Page 70 of The Man Made of Smoke

“I don’t know.”

There was a moment in which it felt like I could hear dust in the air.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.

“It’s fine.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to think.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Sarah leaned back in her chair. “And I don’t know exactly what I was going to say anyway. That you can make amends? Or maybe that you can blame yourselfeven harderfor what you didn’t do? Look at me, Dan. Please.”

I had to force myself to.

“Even though we haven’t seen each other in years,” she said, “Idoknow you. You haven’t changed all that much, you know? You’re still carrying a shitload of baggage from what happened back then. And just because you don’t think about it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

I didn’t reply.

“I know you’re feeling guilty right now,” she said quietly. “About your father’s death. About everything. When something horrible happens, it’s natural to look for answers, and to try to make connections and figure out a way to make things right. Because we want everything to make sense. But sometimes… things are just fucking shit.”

She gestured around.

“Theydon’tmake sense. You search for answers, and when you don’t find them outside of you, you look for them inside instead. And there arealwaysgoing to be answers there, trust me. Those answers will line up one after a fucking other to make their presence felt.”

She looked at the laptop screen.

“But that doesn’t mean they’re right,” she said.

And again, I didn’t reply.

But as I drove home, I felt more stupid than ever.

Worthless. Ridiculous. Weak.

And the worst thing was that I should have known better. I had taken a chance and opened myself up, and the outcome of doing that was always predictable. I had not remained detached; I had not been calm.And Sarah had seen a part of me that I should have kept hidden. I was disgusted with myself for that.

But what she had implied made sense on one level. My father had taken his life, whichof coursehad knocked my own off-balance. The grief aside, I felt responsible for that: guilty that I had not done enough to help him; ashamed and hurt that he hadn’t reached out to me. Negative emotions are like magnets. It shouldn’t have surprised me to find that my mind was trying to make connections to an event in my past that had made me feel exactly the same.

There could be some other explanation for my father having the photograph, and for Field’s wallet being in the tent. I didn’t know if Brian Gill’s story was what had really happened. I didn’t know what my father had talked to Darren Field about. There were gaps there. And I was a long way from having enough information to justify the conclusions my subconscious had been starting to leap to.

So your father might still be alive.

You might be able to save him.

Night had fallen as I parked.

The house in front of me had a sad, abandoned air to it. It reminded me of how Sarah hadn’t changed anything in her mother’s home as a reminder to herself that she wasn’t going to stay. I opened the front door and turned on the light. The post had been delivered after I left that morning, and there was a spread of junk mail on the mat. I stepped over, but something about it made me pause and look back. There was a thin white envelope lying face up on top of the flyers. No stamp or address. Just my own name, written there in block capitals.

I closed the front door, then knelt down and picked up the envelope carefully. It wasn’t even sealed. The end with the sticker was unfolded and rigid, as if it had arrived here straight from a stationery shop.

I reached inside.

There was a single sheet of paper on which a photograph had been printed. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at, but then a shiver of horror ran through me. I turned my head slowly, looking down the corridor toward the kitchen, and the door to the garden.

And then back down at the photograph.

The image was mostly black, but there was just enough detail visible for me to understand what I was seeing. The photograph had been taken two nights ago, on the evening I had returned to the island. When in a moment of weakness, I had imagined I was alone, and that it was safe to let my guard down and my emotions loose where nobody would see.

It showed me crouched down on the deck in my father’s back garden.

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