The Trap

by Catherine Ryan Howard

An ex-boyfriend had once told her that his favorite part of a night out was the walk home. Just him and his thoughts on deserted streets, the evening’s fun still warm in his chest. He had no tense wait for a taxi. He didn’t need to walk to the front door with his keys squeezed between his fingers, ready to scratch, to disable. He had never texted a thumbs-up emoji to anyone before he went to sleep so that they could go to sleep as well. The part of the night he loved was the part she had to survive.

The world, she’d discovered, just wasn’t designed for people with open wounds. Instead, it seemed packed with the privileged and their petty problems, their shitty attitudes, their blatant ungratefulness.

It had been disconcerting to discover that, even when your life had a person-sized hole in it, you still occasionally had to pop to the supermarket. You had to eat, even if you’d no appetite for it. And no matter what else was happening in your life, you were going to need things like toilet paper and rubbish bags.

In the outside world, you always had to be the exact right amount of devastated. Look like you’re on the verge of falling apart, but not let it actually happen. Be grateful that people were enquiring as to how you were, but thank them by never burdening them with the raw, horrible truth. Be OK, but not too OK.

A Goldilocks of grief.

Each of the three missing women’s phones had been found close to their last known locations.

“Lena told paramedics that on the night she disappeared, she was actually abducted by a man who bundled her into his car and brought her to a house where she was held captive for the last fortnight. Somehow, she managed to escape and took off running, and eventually ran into the path of the car that hit her. And she said that—”

Lucy tensed, braced for impact. Under the table, the grip of Chris’s hand on hers hurt. “—she wasn’t the only one,” Denise finished. “She said there were other women being held there too.”

Because you really need the man himself to bring you there, don’t you? Only he really knows where everything began.

Before you ask, no. She doesn’t know. What I find fascinating, though, is that she seems to think that she would, that it would be obvious.

But now I do understand. I understand completely. They do it because when they’re doing it is when they feel most alive.

I know there’s a very real risk it won’t end well for me, but I’ve no interest in a life where I don’t do it. The first time I made it to the summit, it was a feeling like I’d never known. As if there’d been a hole inside of me all this time and that feeling was the missing piece. It was the exact right shape and size. It filled me up. For the first time, I really did feel alive.

But at least, if that does happen, I’ll die doing the thing that made me feel the most alive. I’ll die on the mountain.

If you need something to fit in a round hole, you’re not going to stick on some edges, now, are you?”

Even when traumatized, people were the worst.

Once it finds what it expects, it’s satisfied.

It’s the same when someone dies suddenly and you can count on at least one idiot to say, “But I just saw him yesterday!” Bloody hell, you don’t say? You’re telling me that up until the moment his heart stopped working, it was working, and he was alive? Mind-blowing! I guess I just wasn’t expecting the whole mystery of the thing.

I understand that people want there to be some sort of dark magic involved, because they don’t want to think about the ordinariness, the banality, the availability of what is.

All the women I took were women whose phones I could see. That’s it. That’s the connection.

You women aren’t as trusting or naive as you once were, you see.

What I needed to do wasn’t to convince the women that I was a good family man and so would never hurt them—especially seeing as good family men hurt people all the time, sometimes even members of their own family—but that I was really doing what I appeared to be doing, what I said I was: asking for directions to a place I should’ve already been at.

What were my intentions? I really don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. You see, when I do this, it’s not really me.

You know the way you do things when you’re drunk that you’d never do when you’re sober, but you’re still absolutely you? It’s just a more . . . let’s say, open version of you. Unfiltered. The societal shackles are, if not off, then certainly a little looser.

When he shows up, everything turns more primal.

Just when I thought I couldn’t get any luckier. Because I’ve been absolutely haunted, haven’t I? In the Cork sense.

When we say that, we mean exceptionally lucky. As in, I was haunted the flight was delayed by two hours because the second I got to the airport, I realized I’d left my passport at home. I used to think everyone in Ireland said it until I went to college and got the complete piss taken out of me.

“Speaking of rules,” Jamie said then. He glanced toward the open door. “I came here to tell you . . . Bastian loves making them, but he doesn’t always follow them himself.”

“Where did it all start? That’s always what people want to know, isn’t it? Where it began. I have to say, I never really understood this obsession with the beginning until I inadvertently developed it myself, watching true-crime documentaries. Surreptitiously watching them, mind you. I never do it openly. Not because it would, you know, arouse suspicion or anything. Please. I just don’t want to be known as someone who does that. Because let’s be clear . . .”

“It’s a community. For living simply and sustainably. If you want the same things that the people who are already here want, you can join. In exchange for food and board, you contribute.

How on earth could you let your sister, your only blood relative, think that you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere when you were actually here, in the beautiful West Cork countryside, living the good life, enjoying unprecedented peace?

Enjoy this, Angela said silently. Savor it. The last truly good moment of your life. Denise leaned forward, put her palms flat on the table. “I’m really sorry,” she said gently. “But I have some bad news. Lucy is missing. She has been for three weeks now.”