sense of calm. It was resignation. It was over. The world had been trying to kill her in the worst way possible, and now it was finally going to do it. She gave in, the calmness spreading through her. She even pulled the false door all the way closed; the handle turned and she knew she could get out again, but maybe it didn’t matter. She slid her hands along the wood. The space was the width of the closet, wider than her outstretched arms, but it couldn’t have been more than a foot deep. With her back pressed tight against the rear wall, her breasts grazed the false door. A wave of unreality passed over, and she welcomed it. And she waited.
She listened. She could hear her own breathing and her heart in her chest, but nothing else.
How had Corbin gotten back to America? Or had he never left? No, he had left and gone to London, because Martha had seen him, hadn’t she?
He’d come back because he’d killed Audrey and now he was going to kill her, and this hiding in the closet, this other man, was all part of some elaborate game he was playing.
Or could there really be someone else in the apartment?
Was it Alan, still drunk, who’d found another way to sneak in?
Or was it finally George Daniels? Kate felt the laugh again, rising up through her lungs, and she held it down by tensing her jaw, her neck muscles almost seizing up. George Daniels back from the dead, and in another country. In some ways, she wouldn’t be surprised. As she always said to herself: he was always with her, always along for the ride.
His voice in her head: You are going to die in a closet, Kate. Giggling.
She closed her eyes, and nothing changed. The world was still black.
She tried not to think of her parents and how they would feel when they heard she’d been murdered.
She thought of Alan. Twenty-four hours earlier she’d been in his bed, allowing herself to feel something. She’d been happy, celebratory almost, that she was finally with another man. Maybe that was what George Daniels had been waiting for all along, waiting for her to finally cheat on him, so that he could finally give her what she deserved. Maybe he really was alive, and the police, and her parents, and everyone else had lied to her. For a horrible instant, she believed it.
And then she heard something. A human sound, like a grunt. Or maybe it was a scream that had suddenly been cut off. She waited, barely breathing, but there was nothing else, just the sound of the building humming and sighing around her. And suddenly she wondered if she’d heard anything at all. She allowed herself to take a breath, sipping at the thin air in the closet. She cracked the false door open a little, relieved that it hadn’t locked her in. She tapped her fingertips together, felt a sharp pain when she tapped her swollen thumb, the splinter still embedded deep in the pad. She put the thumb in her mouth and tore at the skin with her teeth, eventually sucking the splinter out. She wiped the blood down her shirt. Removing the splinter had made her feel sane for a brief moment, but now she wondered how much longer she could stay in this closet. What was happening out there?
She formed a plan, just to see how it would feel in her head. She would push her way out of the closet and move as swiftly and quietly as possible from the den to the hallway, then from the hallway to the living room and foyer, then she’d go through the door and run as fast as she could to the front desk. It was a big apartment. Corbin, or whoever else was in here, might be somewhere else. She might get free. And if she didn’t? Then at least she wasn’t cowering in this closet anymore.
Her thumb continued to drip blood, and she sucked at it some more, actually savoring the taste in her mouth.
She’d often wondered about the night that George Daniels had tracked her down in the Lake District and sealed her in the closet. She wondered whether, even if the door hadn’t been blocked, she’d have been able to leave. Not while he was still out there, but after she heard the gun go off. She’d been trapped, and there was nothing for her to do but