moment there are hints of disappointment, then pouty annoyance and the threat of an even poutier resentment. It eventually morphs into a tight smile, though she speaks through barely moving teeth. ‘Sure, if that’s what you need. If, you know, your stuff is so important.’

She stresses the words with mock disdain, but disappears behind a bookshelf and pretends to be busy with re-organising the stock there before I face the delicate task of replying.

The headlines on my screen have kept scrolling. There’s still nothing about the girl in the river.

In the river.

Last night bursts back into my head. And this morning. The way things weren’t supposed to be.

This morning, from the moment I awoke, David was different. His movements were different. He lingered longer than usual before he left for work, petering about upstairs, in his third-storey ‘home office’, with whatever it is he works on in there. Usually it’s only a few minutes – ‘Just grabbing my things, then out the door …’ – but not today. Today he changed his routine. And David is not a man who changes his routine.

I would swear he was trying to avoid me, hiding himself away in a spot he knew I didn’t go. Trying to move through our apartment unseen so he didn’t have to lay eyes on …

But I stop myself, because that’s such a very silly thing to think. Even if the thought has been with me since the day first began and the face in the mirror did its usual thing.

Every morning, as I stand in the bathroom and gaze into the mirror, my eyes look back and taunt me. The fact that their colour doesn’t match my name has always disappointed me, and it’s a bit like they know this and are so prominent on my face purely as a way to rub it in.

They teased from the mirror in their customary way, today, but I merely shrugged. I’m used to this, and I went about my ritual as usual. Mornings are a well-honed routine. The actions of each minute are tuned to fit into their allotted space just as they ought, and so I went through the steps in their customary order. My face was done, my hair was brushed, and my teeth were as clean as is ever the case for a heavy tea drinker. I was suitably polished up for the day. My feet, seemingly registering all this even ahead of my brain, were already moving me out of our teal-tiled bathroom towards the kitchen.

Like they’d lives of their own.

They pointed me down the stairs, the same as they might on any average day. Toe into the not-so-plush carpeting of each step, then heel, bend of a stiff knee above – not creaking yet, I’m not so old as that – and repeat. I let my body guide me. Like normal, like any other norma—

But I didn’t feel quite myself, it has to be said. And it’s an odd thing, to start the day feeling not quite one’s self.

The quarter-inch synthetic rag of the staircase drove its way between my toes in exactly the way it always does, and yet it … well, it didn’t. I’m not sure I can say it any better than that. And it wasn’t just the floor. Moments earlier, when my face stared back at me from the mirror, it was there, too. Something in my features I couldn’t pinpoint, something that in another context I might describe as pain. And a buzz in my ears. And a stronger edge to my eyes.

I felt, deeply, that I ought to know what brought me into this day in this state; that it’s strange, and somehow incomprehensible, not to know why one feels the way one does. But I woke without that knowledge, and like so many other things in life, I simply had to accept it.

One foot in front of the other, toes in the carpet, head on fire.

At the bottom of the staircase I’d rounded the corner into the kitchen, brushed my straw-coloured hair from my exposed neck and tried to rub away a bit of the firmness there, but I was pressing fingers into rocks. I’d gone to bed a woman. I’d woken up made of stone.

The lights had flickered when I switched them on – then a sudden burst of white. White. The memories came on strong, in the confused flurry that generally shapes morning thoughts.

The murder along Russian River. Not a dream. Work. Engaging, yet peaceful work. Long hours in front of my computer. Real.

The drive home. White lights in my vision, a face … The dreams pressed for their own.

But then – home. Passion. David. Tight embraces.

And then coldness and rejection. That wasn’t a dream, either. That was real, and horrible, and I was quite certain I wasn’t imagining it.

The evening had begun with passion. I may be hazy-eyed but I remember that clearly enough. All the signs of the red-blooded night every couple dreams of, and we were bringing that desire to life. But then it stopped, so abruptly. A single word, and everything ground to a halt.

