The Trap

by Catherine Ryan Howard

Here’s what I wonder, though. This is the great unknown: will it be on the way up or on the way down? Will it be this time? And if it’s not, how many more summits will I see? Are you even listening to me back there? Look, if you can’t stop screaming, I’m going to have to make you.

‘You know, it drives me absolutely fucking nuts when people say that. As if a man who’s violent, not only at all, but to the woman he supposedly loves the most, is our baseline for normality, and a man who does it until his victim dies is some other species entirely. They’re one and the same, for fuck’s sake. The only difference is one of them got angrier than the other.’

She didn’t need to be on the other side of Garda training to know that most missing women were not off enjoying another life of nature and open sky and peace. They were broken bones caught in scraps of ripped, rotting clothes, or bloated, decaying, fluid-leaking bodies that would be bones soon enough. They were hastily buried in shallow, unmarked graves in forgotten places, or hiding under new foundations in busy ones, or trapped leagues under the surface of whatever body of water their killer had dumped them in. They were fierce family secrets or suspicions too vague ever to act upon or the dark heart beating beside some other woman in a marital bed, who was still pretending she didn’t feel it. They were the premature ends of dreams and plans and generations. They were unfinished bridges jutting off the edges of cliffs, ending in mid-air, no further on for the love to go. They were faces frozen in time, in their official photos. They were dead. The woman who was here wasn’t missing. That was the only reason they were

Sometimes – tragically, infuriatingly, inexplicably – fiction is the only place we have to go for answers.