Page 27 of 56 Days
This isn’t a lie.
She looks relieved. “You should.”
“Thing is, I hate the heat.”
Thatisone.
“Don’t let that stop you. It’s allice-coldair-conditioningand misting machines. Plus, it’s not always hot and steamy in Florida. I went in March and it was actually quite nice.”
“Was this a girls’ trip or...?”
She pretends not to have noticed that he is fishing for information and he pretends not to have noticed her noticing but pretending not to.
“Work, primarily. A tech conference in Orlando...”
One of the guys he shared an apartment with back in London attended a conference there last year—something to do with sustainable travel, ironically—so Oliver happens to know that thereisa big convention center in the city. And because he’d been surprised to hear this, thinking it was all roller coasters andhuman-sizedrodents in red shorts, he’d said, “Orlando? Really?” and his roommate had told him that the city actually has the most convention space by square meter of any US city and only Las Vegas has more hotel rooms. So her story fits, but does it do that because it’s the truth, or because she’s done her research?
She’s looking toward the canal now, sipping her coffee silently, and he uses the opportunity to study her.
“Cork, right?” he asks.
He’s not especially good with accents but he thinks he can hear traces of the city’s in hers.
“Originally,” she says. “We moved to the Isle of Man when I was seven.”
He doesn’t think he’s ever met anybody who actually lives there. All he knows about it is that it’s in the Irish Sea and they have motorcycle races.
When she asks him where he’s from, he says Kilkenny. No one remembers where he was from originally, only where it happened, so this is a relatively safe share of some truth. When she asks him how long he’s been in Dublin, he offers a little more of it by admitting it’s been six weeks.
“And where were you seven weeks ago?”
“London,” he says. “And you?”
“How long am I in Dublin?” She makes a show of thinking about this. “Well, next Monday it’ll be, ah... seven days.”
“Sevendays?” And on five of them, he’s seen her? “And here was I thinkingIwas the newbie.”
She laughs. “Nope. I win that game.”
“Where were you before?”
“Cork. Since I finished college. I went to Swansea.Not-at-all-notable member of the Class of 2017, here.”
He does the math in his head.
Class of 2017. Presuming she went to university when she was seventeen or eighteen, that’d make her...twenty-fiveor -six. She said they moved to the Isle of Man when she was seven, which would be... around 2002.
A year before it happened. Two years before the trial.
“What about you?” she asks. “Where did you go?”
“Newcastle,” he says absently.
He’s thinking about her being out of the country back then and which column to put this information in. The timeline is pretty tight—tight enough to make him wonder if it wasn’t designed to be that way. And even if it’s true, who’s to say that Irish news headlines didn’t reach the Isle of Man?
He feels tired suddenly, spent by the effort of playing this game. Ofhavingto play some version of it, always. Even now, years after the fact.
And not being able to get a reading on this woman, at least not one he can hold on to for very long.
