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‘Good. Glad you like it. Sorry about the cold. I should’ve put on the heating earlier. It should warm up pretty quick.’ He set the basket on the coffee table. ‘So – any questions?’

  ‘No, no. I think I’m all set.’

  She smiled. His eyes met hers and she realised it was for the first time. Eye contact, evidently, wasn’t his thing. Andrew proved this by looking away again almost immediately.

  Then he gave a little wave, turned on his heel and left.

  The thunk of the front door locking shut echoed around the house again and then everything was quiet and still.

  Too quiet and still.

  Natalie cast about for a remote control but couldn’t find one, so she went to the TV and randomly pressed the slim buttons hidden on its side until loud voices boomed into the space, banishing the silence.

  She took a quick inventory of the contents of the wicker basket. A box of Irish soda bread mix; six mismatched eggs; a bag of Cork Coffee Roaster’s ‘Rebel’ blend; a bar of chocolate with a pencil sketch of Shanamore Strand on the label; a single bottle of beer from the Franciscan Well; a small carton of milk.

  She was patting her coat pockets for the hard shape of her phone before she even realised she was doing it. It was like a muscle memory, a tic. But she didn’t need a photo of the basket. She didn’t need any photos at all, because she wouldn’t be posting online about this trip.

  For a change.

  A search of the kitchen turned up a drawer filled with things swiped but not consumed by previous guests: hardened sachets of salt and pepper, a few pouches of ketchup and mayonnaise, individually wrapped teabags.

  Natalie supposed she could bake the bread and have it toasted with scrambled eggs, but she was missing a crucial ingredient: being arsed enough to. She wasn’t even hungry, not really. So she made herself a cup of hot, sweet tea and took it to one of the couches, and idly ate her way through the chocolate bar square by square without even taking off her coat.

  What she was really doing, she knew, was stalling. Putting off going upstairs. Because being here in the cottage was one thing, but to see the bed, to have to – at some point – get into it …

  On the TV, the talk show had been replaced by a Friends rerun. The one with the wedding dresses.

  By the time Phoebe and Monica had persuaded Rachel to get into one too, it was pitch black outside.

  Natalie got up to draw the curtains.

  According to the front window there was nothing out there in the night except for a buttery gold square directly opposite: a view into Andrew’s living room via the window at the front of his cottage. Same layout, same furniture, just all turned the other way around like a mirror image. There was no sign of him and no lights on upstairs, although his car was still parked in the drive.

  She pulled the curtains closed until their edges overlapped. The material was thin, the orbs of the streetlights easily filtering through.

  There was nothing to cover the wall of black glass, yawning like the mouth of a great abyss at the rear of the cottage. Either the owners were trying to save money or they thought there was no need for window dressings when all that was behind the house was a patio, a few feet of communal garden and a hedgerow. But it made Natalie uneasy. What was on the other side of that hedge? She couldn’t tell in the dark.

  There could be another house looking directly into hers.

  There could be someone looking at her right now.

  As Natalie stood at the glass, contemplating this, it morphed from a mere lack of privacy into a structural vulnerability. How strong was that glass? Could someone hurl a rock through it? What would she do if someone did?

  Here it comes, she thought. The Anxiety Train. Express service to Crazytown unless she applied the brakes. Natalie tried to, now, telling herself that the glass was fine and that there was no one out there. That hundreds if not thousands of people had stayed in Shanamore Cottages before her and nothing had happened to any of them. That if it were daytime, she wouldn’t even have noticed this. This wouldn’t even be a thing.

  She silently repeated this several times until she felt herself relax.

  But she also wished she’d found a bottle of wine in that bloody wicker basket.

  It was when she turned to go back to the couch that the shelf beneath the coffee table revealed itself and the several small piles of books on it. Natalie knelt on the floor and started pulling them out, appraising each one. Battered paperbacks. Airport bestsellers, for the most part. A newish copy of Jurassic Park. Two or three in a foreign language.