There may have been more involved than that, but I just don’t remember. I didn’t remember this morning in the kitchen, and I don’t remember now at my desk.

I only remember … oh, God. In the kitchen my shoulders clenched further as the memories returned. The flash of a face on the motorway. A name somehow appearing in my mind.

Emma.

And then my whispering that name into David’s ear. The truly inexplicable. Even now, my skin tingles to think of it.

Who the hell is Emma?

And why for the love of God would I whisper another woman’s name into my husband’s ear while our bodies were entwined together and heat filled our room?

But I did. I said it, and the night was over. David froze as the final, whispered syllable crawled its way out of my lips, then rolled out from beneath me with a motion that wasn’t meant to be graceful. When I’d adjusted myself to face him his shoulders were to me, his head pressed into his pillow.

‘What is it?’ My question was innocent enough. ‘What did I do?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he answered, in a way that made it clear that it was certainly not nothing. I could tell he was controlling his breathing. The melting bumps of gooseflesh wilted on the sides of his back.

I briefly felt badly, wondering whether I’d stirred up some old pain. David isn’t a fragile man, but he’s not exactly the most open with his feelings, either, which makes it hard to know when I might accidentally knock the scab off some emotional wound he’s never fully shared. That’s the rub in holding things back from people you love: you open yourself to being tortured by them, since they can never know what territory of your heart is whole and what is tender.

‘David, if I said something to upset you, I’m—’

‘I said it’s nothing!’ No concealing the clap to his voice, like thunder when you haven’t seen the lightning; but then a long, controlling sigh. A softer tone emerged from the thunder a few seconds later, though the words were still stiff and forced. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m just tired.’ Hesitation. ‘We’re both tired.’

I wasn’t tired. My body was still on fire, tingling and energized. I reached out to his shoulder and tugged on it provocatively. It was still hot, his body disagreeing with his words.

‘I’m sure we can get a little energy back if we try.’

David pulled the shoulder away in a strong, singular motion.

‘Enough, Amber. Enough.’ Then a sustained lacuna, as if he were pondering what to say next.

‘Let’s just go to sleep. I have a busy day ahead of me in the morning. We probably shouldn’t have started this anyway. Drink some water, you need to hydrate. Get some rest.’

He pulled the sheet up over his shoulders and curled himself yet further away from me. And there I was, naked and uncovered on my half of the bed, utterly confused as to what had just happened.

I don’t know when I fell asleep. I had my long draw of water as David had recommended. He always encourages me to keep a bottle by the bedside; saves having to traipse downstairs if I get a midnight thirst – and it’s just like him to think of my welfare, even at a moment he’s obviously upset. It soothed a little, but neither my body nor my mind were in the mood for rest. I remember staring at our bedroom ceiling for what felt like fifteen or twenty years. I got to know every feature of its poorly textured surface, probably once billed as ‘eggshell white’ but now suspiciously more the colour of dilute urine. We really, desperately need to repaint.

When I turned to David again he was soundly asleep. Somehow I got a handful of the sheets back and covered myself up. I don’t remember much after that, except for frustrated jostling and annoyance at the fact that counting sheep just never works. They’re revolting, shaggy creatures anyway, fluffy-white only in comic strips. In reality they’re dirty and matted and pooping on absolutely everything, and they always just bleat and jump and carry on coming, and …

Morning eventually came, with David’s adjusted routine and the noises from the den. Finally, he left for work. I got a peck on the cheek before I rose from my pillow. That much, at least. All wasn’t lost.

The memories overlap in my mind. The sounds, the kiss, the usual routine in the bathroom. The stairs. The kitchen.

Beneath my feet the linoleum was cold, and the lights had finally flickered wholly to life. The revolting colours of the inbuilt décor glowed under them and the vision assaulted one of my senses, while the scent of coffee, gradually overpowering the lingering remnants of David’s cologne, assaulted another.

Coffee. There was half of a pot still in the carafe, dutifully prepared before David had left, and an empty cup beside it. An invitation, a gesture of reconciliation.

