Page 67 of The Man Made of Smoke

So there was no reason to stay.

I drove Sarah back to her house. The whole time, there was athrumof anxiety inside me. On one level, I recognized that it was a kind of homeless emotion: the unresolved tension between the horror I’d been building myself up to encounter at the cliff edge and what had happened there instead. But it was more than that.

Because I couldn’t shake the memory of Darren Field’s wife.

He’s your husband, right?I’d asked her yesterday.

She’d held up her hand in answer, showing me her wedding ring.

I don’t know if he’s still wearing his.

I parked outside Sarah’s house. We hadn’t discussed what was going to happen next, but she turned to me now.

“You’re coming in, by the way,” she said. “That’s an order.”

“Is it?”

“It is.” She unbuckled her seat belt. “I intend to feed you.”

It was strange to be inside her house again after all these years. I wasn’t sure the last time I’d been here; I supposed at some point as a teenager. But as we walked inside, I felt an immediate rush of familiarity, threads of childhood memory catching fire and coming alight in my mind.

The two of us had spent so much of our lives together as kids. There had been a time when we had practically lived in each other’s pockets, and when we weren’t out in the woods, one of us was usually at the other’s house. Being in the kitchen again now was like stepping back into the past, and I had the same sensation I’d had two days ago outside the police station. The feeling that, if I turned around, I might see the ghosts of Sarah and me as children, running through a doorway.

That was exacerbated by the fact that nothing seemed to have changed. The oak table and chairs; the floor tiles and cabinets. Everything was exactly as I remembered. There was even the old cuckoo clock, still nailed at a lopsided angle on the wall by the fridge. It had never worked, even back then. You had to open the door and pull the little wooden bird out by hand on its broken spring.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said.

Sarah hung her coat over the back of a chair.

“What, you meanfuck all?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well.” She opened the fridge and peered inside. “The plan was always to get out of here as quickly as possible. So at first, I figured: why do anything? Obviously that didn’t quite work out. So these days, it’s more areminderof that idea. Every morning, I come downstairs, and I remember that I’m actually just visiting this place, not staying forever. Ah—here we go.”

She took a Tupperware tub out of the fridge and turned to me.

“Bolognese okay?”

“Great.”

“Then make yourself useful for once in your life.”

I boiled the kettle and got pasta out of the cupboard, while Sarah set the leftover sauce warming on the stove. As we prepared the meal, I realized how strange it was for us both to be here like this. Our lives had diverged and gone in different directions, and we hadn’t seen each other for so long. Perhaps we would lose touch again soon. It was possible that this moment was its own kind of liminal space, and the thought made me feel sad. The idea that our lives are all separate journeys, and that wejust intersect occasionally in places a step aside from them, before carrying on again in our different directions.

Which brought the memory of the rest area to the surface.

Thatthruminside me intensified, and my chest tightened. It was the same sensation you get when you’re about to cry, which immediately made things worse. I didn’t cry in front of other people. Not ever. And yet, as I put the pasta into the boiling water, I realized my hand was shaking. The tears were there.

“You okay?” Sarah said.

“I’m fine. I’m—”

“Detached?” she said. “Calm?”

“Yes.”

She pulled a face but let it go. She probably imagined it was residual anxiety from the cliff top, and it was partly that. But it was everything behind that as well. Just a couple of days ago, my life had been controlled and contained, the ground beneath me stable, but now I felt unbalanced and lost. There were too many questions I had no answers for right now, and every way forward frightened me on a level I found hard to articulate.

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