The Trespasser

by Tana French

When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realize I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty stories above my dizzy view. “I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.”