And a smoothie, some repellant shade of green, in a tall glass near the fruit basket, sitting atop an appointment reminder from the dentist’s office in lieu of a coaster.

But there was no note. And I can’t remember the last time David didn’t leave me a note.

13
David

There is no other choice. Not now. With what Amber said as we went to sleep, the way forward has become painfully, but perfectly, clear.

It might be politically correct to wish there were another way, but there isn’t, and I’ve learned not to waste my time with those kinds of emotions. We’re perilously close to falling off the only path that keeps us alive. Course correction is required, and a man shouldn’t lament what is simply necessary.

The solution – the only solution – doesn’t lie in anything new. The path we’re on is the right one. What needs to be adjusted isn’t the act, it’s the art of the dosage. I’d thought it had been high enough. Obviously I was wrong.

The particular concoction I’ve settled on acts deeply, almost at the core of the psyche, but that doesn’t mean more won’t sometimes be required.

One of its perks is that its interior impact lasts, even while its more physical effects – the grogginess, the confusion, the loss of control – wear off swiftly. An ideal pairing.

So this morning I did what I always do, adding it to what I know she’ll drink, this time with a few additional drops. It’s always been the easiest way to get it into her system. Some here, some there. Prep everything just right, make it a kind of invitation. She never resists.

I mixed the smoothie, trusting that the sound of the blender was so familiar now that it wouldn’t rouse her. There are other ways to get the job done – when we’re on a trip, or camping, or otherwise out and about. But when we’re home, when it’s the routine, this has become the standard.

The drink’s contents just filled a glass, and I left it on the counter.

Then the coffee. Always, always the coffee. An essential part of it.

A drop here, a drop there.

It will all have its effect. It will just take a day, maybe two – and everything will be made right.

14
Amber

My thoughts have been wandering too long. The bookshop is moving around me now, quietly but with gentle activity. I think I’ve tended to a few customers who’ve ventured to my corner and didn’t already know what they were after, but I can’t say I’m entirely sure. My memories, permitted freely between activities, have nevertheless seemed to invade the whole.

But it’s impossible to be oblivious to Chloe as she re-emerges from behind a bookshelf covered in paperback detective fiction and thrillers. A favourite genre of hers. As she appears, I impulsively fold down my laptop’s screen, which I’d been once again perusing from behind the stacks of magazines on my desk. I’m not sure I want her to know what I’m looking at.

I recognize that the motion might appear rude, so I glance up at Chloe with a try for a smile. Immediately I realize my error, and try desperately to halt the change in my expression. I’m still not in the mood to talk, and smiling generally encourages Chloe to speak. Even here, in my quiet corner where I’m so often left in peace.

‘Noticed I didn’t hear none of your usual flirting with Mitch today,’ she says, proving my point. There is egging in her voice, together with that stupid drawl. She fancies herself a detective, with all the time she spends nose-deep in the books, but with Chloe it’s mostly guesses and innuendos. She wags her head towards our boss’s office door in an appropriation of subtle suggestion. Little stints of investigative splendour like this would be flaunted in my direction more often if Chloe’s normal post wasn’t on the till near the front door, too far away to pass sly comments with any degree of subterfuge.

‘Haven’t seen him since I got in,’ I answer. ‘I assume he’s down in the warehouse.’ Curt. Short. ‘And I never flirt.’

‘Come on now, we all flirt! You don’t have to hide nothin’ from—’

I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand another syllable of it. I’m upset with David, with myself. I’m confused about the odd emotions I seem to harbour about the story of the woman in the river, frustrated that I can’t find more details on it, and I’m not prepared for such an exchange. Not today, and not with this throbbing in my ears.

‘Noth-ing,’ I answer, cutting her off and staring straight up at her. ‘I don’t have to hide noth-ing.’ I catch myself. Shit. ‘Any-thing. Christ sakes, quit pretending you’re Agatha Christie meets queen of the bayou. You work in a bookshop!’

That’s a good snap, for me. I usually don’t react like this.

