“Carter, I know we might not have got off to the best start. And I’m sorry if this is strange, me being here; I know how badly you wanted this job. I probably haven’t been very sensitive about that, but I do respect you. And, just to prove it, I have something very important that I need you to do.”
34HARRISON
It’s so important that I do the right thing now.
I close the door, wishing I knew what that was. Then I stand perfectly still until I hear the officers drive away. Him in his ridiculous toy police car. Her on a red bloody scooter. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dangerous. I double-lock the door and close all the curtains and blinds. The police looked in every room before they left, almost as though they thought Eden was here somewhere. Hiding. Or hidden. I find the intrusion deeply irritating, and retrace their footsteps, hurrying from room to room, trying to see our home through their eyes and wondering what they saw. I linger in the bedroom and stare at the bed. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to change the sheets, but I had to. I wanted to get rid of the smell of her from every room.
Having already gone willingly to the police station to answer their stupid bloody questions, I thought they’d have the decency to leave me alone. Guess I thought wrong.
Now that they’re gone I start to relax, until I remember something.
Something I forgot about.
Something they missed.
I hurry downstairs, grateful in some ways that they asked me to wait in the kitchen because I know they didn’t check the bin. I open the lid and stare at the black velvet dress all too visible on top. Eden loved this dress. I still remember the first time she wore it—our anniversary several years ago—I’ll always remember the last. It’s the kind of dress that makes you want to undress a woman when you see her wearing it. I pull it out of the bin, take it to the fireplace in the lounge, and burn it.
While the flames lick and hiss and spit, I look around the room to check that I haven’t missed anything else. There are a lot of pictures of Gabriella in here. Snapshots of our daughter from every stage of her life, from when she was a little girl, to more recently. There is one of me and her taken before the accident, before our lives got turned upside down. It’s my favorite one of her, and us. There are no pictures of Eden in this room. No pictures of Gabriella’s mother at all anymore.
I removed every single one.
Once the fire has burned itself out, I return to the little library at the back of the house. I stand and stare at the ancient bookcases containing stories I’ll never read written by people I’ve never met. I have never understood the appeal of fiction. I don’t havetimefor other people’s stories; I’d rather live my own. Maybe when people know how little time they have left they’ll use it more wisely. Thanatos means that I am more aware than most that life is short and time is precious. The thought leads me to thinking about my daughter again. I miss her. I should never have agreed to put her in that institution, because that’s what The Manor is. Regardless of the fancy exterior and extortionate fees, and the “home away from home” description in the glossy brochure, my little girl is in a luxury prison. I’ll never forgive myself for going along with it.
And I’ll never forgive Eden.
My wife and I rarely argued, but we did disagree about Gabriella.
And we had conflicting views about this library too.
Seeing all these bookcases reminded me of my mother, who is someone I’d rather forget. My father died when I was ten, and my mother had little interest in me after that. She said I reminded her of him. She spent her time drinking cheap wine, reading cheap books, and filling the house with stories that were happier than her own. She never worked—even when we were broke and had to choose between eating, or heating the house—but she still spent money on novels. I don’t have a problem with books, but you can’t eat them. I spent a lot of my childhood feeling hungry. And cold. And alone. Navigating her moods was terrifying. As was her temper. Nothing I did was ever good enough for her and she made sure I knew it. She didn’t abuse me with her fists, just her words. And her hate. So I grew up and I got out and I wrote my own story. One without her in it.
The last thing she said to me the day I left home was,
You’ll never amount to anything.
It was the greatest gift she ever gave me; the determination to prove her wrong. And I did. I got into university on a scholarship because I was the best in my class. I was the smartest kid on that degree course too, but also the poorest. I taught myself how to blend in, but I never felt like I belonged in the world my studies or my work took me to. Everyone else was more confident, better connected. Their world always seemed out of reach to me even when I was supposedly one of them. My mother created my demons and I’ve never outrun them.
I spent my teenage years wishing she had died instead of my dad.
Then I grew impatient wondering when she would.
And I think that was the spark. The lightning-bolt moment. My eureka.
It was my burning desire to know when my mother would die, and how much longer I had to endure her hate, that led me into science and eventually to Thanatos. I studied hard, I worked even harder, and I launched an entire company to discover how to accurately predict the day a person will die.
My mother’s date of death was the first I got right.
My daughter’s date of death was the first I hoped was wrong.
After Gabriella’s accident, the fear of losing her consumed me. I became so obsessed with how much longer I had left with my daughter, I spent even less time with her, too busy trying to crack the code. I created Thanatos to spite my mother and save my daughter, but in the process I lost so much precious time. Time I can never get back. Seeing anything that reminds me of my mother triggers me, including those old bookcases in our new home. So one evening when Eden was out for one of her runs, and despite the ancient covenants that came with the house saying this room should not be touched, I came in here with a sledgehammer.
I decided to remove the books before I started smashing the shelves, and that’s when I found the small fake panel hiding a lever. A lever that I pulled. There was a creak and what sounded like a sigh, as though the bookcases had been holding their breath, and then I saw that they had come slightly apart in the middle. There was a centimeter-wide gap between them from floor to ceiling. I carefully slid my fingers inside the gap, and when I applied the tiniest amount of pressure, the bookcases slid apart to reveal a door behind them. I told myself that the door couldn’t possibly lead anywhere; this part of the house was literally built into the cliff it was perched on.
But I was wrong.
35CARTER
I was right about DCI Bird not taking me seriously. When she said there was something important she wanted me to do, I didn’t think she meant walking her bloody dog.
