Page 9 of 56 Days
She pinches the bridge of her nose, closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, she sees Karl looking at her questioningly.
“I know this is bad,” Stephen says in her ear, “but we didn’t think—”
“We’ll talk about thenot-thinkinglater. I’m with Karl, we’ll go straight there now. Text me the full address. Send me a few cars. Tech Bureau and pathologist, too. If anyone else gets there before us, tell them to set up the cordon. No one leaves. Then call Ant and Dec back and tell them one of them needs to stand outside the apartment door and the other one needs to meet me outside the building and they are not to so much asbreatheuntil I get there. Keep this off the air until you hear from me again. And start praying that this getsun-fucked-up before our Super gets wind of it. Got all that?”
“Got it.”
After she ends the call, Lee throws Eddie’s cuffs onto the bed in a high arc, hitting Karl square between the legs with their full weight and then some, sending him into a spasm of new pain.
She doesn’t wait for him to recover.
“Get dressed,” she says. “We need to go.Now.”
53 Days Ago
Him not being there, not waiting for her outside his office building as arranged, is not theworst-casescenario. Theworst-casescenario is him not being there but somewhere else that offers a view of that spot, from where he can watch her waiting for him like a fool. To avoid this, Ciara arrives twenty minutes early and buys a coffee in the Starbucks just around the corner, which she sips at one of their outdoor tables with her eye on the time. When it gets to thehalf-hour, she waits a minute more before leaving, crunching on a chalky mint to ward off coffee breath.
He is the first thing she sees when she turns on to the main street. There, where he said he’d be, waiting for her.
Relief floods her veins.
He turns and waves. She waves back, doing her best to look like she’s dashed here straight from the office.
He is dressed as he was on Friday; men’s suits are indistinguishable to her, for the most part, but it could be a different one. The tie is a different color, anyway. The thick strap of abeat-upleather messenger bag rests across his body. He has no coat or jacket, even though she is glad of hers already and there’s a whole night to get through yet. She has gone for standard work clothes, but on a day when she is making an effort: a black shirt dress over black boots and tights, her trusty green winter coat, black handbag.
It’s odd to see him now, smiling and coming toward her, when they have so recently been strangers and he looks the way he does. She has managed to forget, in theseventy-oddhours since she last saw him, how striking he is.
What it feels like to look into those eyes.
To have them be looking back at you.
He is stretching out an arm to greet her with a hug before she has a chance to worry abouthowthey will greet each other and what acute awkwardness might ensue if it turns out they have different expectations. The hug is loose and polite,one-armedon either side, not at all intimate. But she gets a whiff of whatever scent he’s sprayed on himself—in the last five minutes, going by its potency—and to be so close to him, to touch him and be touched by him, even momentarily, is heady and disorienting. Her body’s reaction takes her aback and she doesn’t hear what he says immediately after they break away and turn to walk side by side in the direction of town, so distracted is she by the fading heat of the contact.
“Hmm?” she says.
“I said maybe we shouldn’t have done that. You know, hugged.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “You heard they canceled the parade? Although it’s probably for the best. It’s all tourists at that thing anyway. The only time I’ve ever done anything for it was when I was abroad.”
They’ve canceled the St. Patrick’s Day parade. That’s what he’s talking about.
As they walk up the street, she sees women walking in the opposite direction steal glances at him as they pass. This makes her feel both completely invisible and superior to them at the same time.
These women haven’t even noticed she’s there too, but she’s the one walking with him. It’s a weird brand of pride.
“Same here,” she says.
He tells her that when he was in London, Patrick’s Day was one of the biggest nights of the year. A ticketed event at an Irish pub packed to the rafters, leprechaun outfits, drinking green beer—all things they wouldn’t be caught dead doing at home. One of histop-tenhangovers ever. His brother had been visiting, which didn’t help.
He asks her if she has siblings.
“No, I’m that rare specimen,” she says, “the Irish only child.”
“In the same realm as a unicorn sighting.”
“Leprechaun, surely?” She smiles. “But yeah. Is it just you and your brother or...?”
“Just us.”