Chloe is silent for longer than I’ve ever known her to manage the feat. The miracle spans a solid ten seconds.

‘Bitch,’ she finally says, flatly. Her accent is now wholly Californian. ‘Just trying to be friendly. And I can talk however I want. It’s my life.’ Then a pause, and then for what I assume to be the good measure of ensuring it sunk in: ‘Bitch’.

I feel bad. Chloe may not yet be thirty, but she’s already a single, twice-divorced mother of a seven-year-old boy whose stated goal in life is to grow up to be ‘a more bad-ass fucker than dem shits from Oakie’ and whose usual terms of endearment for his own mother alternate between ‘wench’ and ‘yo, lady’ She deserves a break, and certainly more than my attitude.

‘I’m sorry,’ I offer. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘No, to hell with you,’ she cuts me off. ‘I don’t want to hear about your long morning or your tired body or your worn-out temper, or your great throbbing bastard of a headache.’ Chloe is almost prescient in her huff. ‘You just sit there and tend to your pile of newspapers and dross, I’ll mind my till, and we’ll both pretend you’re not the pompous self-centred cow we both know you are.’

She’s disappeared among the rows of shelves again. Despite the impressive array of insults having just been flung my way, I’m not willing to become too apocalyptic about the exchange. I re-open my computer. Chloe and I have tragic, earth-ending disintegrations of our friendship on more or less a weekly cycle, so I know this will pass.

Though not, perhaps, quite as quickly as it actually does.

‘You’d think you’d be grateful for a little help with your snooping, since the art of the search clearly isn’t your forte.’ I hear her voice, soft and back-in-black, from somewhere behind a row of rarely visited classics. A strange comment. My ears are suddenly a degree more alert. My face comes up from my monitor and Sadie’s fuzzy underbelly is facing me from the photo on the wall.

I’m entirely uncertain what sort of ‘help’ Chloe could be in a position to offer me – there’s a solid 50/50 shot it’s advice on hairstyles or improving my sex life, or just an all-out ploy to get me to do some menial activity she doesn’t want to do herself – but her reference to snooping jostles my attention. She hasn’t said it with the tones that normally go with jokes, and the word itself sounds foreign in my ears.

‘My snooping?’ I finally ask. I don’t get up.

And I can’t explain it, but there’s that tingling in my spine again.

‘Yeah, help, woman,’ Chloe answers. Power is coming back into her voice, and after a strong intake of breath, she launches into a long collection of words she’s clearly been storing up since she first said hello.

But I only hear the first three.

‘It’s about Emma.’

And she keeps talking, but I suddenly can’t breathe.

15
Amber

I am positively, spectacularly certain that I’ve never spoken with Chloe about my private, quiet little obsession with learning all I can about the murder of the woman in the river. It’s been entirely my own, tucked away in my corner and in the secret folds of my thoughts. Besides, a conversation like that would have been torturous, and while many of my emotions over the past twenty-four hours have been unusual, I’m not that out of it.

But Chloe didn’t just mention the subject of my sudden interest. She mentioned a name. The name.

‘What do you mean, “It’s about Emma”?’

I can barely form the last word. The name that came to me on the road, the one that stopped David mid-thrust and sent yesterday spiralling out of normalcy into disarray. The name I’m all but positive I didn’t even know before I left the shop yesterday.

Yesterday. That word, again.

‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’ Chloe’s been talking non-stop for several seconds, her voice a background murmur behind my thoughts, but she halts at my interruption, genuinely puzzled. ‘Haven’t you been listening to I word I just said?’

I shake my head, too anxious to be embarrassed. ‘Start again.’

‘I said,’ she draws out the word, emphasizing the condescension implied in her willingness to repeat herself, ‘that you being so interested in random bits of the week’s news seems to have paid off, in terms of curiosity value. The murder you’re so bent up on, up in the Russian River. Story’s got more involved overnight.’

It’s solid now. She knows concrete details. Like she’s been in my head.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I demand, fire in my voice. I’m not normally this assertive, and the strength in my breath is doubly out of place in the quiet of the shop.

