The Trespasser

by Tana French

I’m fine—better than fine; not a care in the world. I’m a happy man. OK?”

Small talk may not be yours.”

Evelyn basically kept Des prisoner, never wanted to do anything but cried for days if he did anything without her, freaked out if he didn’t answer his mobile fast enough—but

The way they worked it. Does that seem off to you?” Steve says, “They were very bloody thorough.”

Someone wants me to make a mistake. And I’m a couple hundred miles out to sea with all my systems going haywire.

tucked inside a crumpled white envelope.

but today everything feels dodgy, ready to blow up in my face at the wrong touch; nothing feels like it’s on my side.

Even when we have something, touching it crumbles it into nothing. More nothing, sifting down like fine dust, piling up in sticky drifts on the glossy desks, gumming up the swanky computers.

If someone rescues you, they own you. Not because you owe them—you can sort that, with enough good favors or bottles of booze dressed up in ribbons. They own you because you’re not the lead in your story any more. You’re the poor struggling loser/helpless damsel/plucky sidekick who was saved from danger/dishonor/humiliation by the brilliant brave compassionate hero/heroine, and they get to decide which, because you’re not the one running this story, not any

He knew I’m worthless now.

There isn’t a way for me to do this on my own.

I can’t do it. There’s no one, on all that list, who I can make myself ring up to say Hi, I can’t do this, come help me. To every single one of them, I’d be a different person after that call.

Here it is: my deepest and darkest, the one that no best mate or partner or lover will ever know. In that second I see what Aislinn saw. I see the moment she chased over barriers and through muck and out the other side of death; it bursts into my house like ball lightning and it sings in front of me, an arm’s reach away. What’s your name, how did you and my ma meet, why did you go, where have you been, what do you do, tell me all of it, all . . . I see me tilting like a hawk high in warm air, while below me he unrolls all my might-have-beens, for me to circle above at my leisure till every fork and tributary is

For some reason that gets me, solid in the gut. Not like I’m welling up, or any of that shite, but something swells hard under my ribs. Weird how, when I realized I’m leaving, it never occurred to me that that’s gonna mean leaving Steve.

“Sometimes he didn’t even give her that much notice. He just showed up at her door and expected her to drop everything and spend the evening with him. Ash thought it was just because his schedule was unpredictable, but to me it sounded like he was checking up on her. He wanted to see what she was doing when he wasn’t looking.”

Joe picked up Aislinn’s phone and started messing with it, and it was locked, like with a code. He wasn’t happy about that, at all. He wanted to know if she was texting people about him.”

“She didn’t care. It was only for a few months, right? And Joe being obsessed was what she wanted; she wasn’t complaining. But I didn’t like it. A control freak like that . . .”

Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too.

You tell him the live victim is dead and can’t contradict him, or the dead one is alive and talking.

“How would they have felt about Daddy fucking some girl young enough to be their sister?”

You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.

I’m done with being very fucking careful.

She made him think it was his idea

Every murderer says that to us, sooner or later. You weren’t there. You don’t understand.

She didn’t want to be some homewrecker.

that I stopped seeing myself as a D. I stopped seeing myself at all.”

I can’t have you on the squad.”

Breslin’ll be for the chop.”

A big solve does that to you, leaves the world scoured dawn-white, sand-white, empty except for the solve smooth and heavy as a deep-dived rock in your hand.

We’re not sure where to go from here; there’s no rule book, no ritual, to tell us what comes after a day like this one.

“Look on the bright side. We’re never gonna have a worse week than this one.”