The Witch Elm - Tana French Page 0,172

a good night’s sleep but on the other hand I needed her to hear this, this bullshit that had pushed us into our one and only fight ever, I couldn’t leave it till morning. “Baby,” I said quietly, or as quietly as I could, into our dark bedroom. “Are you awake?”

As I said it I knew. The air of the room was chilly and sterile, no breathing, no scent of her, no tinge of body warmth.

I found the light switch. The bed was still made; the wardrobe was open, bare hangers dangling.

I sat down heavily on the bed. My ears were roaring. I found my phone and rang Melissa: it rang out to voicemail. Tried again: same thing. Again: she had switched it off.

I never thought you did, she had said, looking me straight in the eye, and I had believed her because I wanted to. No wonder she had been preoccupied, the last while; no wonder she had been desperate to drag me out of there—middle of the night, drunk, stoned, leave everything behind and run with just the clothes on our backs. She had been trying to protect me. She had been afraid that, if I kept asking questions, I was going to find out what I had done.

Somehow what hurt wasn’t the fact that she believed I could be a killer—she hadn’t even met me back then, teenagers are scrambled and confused and half off the rails, I could have been anything for all she knew. What made me want to drop my head in my hands and weep was that I had really believed Melissa knew who I was now, knew it so closely and truly that she would be able to hold me together while I didn’t even know myself any more, and I had been wrong. I wasn’t some callous shithead, some psychopath who could push a murder into a corner of my mind and bounce blithely on with my life as if it didn’t exist— And there I was again, here we go round the mulberry bush and come full circle, what made me so sure what type of person I was, what I could and couldn’t have done?

Melissa, Leon, Susanna, Rafferty, Kerr. Hugo, for all I knew—in the car that day, I’d really like to know the story behind him ending up in that tree, I do feel as if I’ve got a bit of a right to know what happened . . . In hindsight it was obvious that he’d been carefully, delicately inviting me to come clean. Who else? Which of the guys on the alumni Facebook group? Dec, Sean? My own father? My own mother?

Whirls of crimson flowers spread out on a slate countertop, neat rhythmic flash of a knife through sunlight. Susanna’s voice, wry and amused: Oh, you. Anything you feel bad about just falls straight out of your head.

And with that, finally, it all fell into place. It had taken me a gobsmacking amount of time to notice the one dazzlingly obvious reason why all these people might think I’d killed Dominic: because I had.

The house was utterly quiet, not a creak or a tick of settling wood, not a snore from Hugo. It had the same terrible feel as the garden, a monstrous impostor burgeoning with incomprehensible, unstoppable transformations, wooden floors squelching like moss underfoot and brick walls billowing like curtains with the force of whatever was growing behind them.

That night. Where did you go?

I tried to tell myself that I would remember that. A whack to the head could knock out the word for colander or the last time I’d seen Phil, but not something like this. I had no idea whether that was true.

Faye said you’d been kind of pissed off with Dominic, that summer.

By the time Dominic died, we had all been finished with school, about to head off in our various directions to the rest of our lives. It wasn’t like Leon had been facing into another year of Dominic’s locker-room shenanigans; all that had been history. Why would he have needed to kill him?

I’d bet money that you only meant to give Dominic a scare. You were only planning on shaking him up a bit, nothing serious.

But surely, I thought (walls rippling queasily, dark pulses at the edges of my vision), surely if that had happened it would have colored every day of my life since, nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks whenever I saw a cop or went into Hugo’s garden, a

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