Chloe’s left eyebrow rises so high it looks like it might go into orbit. ‘The hell am I? What … Calm down, girl. I’m trying to share the juicy details I dug up for you.’ She looks like she might spit at me if I don’t change my tone, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

I didn’t ask Chloe to do anything for me, dig up anything. I’m mishearing. My palms are growing sweaty, sticking to the newsprint of the paper on which I’ve laid them.

‘That woman you’ve gone all Hercule Poirot over.’ Chloe’s voice stomps through my thoughts, instantly proving me wrong. ‘You’re not the only one who can play detective, you know. Come on, you’re talking to the queen. Try to name a detective novel published in the last five years that I haven’t read. Come on. I dare you.’

I don’t. She rolls her eyes.

‘Anyway, I scoped out everything I could find on that woman last night,’ Chloe continues. ‘Web’s a fantastic place for the curious. Turns out she’s single, never married and no children. One site said she was gainfully employed, but didn’t say where. No ongoing relationships. No history of major drugs. No criminal background.’ Chloe lists off the facts in a way that stresses, again, that she’d just said this a moment ago, when my brain wouldn’t allow me to listen. ‘I did manage a little more this morning,’ she finally adds. ‘Since I knew you were interested. Looks like they’ve got a cause of death now, and some other stuff. Saved it on my phone. You want it as an email or a text?’

I abruptly stand up. The newspaper clings to my wet palms and I frustratedly shake it free.

‘What’s going on, Chloe? Why are you nosing around into these things?’ I’m affronted by what feels like her invasion into my inner world. Has she been watching me? How could anyone know I was so taken by this? How could she?

‘Who asked for your help?’ I blurt out.

Chloe’s face drops out of banter mode. It’s not a facade she often abandons.

‘You sure you’re feeling okay, Amber?’ Her voice is once again more Oakland than fake Floridian, and she looks genuinely confused. When I nod my head but say nothing, her eyes go a little wider. ‘Because, I mean, what kind of question is that? You asked me, obviously. Who else would have?’

I suddenly feel dizzy on my feet. I want to snap back at her, but I can’t find any words.

Liar. Cow. I haven’t talked to you about this. I haven’t talked to … But the reactions stay firmly in my head. If I could see my face, I’m certain I would see it going white.

‘We, we talked about this? You and me?’ I try to make the question sound calm, rational, but inwardly I’m imploring her to say no, to announce some joking Chloe-esque detail that puts an end to this spontaneous charade. Maybe she caught a glance at my computer screen yesterday, or my notepad. Damn that oddly enticing Hello Kitty logo. She’s just goofing around, playing the clairvoyant.

‘I wouldn’t say so much that we talked,’ she answers. I knew it! Cow! But Chloe doesn’t stop there. ‘It was a weird conversation. A few scattered words. But I caught your drift in the end, hon.’

My eyes are back into hers. They must ask the question for themselves.

‘You were just sitting there at the periodicals service desk, muttering,’ she continues, nodding at my cluttered workspace. ‘About three o’clock. Shop was in the afternoon lull, and you’d been lost in your little world a while. Come on, you’re honestly saying you don’t remember?’

I don’t want to admit that, even to myself. ‘Remind me,’ I say instead.

‘Your eyes were glued on your laptop, Amber. Your whole body was rigid, like you’d really been captivated by something. Weren’t saying much, but you were obviously enrapt.’

‘And?’

‘And, well, it isn’t every day you start out a conversation asking for help. So I paid attention.’ She pauses – long, expectant – but I don’t have anything to say.

Asking for help? This makes no sense.

‘After that,’ she continues, ‘you just said a few words, pointing at the screen.’ She indicates my laptop. ‘“My story. The dead woman in the river, her name is Emma. Help me.” You obviously wanted to explore the story, and heck, I’m always up for diving into a bit of snooping around.’

It’s suddenly gone very cold in my corner of the shop. Chloe’s words are not nearly as disturbing as the fact that I have absolutely no memory of saying them.

