Her Every Fear - Peter Swanson Page 0,27

anything, okay? Even if it seems insignificant.”

Kate hung up the phone. She sat quietly for a moment, thinking: Did I make a mistake by not telling her that I’d seen the man from across the courtyard peering into Audrey’s apartment? She decided, swiftly, that not telling the detective about Alan Cherney was not a mistake. Of course he was looking across and into the apartment. There’d been a murder. He must have heard about it, and he was curious. Curious and upset, probably. It was natural.

When bad things happened, the world always looked. Kate knew that more than most people.

Chapter 9

Kate finished her long e-mail to her mother, detailing what had happened since she’d arrived in Boston. She knew that as soon as she sent it, her mother would ask her to come home. Not so much for the sake of safety—although that would obviously be part of it—but because of what Kate had gone through with George Daniels.

She’d met George her first year at university. He was in earth sciences, and she was in the arts, but they’d ended up in the same beginning Greek course. Kate struggled in the course and ended up asking George for help. She’d only asked him because he looked studious and trustworthy. He wasn’t bad looking, but at eighteen years old he looked like a fully licensed chartered accountant. He was tall and lanky, most of his height coming from his long legs. He wore plain spectacles, always dressed in corduroys and sweater vests, and was beginning to lose his hair. But the hair loss had left George with a prominent widow’s peak that she found attractive. After several study sessions, he nervously asked Kate if she’d like to go to dinner sometime; he suggested an Italian place that he’d heard was very good.

She said yes, intrigued about what it would be like to go on such an old-fashioned date instead of just meeting up with some boy at the student union pub. And it had felt like an old-fashioned date. George even wore a tie under one of his sweater vests. It should have been awkward, but it wasn’t. George and Kate had lots in common; both were secret poetry fans, and both were obsessed with Twin Peaks. That weekend they spent all of Saturday and part of Sunday in George’s room watching the entire first season on George’s laptop in his bed. By Monday they had each lost their virginity, and Kate was certain that she was in love. George, she knew, felt the same way.

They were together for a year, safe in the bubble of their relationship. Kate felt safe, anyway. Her whole life had been colored by her conviction that tragedy was always about to strike. The therapist her parents had brought her to when she was eight had asked her to name the three things she was most frightened of, and Kate had burst into tears, overwhelmed by having to reduce a world of strangers, spiders, gas leaks, bullies, invisible germs, and violent weather into just three simple fears. She was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder—to the surprise of no one—but also with fantasy-prone disorder. She was simply too imaginative.

What was comforting about George was that he planned everything, down to the little details. Kate still worried—her mind one of those rattling filmstrips that only showed lurid safety films from health class—but her worries would never change George’s mind, and it took some pressure off her. For summer holiday after that first year of university, he booked a trip around the Greek islands. They were to fly from London to Athens, then take ferries to Santorini, Crete, and, finally, Rhodes. Kate had only flown once, as a thirteen-year-old, to the Azores, and her parents had promised her afterward that they’d never make her do it again. She remembered the feeling well, the plane taking off and her conviction that death was swallowing her whole. The feeling had gone beyond panic and into the cold vacuum of pure terror. Kate told George about it, told him she didn’t think she could fly to Athens, but he’d looked at her calmly and told her he’d already planned it. “It’s all booked, Kate,” he’d said, his voice telling her that there wasn’t going to be a conversation.

In a way, it made things easier. The days leading up to the flight Kate felt like she was moving through air that had solidified into something without oxygen. Her chest ached, and she’d begun

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