I take another step toward her. “Is Nika OK?”
Her face crumples as she shakes her head.
“I’m so sorry. Susan, I’m so, so sorry for what she did.”
On impulse and to my surprise, I find myself holding out my arms to her, pulling her into a hug.
Another sob escapes Celeste’s throat and now I’m crying too. For all of us. For the children, trying to fit in, trying to navigate, trying to survive. For the adults, trying our best.
Celeste pulls away, her face streaked with tears.
“And Bella? Is Bella OK?”
“Bella’s perfect. She’s safe at home with Jon.”
• • •
Bellaisperfect, despite what she’s been through. Jon and me, though, our marriage—I guess that’s over. We both know; we just haven’t said it. Whatever thoughts I had of not confronting it, it’s clear now that there’s no coming back from his affair. There’s an irony there somewhere, and it strikes me as I stand here hugging Celeste in the hospital corridor. He’ll finally be free to see his mistress—only his mistress, of course, is dead. And still, nobody knows who killed her.
109
Savannah
Last week
Savannah looked down at her phone, then up at the front door as the bell rang a second time. Who on earth was calling now? Someone else ready to attack her for no good reason? Once bitten, twice shy: she wasn’t going to open the door so easily again. She moved quietly further into the hall and craned her neck, but she couldn’t see much now that she’d closed the blind on the hall window, leaving only a slice of daylight down near the floor. Silently, she slipped upstairs to look down from her bedroom window.
A man this time, someone she’d never seen before, though it was hard to tell from up high. Then she noticed he was carrying a Brown Thomas bag. Had she ordered anything from Brown Thomas? She didn’t think so, but she didn’t always keep track of what she ordered online, especially after a few glasses of wine. The sequined leggings she’d bought during the first lockdown Christmas sprang to mind. A little fizz of excitement bubbled up now—the same fizz she always felt when packages arrived. Even—it turns out—on days when she’s been slapped by strangers and discovered her boyfriend is married.
As she dropped the blind, the rose-gold bangle clinked against her watch and, on autopilot, she pushed it up her forearm. Then caught herself. What was she doing? That meaningless inscription. The effort she’d gone to, replacing it when she’d lost it. Getting the same words inscribed, so Jon would never know. And what did he care? She wasn’t the love of his life; she was the bit on the side. As she passed the bathroom to go downstairs, she flung the bangle into the bin. Time to move on.
She skipped back down the stairs, happier now with the dopamine hit an impending delivery always brought. At the bottom of the stairs, she stepped toward the front door, not noticing the puddle of rum still on the floor since last night. Her silver ballet pumps—new, not yet broken in, smooth and slippy—slid out from under her, and she landed flat on her back, her head cracking against the corner of the radiator on the way down.
• • •
Outside, the man waited, then rang the doorbell a third time. Still no answer. He checked his phone, clicking into the Adverts app. That’s when he realized his mistake. The person taking his bag of old CDs was at 36 Oakpark, not 26. He was at the wrong house. He turned and walked away.
110
Greta
That story—Savannah slipping—is entirely fictitious. The kind of thing anyone might imagine upon reading in the newspaper about the inquest findings. Only one person in the world knows what really happened that morning, and that’s Greta O’Donnell.
Greta reads through the inquest findings a second time, folds the newspaper and nods to herself. The dash downstairs to answer the door, the slip on the puddle of rum, the new ballet flats. All perfectly valid assumptions, really. Accidental death. No foul play after all.
But that’s not how it happened.
• • •
As soon as she walked into Savannah’s house that Wednesday morning, after Jon’s ludicrous phone call pretending she was Susan, Greta knew for sure who Savannah was. She had looked Savannah up on Instagram that morning in Susan’s kitchen, when Susan first told her about the mixed-up packages and her “alter ego,” Savannah Holmes. The name rang a not-too-distant bell. Yes, it’s South Dublin, with its fair share of Nikas and Arianasamong the teens and kids, but not so many Savannahs among the adults. Back when she crossed Greta’s path (literally, as it happened), she was Savannah Byrne, married to Albie Byrne. A footnote in the story of the car accident that gave Greta her limp and ended her hockey career. The passenger who escaped uninjured while her husband broke his ankle and Greta ended up with six months of physio. But was Savannah a footnote? That’s the part Greta wondered about, especially after she met Albie’s sister, Phoebe.
Phoebe joined Greta’s hiking club, and they hit it off immediately. They did that thing everyone in South Dublin does—did you grow up around here, what school did you go to, who do we know in common? And their common denominator, they soon realized, was Albie, Phoebe’s brother. At first Phoebe was horrified; she knew what had happened, the outcome for Greta. But Greta didn’t hold any grudge against Albie, she told Phoebe. The road was icy that night, visibility poor, it wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t Greta’s. They chatted on, sometimes on hikes, sometimes in pubs, and then Phoebe mentioned her love of skiing and, in due course, the ski trip she’d taken with her brother and his ex-wife Savannah. The trip on which Albie broke his ankle. The trip that took place a week before Greta’s accident. So how, Greta wondered later that night, at home in her house, had Albie driven the car?
Her mind whirred over the facts. Albie had a broken ankle before the accident, so must have lied about injuring itinthe accident. Albie surely couldn’t have been driving the car. Meaning Savannah was driving. Meaning they lied.
Greta had never known who was in the driver’s seat: she was unconscious. So why did they lie? There were only a few reasons she could think of—no insurance, no license, drugs or drink. So she started to dig some more, gently questioning Phoebe. Why had Albie and Savannah divorced? What was Savannah like? And the picture became clearer. Self-absorbed, flaky, shallow and vain, according to Phoebe. That didn’t really helpthough. Greta pushed a bit more. A bit of a drink problem, Phoebe confided one night in the pub. Not the kind that’d put you in rehab, she clarified. But Albie had told her Savannah was opening wine before he got home from work most evenings, and often drinking with lunch. He’d had a gentle word with her and she’d said she’d stop. But what if she didn’t? What if she’d been drinking the night of the accident? What if he’d asked her to drive him somewhere? Would she have done so, rather than admit to Albie that she’d been drinking?
Greta reached out to Albie but got no reply. Not surprising. If he had lied to the gardaí for Savannah, he’d be in almost as much trouble as her. And now that he was a politician, well, he’d blocked Greta everywhere he could. So she let it lie for a while, trying to make peace with not knowing.