  A library of left-behind holiday reads.

  Natalie stopped and stared at the narrow, hard, cornflower-blue spine.

  And she knew. She knew even before she reached out and picked it up and turned it over in her hands: it wasn’t just a copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley selected by Fiona Sampson. It was her copy.

  Their copy, hers and Mike’s.

  Then she opened it and got confirmation.

  Stuck on the first page was the bookplate she’d bought in the Keats–Shelley House by the Spanish Steps, along with the book itself, a few years before. It was stuck on slightly askew because Natalie had done it quickly, surreptitiously, in the doorway of the gift shop, before Mike could catch her in the act. The For my M she’d scrawled beneath the sticker was in a messy version of her handwriting for the same reason. When she’d presented it to him that night over a candlelit dinner off the Via Veneto, the first thing he’d said was, ‘When did you buy this?’ The next question he’d asked her was if she’d marry him, the proposal his plan for their supposedly last-minute weekend away in Rome all along.

  Last week she’d been arranging the bookshelves in the room she was supposed to be using as a home office when it had occurred to her that she hadn’t seen that book in a while. When she’d asked him about it, Mike had reminded her that there were a few things they hadn’t seen since the move. He’d said it was probably down the bottom of a box they hadn’t unpacked yet. He’d seemed confident that it would show up soon.

  Natalie clutched the book to her chest as if it were something precious. And it was, but not for the reasons it had been in the past.

  Now, it was evidence.

  Now, she had proof.

  _________

  The clock on the TV screen said it was almost eight. Natalie decided to have a bath. It would warm her up and give the cottage time to warm up too. Afterwards, she’d crawl into bed and let herself sink into a night of blissful sleep. She could face facts tomorrow.

  She’d have to face the bed now, though.

  Reluctant to put the poetry book back with the others or to leave it out, Natalie pulled open drawers in the kitchen until she found a relatively empty one and then slipped it in there. After double-checking the doors and windows were locked, she turned out the living-room lights and lugged her case up the stairs. She kept her free hand on the wall to steady herself and tried not to focus on the empty space between the steps or the yawning open space to the right of them.

  There were two closed doors at the top, one off either side of the small, carpeted landing. The bathroom was through the one on the right. Simple, white and very clean. There were no windows save for a tiny frosted square above the sink. Natalie dropped the plug in the bath and ran the tap until it got hot, adding a few drops from the miniature bottle of shower gel that had been left on the edge.

  She sat on the closed lid of the toilet and watched the bubbles grow.

  Until an alien noise pierced the air.

  BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

  Her phone, Natalie realised on a delay.

  Had it always been that loud? And that annoying? She got up to retrieve it from her bag, which she’d dropped in the doorway. A single bar of service had appeared on screen, letting a flood of text messages and notifications come through. The newest one said she had a voicemail.

  Natalie put the phone to her ear and played it.

  It was him.

  ‘Nat, where are you? What’
s going on? I’m—’

  She threw the phone across the room and watched as it smacked off the tiled wall, dropped into the bath water and sank beneath the bubbles.

  Natalie blinked.

  Had she really just done that?

  She’d done it unthinkingly, or rather before she could think about it, and now, in the moment immediately after, she felt like she might throw up.

  No phone? The idea made her feel clammy, anxious, unmoored. No phone. No phone. No phone. She couldn’t contact anyone and no one could contact her. No one even knew where she was—

  But that had been her plan, hadn’t it? She had intended to turn off the phone while she was here. This would make things easier now. Simpler. She wouldn’t be able to turn it back on, so she wouldn’t need to waste any energy trying to stop herself from doing it.

  This was a good thing, even if it didn’t feel that way.

  Natalie found the phone beneath the water – the screen, somehow, had remained intact – and put it in the plastic bin under the sink.

  The bath wasn’t full yet. She pictured herself lying in there with the breach of the bedroom still ahead of her and decided that wasn’t the right recipe for relaxation. She should go in there now. Just get it over with.

