In the Woods

by Tana French

Even now, when I’m having trouble falling asleep, I try to imagine myself back on that sofa: the soft, worn flannel of the duvet cover against my cheek, a spicy tang of hot whiskey still warming the air, the tiny rustles of Cassie dreaming across the room.

this worries me

appears

I had been robbed blind.

"Hell of a thing, killing a man..."

upon

“I should get back to my girlfriend,” I said,

That was ugly.

“One more thing: are you familiar with the names Cathal Mills and Shane Waters?”

Like Columbo from the movie his dad was watching.

“If I could make you understand,”

The phrase is used more than once in the book, and it makes a good running, thematic trope.

It was only much later that I understood she had actually been telling me something very specific, if I had just been paying attention.

Uh oh, I don’t like this foreshadowing, whatever it might point to.

I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

This is going to drive me crazy.

the blood work,

They never got any DNA, did they?

Nobody would even notice I had gone.

How comforting.

She didn’t put her arms around me or try to comfort me, and I was grateful for this. She just sat there quietly, her thumb moving regularly on my shoulder, while I cried. Not for those three children, I can’t claim that, but for the unbridgeable distance that lay between them and me: for the millions of miles, and the planets separating at dizzying speed. For how much we had had to lose. We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark and complicated threats of the adult world, run straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.

“I can’t tonight,” I said. “Sorry.”

He's, like, 16 years old. Why such a dick?

giving her my shoulder with the priggish aloofness of an offended cat.

So... don't do that?

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything.

He's not actually a very good example of this, judging from the rest of the book other than this sentence.

I dislike him so much at this point that I'm glad he's in this much trouble and likely to be fired.