56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

The residents are used to living above and below and beside other people’s entire lives while pretending to be utterly unaware of them; hearing each other’s TVs and smelling each other’s cooking but never learning each other’s names.

“Most people who do bad things do so because a confluence of events has maneuvered them into that position and then pushed them to act, to do something out of character. How many times have we heard, ‘Oh, my Johnnie would never do that, he doesn’t have it in him, you must have the wrong house,’ or, ‘I’ve been best friends with this guy for years, I know he’s not a killer’? Yeah, he didn’t have it in him and he wasn’t a killer—until he did and he was. None of us know what we’re capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.”

He thinks of the exact moment he realized that Lucy, sitting beside him, had draped her arm casually across his thigh, and how he waited for her to realize and remove it, but she didn’t, and instead she’d turned and met his eye and told him silently that she knew it was there, that she’d put it there on purpose, and that she’d done it because she wanted him in a way that she didn’t want the others.