  It was only a bed, for God’s sake. An inanimate piece of furniture.

  She crossed the landing.

  The bedroom was cold with a hint of damp, just like downstairs, and just like downstairs, this space had a gaping wall of glass. The difference was that this one was to the front of the cottage.

  There was an amber streetlight right outside and it lit the room well enough to see the outlines of everything in it, but Natalie flicked on the ceiling light to get a better look. The bed was king-sized, the sheets plain white and pulled smooth across the mattress. She got down on her hands and knees to look underneath it, imagining that she’d see the glint of a cufflink or a lost earring, like people do in the movies.

  There was nothing.

  It didn’t matter. She had the poetry book.

  The bed faced built-in wardrobes with mirrored doors. There was a dressing table, a small TV screen mounted on the wall and a table and two tub-style armchairs set right in front of the wall of glass, just in case you wanted to play a game of Exhibit in a Zoo.

  This wall of glass, at least, had curtains. Natalie was pulling them closed when she caught a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision: someone moving in the downstairs window of Andrew’s cottage. But when she looked, there was no one there.

  She wondered what Andrew’s deal was. Was he from Shanamore? Did he live alone over there? She hadn’t seen a wedding ring or any evidence of children. And there was something about him, something she couldn’t quite articulate, that made it hard for her to believe he wasn’t alone and easy to assume that he was.

  The wall of black glass that fronted the second storey of Andrew’s cottage – his bedroom window – suddenly lit up with a flash of eerie blue light, revealing—

  A woman.

  Standing at the window, looking out.

  Natalie yanked the curtains closed, then immediately regretted being so obvious about it.

  There’d barely been time to collect an impression but it was definitely a woman she’d seen, not Andrew. She was wearing a skirt. Knee-length, maybe. And her hair was pulled back from her face, perhaps in a ponytail …

  ‘No,’ Natalie said aloud, catching herself. Don’t start down that road. She’d only seen this woman for a fraction of second; she couldn’t describe her in any detail with any certainty. And she didn’t think she’d been wearing glasses. The light that revealed her was so odd, it was as if she was lit from the chest up—

  Natalie realised what the weird blue light had been, where it had been coming from.

  The woman’s phone.

  That had been all the light, which meant that until some call or message had lit up that phone’s screen, that woman had just been standing there in total darkness, at the window, in Andrew’s bedroom.

  Watching.

  Watching Natalie.

  Three loud knocks, knuckles on a door.

  ‘Audrey?’ a voice said. ‘You up?’

  She wasn’t. Audrey was half-awake, aware of real-world intrusions but desperate to hang on to the warm, wispy tendrils of sleep, to delay another morning for just a few moments more.

  She clamped her eyelids shut, turned over and burrowed deeper into the warm cocoon of her bed.

  ‘Aud?’ Louder now, more demanding: ‘Audrey?’

  The voice was coming from the other side of the bedroom door, the handle of which wasn’t a full foot from Audrey’s head. It belonged to Dee, her younger sister.

  And, technically speaking, her current landlord.

  ‘I’m coming in,’ Dee warned. But this was followed by a clink and a dull thump; she’d tried the door and discovered that it was locked. ‘Audrey, for God’s sake. Open this bloody door before I have to—’

  Audrey reached out an arm and turned the key in the lock.

  The door swung open immediately, the white light from the landing banishing the grey dim of the box room in one fell swoop.

  The next thing Audrey saw was a cup of steaming coffee seemingly hovering in mid-air.

  ‘Is that for me?’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Dee said. ‘But you can have it.’

  Audrey pulled herself into a half-sitting position and gratefully took the cup of coffee, slurping up a mouthful.

  She stole a sideways glance at her sister as she did. Dee was standing in the doorway, arms folded, surveying the roomscape with a frown. She was already dressed for work in her trademark black suit, barely there make-up and neat, gleaming hair; Audrey so rarely saw her in casual clothes these days that whenever she did, it was disorientating, like meeting one of your primary-school teachers outside of school.