I finally peer back at her. She’s eyeing me with what feels like too much curiosity. Then, joltingly, the intensity breaks and a devious wink flickers across her eyes.

‘You want my opinion, hon?’ she asks, her voice toying.

‘No.’ But that answer’s never worked with Chloe before, and it doesn’t now.

‘I think you need to get yourself laid.’ She leans forward, her small chest heaving as rapaciously as she can manage. ‘Nothing better for clearing a foggy mind and that pasty looks like a good—’

‘Was I right?’ I suddenly find myself asking, eager in equal measure for an answer and to keep Chloe from finishing that particular sentence. Her face is instantly a question.

‘Right?’

‘When I said … you said I said the girl was called Emma … All those other details, but you haven’t said whether what I said was …’ The sentence is convoluted. I’m not sure how to frame my question in any other way. ‘Was I right?’

Chloe’s eyes are now as wide as I’ve ever seen them. She doesn’t answer immediately, and her silence feels foreign and uncomfortable. Finally she replies, with a tone bridging tenderness and concern, ‘Yeah, hon, you were right. Course you were. Doesn’t take a mystery fan to figure that out. Name’s public record.’

‘She really is called Emma?’

‘Emma Fairfax.’ I can see Chloe trying to normalize her expression, hoping to re-rail a conversation that hadn’t gone at all the way she’d anticipated. But when I keep silent, it becomes clear that Chloe doesn’t know how to continue. She begins the slow departure back towards the front of the shop.

‘Whatever, girl. I’ll shoot you off an email with a few more notes later, see if I can help you make all the nice plot points fit together.’ Her voice retreats to a whisper before it fades away all together. ‘Not like I don’t have my own things to be doin’.’

I wish I could say that I’m able to move on and accept Chloe’s strange words as just her being her. I wish I could just get about my day, but I can’t. I only manage to get myself back into a seated posture by the most extraordinary exertion of will.

Chloe’s words mingle with those already in my head.

Single, never married, no children.

Emma.

Gainfully employed.

Emma.

No relationships. No domestic problems.

Emma.

Foul play. Murdered.

Emma.

Emma.

Emma.

As I whisper the name now, I remember whispering it yesterday. Uncomprehendingly. Innocently.

And again I remember David’s body, rigid beneath my own.

16
David

‘Not … by … choice.’

When those words emerged from Emma Fairfax’s lips, as I first met her two and a half years ago, a little more, they opened a door. A door I’d been waiting for my whole life, without even knowing it. She became a revelation, and a revelation only for me.

She’d been admitted to the ward nine days before her first interview with Dr Marcello, and she’d already gone through the usual battery of psych evaluations that accompany every arrival. Even when one is committed by law, rather than choice – when there’s at least the legal assertion that the individual has substantial psychological problems – there’s a routine that has to be gone through in order to arrive at a formal diagnosis. Intake interviews, broad-level diagnostics, then assignment to an appropriate ward for specialist interviews prior to the prescription of treatment. She’d come to Dr Marcello only after the first few rounds of those had already been accomplished, ready for the diagnostic comb to be finer and the focus of treatment more precise. And I sat at his side, as I always did in those days, watching, learning, taking notes, offering thoughts. The pharmacy wing always had a representative at consults like this, to counsel the doctor on options to form part of any treatment, and to receive instructions in turn on the precise drugs a patient’s regime would require.

So there we were. The system, in its glory.

All this had fallen upon Emma Fairfax because of the day she got into a car. A blue Chevy Malibu with a custom JBL ten-speaker sound system, still blaring Coldplay, of all things, at full volume when the emergency services unwrapped its wrinkled metal frame from a tree trunk in Santa Cruz. There would probably have been an arrest following her hospitalization in any case, given the nature of the crash, but a stomach filled with a nearly lethal combination of Valium and Xanax, stirred together with most of a bottle of cheap tequila, changed things. Attempted suicide always gets a psych eval.

