Page 54 of 56 Days
He likes her and it’s going to ruin everything.
Again.
“What are you having?” she asks. “I think I might get the baked eggs.”
He knows he’s standing with his hand in the fire. He can see the flames tickling his skin. And past experience tells him that any moment now, the heat will burn through the outer layer to his nerve endings and drop him into a world of screaming pain.
There’s no other possible outcome, he knows this.
But he just can’t pull his hand away.
He likes the heat.
“Sounds good,” he says. “I think I’ll have that too.”
They set their menus down. He can’t see any waiter in this section of the café, but presumably one will appear.
“Don’t look,” Ciara whispers. “But in the corner, to your right.”
Then she lifts her chin to indicate that heshouldlook.
One of their fellow patrons is standing, balanced precariously, on her chair, pointing a camera the size of a small dog at the tableful of artfully arranged food and drink below her. After she inspects the results of the latest shot on the camera’s screen, the photographer bends down to slide a coffee cup a couple of inches to the left, wobbling a bit as the wooden chair rocks unsteadily beneath her feet.
Behaving in public in a way that attracts so much attention without seemingly caring who sees is such an alien behavior to Oliver that he classes it as a kind of psychopathy.
“Anything for the ’Gram,” Ciara mutters.
They’d woken up in the same bed this morning but they hadn’t stayed together since; after he suggested they walk into town for breakfast, she’d told him she’d meet him there instead, that she needed to “get ready” at her place. Change clothes, put on makeup, whatever else women do. It gave him an hour at home alone, which he used to search for her on social media, more thoroughly this time, using all the information he’d gleaned—but, again, to no avail.
He hasn’t been able to find anything even resembling a corresponding profile on Twitter, Facebook,orInstagram, despite forensically searching for every possibility he could think of. Her full name. Her first name plus “Dublin.” Her first name plus “Cork.”
All those with her last name and first initial.
All recent posts tagged with things like #thesidecarbar, #cocktails, and #French75 in case her username was a string of random numbers or some other name altogether.
Nothing.
Not even an account set to private thatmightbe her. No old posts belonging to other accounts in which she’d been tagged.
She just wasn’t there.
And not just on social media, but online in general.
Apart from the LinkedIn profile he’d found for her on the day they’d met, there wasn’t a single Google search result about her. She wassonot there, it was suspicious.
A person would have to work at keeping the internet so clean of their name.
Or would they?
Maybe if you were a normal person, it wasn’t that hard.
And Ciara might justnot usesocial media. It wasn’t unheard of. After all, weren’t digital detoxes all the rage? And in the hours they’ve spent together, he’s never seen her take a single picture with her phone. Any time he’s caught a glimpse of her screen, she seems to be checking her email or scrolling through news headlines.
And now that she’s brought up the subject, it’s an opportunity he can’t waste.
“You’re not on the ’Gram, then?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “Nope.”