  ‘It looks a lot worse than it is,’ Audrey said.

  The box room was a small square narrowed by a set of built-in wardrobes along one wall and the single bed pushed against the opposite one. The strip of floor that remained was mostly hidden by a thick layer, several strata deep, of books, clothes, papers. The bad news for Audrey was that this mess matched up perfectly with the shaft of bright light coming from the open door, an unwelcome Newgrange.

  ‘What amazes me,’ Dee said, ‘is how quickly it descends into this.’

  ‘An almost thirty-year-old shouldn’t be able to fit into a space this size. It’d be weird if it didn’t look like this, if you ask me.’

  ‘Speaking of—’

  ‘Jesus, Dee,’ Audrey said, ‘I am not having a party. How many more times—’

  ‘We’ve accepted an offer, Aud. As of ten minutes ago. Five grand above the asking price, which is more than we thought we’d get. Especially after all this time.’

  Audrey’s stomach sank.

  She said, ‘That’s great. Wow. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Dee smiled briefly. ‘It is great, yeah. But it comes with a condition. The buyers’ own house is already sold and their buyer is anxious to move in, so they want to move in here, like, yesterday. We’ve, ah … We’ve agreed to be out in three weeks.’

  ‘Three weeks?’

  ‘I know, it’s a bit crazy.’

  ‘But you haven’t found a house yet – have you?’

  ‘No, not yet.’ Dee touched a hand to the doorframe and then turned to look at where her fingers had landed, as if fascinated by some imperfection in the wood she’d just detected there. ‘Alan and I … We can stay with his parents. They’ve offered us their spare room.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a friend you can stay with, just until—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Audrey said. ‘I’ll sort something out.’

  ‘I’ll ask around at work. Maybe you could get a room-share. And if you need help with a deposit—’

  Audrey reflexively raised a hand in a stop gesture, silencing Dee. She didn’t want to talk a
bout borrowing money from her little sister two weeks before her own thirtieth birthday. Their living situation was shameful enough.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Anyway …’ Audrey threw back the blankets and swung her legs out of bed. ‘I better get going. What time is it?’

  ‘You know,’ Dee said, ‘I think this is actually going to be a good thing.’

  Audrey felt the aftertaste of the coffee turn bitter on her tongue.

  ‘I wanted to help you,’ Dee continued, ‘but I don’t think I was helping you. That’s the thing. You’re just not— I mean, you never were—’

  ‘Hungry enough,’ Audrey finished. She’d heard the same line from Dee umpteen times before. ‘Because I’m just too comfortable, aren’t I? I need to struggle. Well’ – she stood up, thrusting the coffee cup back at Dee who only narrowly avoided getting her white shirt flecked with coffee drops – ‘in three weeks I’ll be homeless and destitute, so that should probably do it, don’t you think?’

  Dee rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘No, no. You’re right. You’re totally right.’ Audrey began angrily smoothing the pillows and pulling the corners of the duvet to the edges of the bed. ‘I’m just way too comfortable here, living in the ten square feet my little sister rented to me, doing a job that’s, like, a million miles away from the one I want to have, working forty hours a week just to pay off a loan I took out to get a Masters that, so far, has been of absolutely no use to me at all. While also slowly dying of shame. Yep, you’re absolutely right.’ She stopped and turned to face her sister. ‘I’ve got it cushy.’

  ‘You just don’t want to hear the truth. You never have. Because, God forbid, it interferes with your dreams and mantras and your vision boards.’

  ‘What’s your point, Dee? That I’m a great big failure? Is that it?’

  ‘I don’t think you can fail if you’ve never even tried.’

  ‘You should put that on a poster. One of those motivational ones. With a sunset. You could sell them on Etsy. You’d make a fortune.’

  ‘Aud, you—’

  ‘I am trying, Dee. I have been trying. All this time. As hard as I possibly can.’

  ‘Have you?’