Attempted suicide. With pills. At first, an innocuous case. Later, that feeble attempt at taking her own life would make so much more sense.

The tree Emma had hit stood in a front yard in a residential neighbourhood inhabited by twelve children under the age of fifteen (the prosecutor had been insistent to identify the exact number and ages, even though none had been injured in the crash), and that meant Emma had been labelled ‘psychologically disturbed with criminal liability’, which in turn meant she’d ended up in DHS-Metropolitan, the Department of State Hospitals facility in LA County, rather than in a cell in the women’s prison in Chowchilla or Valley State.

Which meant she came within the scope of my vision.

It took days for her conversations with Dr Marcello to open up beyond the blank stares and occasional mutterings that had characterized the first encounter. Part of that was due to the sedatives forcibly delivered to her in a little paper cup each morning, but part went beyond the medications. Something was haunting this young woman. I could see it, even from the side of the room. And my interest grew, because there was something there that was familiar. Something that stirred at memories. Something that made me want to … help her.

‘You know, you can talk to me.’ Dr Marcello said this almost every morning, usually towards the beginning of the prescribed thirty-minute sessions. It was a truth that needed to be gradually absorbed by the patient, softening up the clay that had hardened into her rock-solid defences. She’d eyed him each time he said it, sometimes glancing over in my direction as well, but usually little more than that. Only in the fifth session did she finally begin to open up.

‘It’ll help if you talk, eventually,’ he added that day. ‘You’ve been here two weeks now, a little more. Time’s got to come to speak, Miss Fairfax.’

She grunted. We weren’t to be believed. Her look was momentarily all revulsion, peering up and down at Marcello, then at me. Then the emotion evaporated. The doctor jotted a note down on his pad, just visible to me on his knee. Resistant to authority. Maybe to men.

‘Though I suppose, from another perspective,’ Dr Marcello added, ‘we could say you don’t have to speak at all.’ He laid down his pen over his notes. ‘You can stay silent, if that’s what you want, and we can just sit like this. You’re going to be in here for a while, in any case. You know that.’

‘Not long enough.’

I barely caught the words. She barely said them. But the whisper made it to my ears, and my shoulders rose, encouraged by the first sign of a real communication.

‘What does that mean, Emma?’ Dr Marcello asked. ‘Is it okay if I call you Emma?’

She shrugged, dismissive and annoyed. It was ‘I don’t care’ and ‘fuck off’ in a single, well-practised thrust of the shoulders. But it was also a solid sign of comprehension, and a concrete response.

‘You can call me whatever you want,’ she finally answered. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

I was startled at the strong accent with which she spoke. With her first full sentences it came out noticeably, and the elongated vowels and reassigned consonants of country bumpkin drawl clashed with her simple beauty. Her ‘whatever’ came out ‘wat-evuh’ and her ‘doesn’t matter’ was a punctuated ‘don’t mattuh’. I couldn’t immediately tell whether it was authenticity or affectation, but Emma had the motions to go with the sassy tones. There was a tedious roll of the eyes and a dismissive flick of the head. Ain’t much for ya, fukkuh. Piss off.

‘Why is that?’ Dr Marcello asked, keeping his attention focused. If he was as surprised by her voice as I, he didn’t show it. ‘Why doesn’t it matter what I call you?’

‘Nothing matters now I’m here. It’s all done.’ She rolled her eyes again. Her arms remained folded across her chest.

‘Your life isn’t over,’ he said. ‘You were fortunate – you didn’t harm anyone but yourself. The car’s totalled and you probably offed the tree, but it didn’t go further than that.’

When she laughed, the sound was pitiful. Mournful. I remember I was amazed that someone who seemed so determined to be brash could exhibit such a contrary emotion.

‘Didn’t harm no one!’ she jabbed back, her eyes suddenly going glassy. ‘That’s the whole problem. I’ve harmed plenty, and no one knows.’ She swung her head my way, stared into my eyes, as if I might understand what she felt the doctor didn’t.

