“Laughed in my face,” Susanna said. “They wouldn’t even take a statement, or a report, or whatever they call it.”
“Why not? What was their problem?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have any evidence. The lump on my head was gone by that time. No texts, no emails, no notes, no witnesses. Just she-said-he-said, and apparently what she said didn’t count for much. In fairness, I don’t think it was just because I was a girl. Dominic was a rich kid from a fancy school, his parents would’ve gone ballistic and hired big-shot lawyers and filed a million complaints . . . The cops didn’t want to get into that mess, not with zero evidence. So they patted me on the head and told me he was probably just having a laugh, and I should go home and concentrate on having a nice relaxing summer, instead of getting myself all worked up about fellas.”
“Which seemed a teeny bit insensitive at the time,” Leon said, shaking another cigarette out of the packet, “but actually it was the best thing that could have happened. If there had been a report on file . . .”
“So that was that,” Susanna said. She put out her smoke and pushed the ashtray across the coffee table to Leon. “If the cops wouldn’t touch it, then there wasn’t much point in going to my parents, either, even if I had wanted to—what were they going to do, grab a cop and march him out to arrest Dominic? go talk to his parents, so Mummy and Daddy could be outraged at the thought that their precious prince had done anything bad? And the school wasn’t even involved any more. I was pretty much out of options.”
“You were about to go to college,” I said. I knew it might come out wrong and piss her off, but I needed to hear that I had had no choice. “You could have got in anywhere. Hadn’t you applied to Edinburgh, or somewhere?”
“I had, yeah,” Susanna said, unruffled. “And I was pretty sure I’d get in. I was thinking about going—I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay here, but anything to be safe, right? Except then Dominic came up to me in the kitchen, one day, and he went, ‘So I hear you’re thinking about Edinburgh’—who knows where he heard that.” A wry eyebrow-lift at me. “I babbled something, and he said, ‘Cool. I’ve always wanted an excuse to spend some time in Edinburgh.’ And he shot me the finger guns and wandered off.”
Shrugging: “I mean, maybe he wouldn’t actually have followed me. Maybe he’d have forgotten I existed. But by that stage he was crazy enough that I believed him. God knows money wasn’t a problem for him, and it wasn’t like he had anything to stay here for. Even you guys were pulling away from him—not that I blamed you, believe me. He didn’t have any real friends, did he? Plenty of dudebro types all ready to hoot and cheer when he did something moronic, but no actual friends. Not like you had Sean and Dec.”
“I guess not,” I said. I had never thought much about it, but I couldn’t remember Dominic ever hanging around with one or two people; he had been either at the center of a whooping crowd, or else—towards the end, mainly—sloping around on his own, with a fractured, roving glitter in his eye that made you want to stay far away.
“So he wasn’t going to stick around Dublin just to hang with the lads. And I was so fucking terrified all the time, and so exhausted from being terrified, I couldn’t think straight. I was positive he’d track me down, and it would be even worse because I’d be away from home and my family. By that stage he didn’t feel like just some douche; he felt huge. Like a demon. Something that could find me anywhere.” With a glance at me: “You figure I should’ve gone anyway, and kept my fingers crossed. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I should’ve headed off to Outer Mongolia because some arsehole couldn’t handle not getting his way. Would you have?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The calm of her—of both of them, really, Leon lounging on the hearthrug and poking experimentally at one wet shoe—was unsettling me more and more. It wasn’t that I wanted them trembling and sobbing, but given where all this had led, it felt like they should at