The Witch Elm

by Tana French

Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t.

obviously she had had a bad couple of days, but now I was out of danger and she had nothing to worry about, her hands were both working perfectly, her vision wasn’t stuttering and doubling, nobody was giving her speeches about occupational therapy, what the hell was her problem? All

Unlike my mother, he could tell when I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat, and unlike with my mother I had no urge to goad him into no-winner fights.

Monster Munch

inexplicable shopping (the basics, bread and milk and whatever, mixed in with stuff like a knobbly beige object that she informed me was ginger, “just in case”).

but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

Hugo just had bad luck; a bad roll of the dice. But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it. People genuinely can’t take it in that someone could

die of cancer without bloody well smoking.”

That day felt like it lasted weeks.

Maybe this is why I still consider myself a lucky person: now more than ever, I can’t afford not to. If I’ve realized nothing else, you see, in the long strange time since that April night, I’ve realized this: I used to believe that luck was a thing outside me, a thing that governed only what did and didn’t happen to me; the speeding car that swerved just in time, the perfect apartment that came on the market the same week I went looking.

Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said.

And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?