I lowered my head, unsure how to meet that stare. I had a clipboard across my lap, intended for clinical notes on prescriptions the doctor might require, but I found myself scratching illegible lines across it with my pen. Muscle memory was moving my hands.

‘Is that why you were taking the drugs?’ Dr Marcello asked. Suddenly my own throat caught slightly. The mention of the pills – it wasn’t the first. But the attempt at suicide, it suddenly hit me. Not as simply a clinical fact, but as a memory. One I’d worked so hard to push away.

The pills …

I swallowed hard.

‘Was it guilt?’ Dr Marcello continued. ‘Guilt over the people you feel you’ve hurt in your life? The Xanax, the Valium – you had a lot in your system.’

God, Evelyn. I shoved the memory away. Back into its box. This wasn’t the time. The past was the past. This woman wasn’t my sister.

Emma Fairfax glared at Dr Marcello, her eyes pitying and condemning at the same time.

‘I don’t feel nothing,’ she answered. Her eyes rolled and her arms crossed tighter at her chest, defiant. I escaped the clenched feeling in my chest enough to see Dr Marcello underline the phrase as he transcribed it onto his notepad. A sentence fairly well drenched with possible interpretations.

‘So you feel you don’t sufficiently register emot—’

‘I’m not speaking psycho-shit, Doctor,’ she snapped. But she wasn’t angry. ‘I don’t feel I’ve hurt others. I know it. It’s a fact.’

There was a sob in her eyes and it shook her tongue. She stopped talking, tossing her hair aside in a show of dismissiveness. I don’t care. Nothing can make me care. The forced denial of someone who cares deeply – more than they wish or want.

‘Can you tell me about that?’ Marcello asked. He’d drawn a firm line across his paper. This was a new area, one that hadn’t come up in our brief encounters to date.

My heart was racing. The conversation was taking me in new directions, too. The memories were hitting like a flood.

The pills.

The death.

My sister’s absence.

I could barely stay in the moment.

‘It weren’t supposed to turn out the way it did!’ Emma cried out. There were tears then, streaming down her cheeks and pooling at the curve of her chin before falling onto her lap.

‘What wasn’t, Emma?’ Dr Marcello kept his voice soft.

‘It were bad. We all knew it were bad. But it got out of hand.’

She wasn’t registering his questions, so he stopped asking them.

The sob was back, this time long, vocal and heart-wrenching. A few words fumbled out from between Emma’s lips, but none of them had anything to do with the car accident.

‘Emma,’, Dr Marcello leaned in towards her in a carefully practised, unthreatening way, ‘I’m not sure what we’re talking about. Fill me in. Why don’t you start with where, with when?’ Concrete facts, sometimes easier for traumatized patients to deal with than emotions.

She gazed more through him than at him.

‘You don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘These nice looks you give me, the “it ain’t so fuckin’ bad, you’re a good girl” sentiments, you’re not gonna have ’em for long if I tell you what … what …’

Her throat seized up. She wanted to be defiant, but a sob stopped her.

Marcello leaned forward. Despite the torrent of my memories, my emotions, I leaned forward too.

‘Emma, there’s nothing you can tell us that will cause me to change my desire to care for you.’

It’s a lie he’d been trained to tell. All of us, actually, even if we’re just pharmacists in a prison ward – and we’re taught to believe it, too. Our goal is to help the patient. Nothing can change that. There’s nothing they can say that ought to cause us to look at them differently. No deed a person has done that devalues his worth or affects our duty to care.

But it’s a lie. A terrible, dreadful, hideous lie. Maybe I was never meant to become a man of Dr Marcello’s moral objectivity, maybe my own experiences meant I couldn’t maintain that ruse of unflappable dispassion, but reality’s reality. There are things a person can say – things a young woman can say, in a little room beneath fluorescent lights before an analyst and a pharmacist at a metal table – that should make any human person change their mind radically about them. Things a person can say that show they’re not people at all, but monsters. Monsters whose existence makes the world itself groan, repulsed by more than their actions.

Repulsed by their very existence.

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