The Women Who Ran Away - Sheila O'Flanagan Page 0,18

of course there was still one thing it was likely she’d never get the opportunity to do. And it was the most important thing in the world.

Out of nowhere, the tears came again.

Chapter 7

Dublin to New York: 5,112 km

Like Deira, Grace Garvey also had a cabin on Deck 8, which meant that she too had an outside balcony and a small seating area. After dinner, she’d spent some time on the balcony, but the chilly wind had driven her back inside, and now she was sitting at the low table, Ken’s laptop open in front of her.

She was looking at the eight documents again, clicking on them one by one and shaking her head each time they asked for a password. She was torn between her desire to work it out and a quite separate desire to completely ignore Ken and his stupid documents and head straight for their apartment in the south of Spain without any palaver. It was about half an hour’s drive from Cartagena, the name on the last folder.

But he’d got inside her head, that was the problem. He’d always been good at getting inside her head.

So she stayed looking at the computer screen and eventually turned her attention to the folder titled Nantes. Her initial guess at a password had been the date of their wedding anniversary, thinking it was the most likely answer, but no matter which way she entered it – numerically, with text, or a combination of both – she continued to get a ‘password incorrect’ message. She felt her irritation with her late husband increase at every failed attempt to unlock the document, and imagined Ken’s exasperation at her failure. He would have told her to think, she knew. He was always telling her to think. Use your head, not your heart, he’d say. Stop making mad, emotionally charged decisions.

She’d tried desperately hard, particularly over the last couple of years, not to make emotionally charged decisions, although his assessment of her approach was flawed. It was never as emotionally charged as he believed. But it wasn’t based on pure logic either. She often told him that a man like him, who read so much, should be more in tune with feelings than he was. And he would say that it was precisely because he’d read so widely that he understood the disastrous effects of unfettered feelings. That was why he liked his life to be determined by reason. But not all the time, he’d add with a smile, because I married you, didn’t I, Hippolyta, which was definitely emotion not logic.

Had he regretted that? And had his final decision been emotional or logical? She wished she knew.

She turned back to the documents. There had to be something she hadn’t tried yet.

‘You idiot,’ she muttered as she got another ‘password incorrect’ message. She wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself or to her husband. ‘If you wanted me to solve this, if it’s as important as you want me to believe, then why did you make it so bloody hard?’

Because he’d loved mysteries, she supposed. And riddles. And codes. After he’d cut back on his academic workload, he’d taken up setting crossword puzzles for the professional journal he subscribed to. He liked to make them as difficult as possible. After all, he told her, his peers were clever people. He had to pose a worthwhile challenge to them.

‘But not annoy them too much, surely,’ she’d said. ‘You want them to be able to finish it, don’t you?’

‘Eventually,’ he’d replied. ‘But not immediately. I don’t believe in instant gratification.’

She’d never been able to finish one of his crosswords. In fact she was triumphant if she solved more than a couple of the clues correctly. Now she had eight to work out and no idea how she was going to go about it.

Were we completely incompatible? she wondered, as she continued to enter a variety of dates into the password bar. Was our entire marriage based on him being super-intelligent and me being super-thick?

She thumped the keyboard, to no effect. She knew she wasn’t stupid. But there was a difference between her intelligence and Ken’s. She was life-clever. Competent at resolving issues and conflicts. Competent at getting things done. He was – had been – intellectually clever. Which was very different.

She’d known that from the start.

Grace Garvey had met Ken Harrington on her first transatlantic flight from Dublin to New York. Transatlantic was a promotion for her and she’d worked hard not to