E-Book, Englisch, 432 Seiten
Howard 56 Days
Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-164-1
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The addictive bestselling psychological suspense thriller behind the NEW major Amazon Prime TV series from the author of The Nothing Man
E-Book, Englisch, 432 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-164-1
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Catherine Ryan Howard is the bestselling author of The Nothing Man, which shot straight to the top of the Irish bestseller charts on publication and was a Kindle No. 1 bestseller in the UK. Her work has been shortlisted for the CWA/John Creasey New Blood Dagger, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, and for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year several times. Her third novel, Rewind, is currently being developed for television. She lives in Dublin.
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56 DAYS AGO
‘Go ahead,’ are the first words he ever says to her.
They are both on the cusp of joining the queue for the self-service checkouts in Tesco. It’s Friday lunchtime and her fifth time this week coming in for yet another unimaginative meal deal: a colourless sandwich, a plastic bag of apple slices and a bottle of water, which she’s just noticed is the type with the sickly-sweet fruit flavour added. This realisation has stopped her in her tracks, paused by a stack of Easter eggs (Easter? ) and wondering if she can be bothered to go back and change it when she almost certainly won’t drink it anyway.
That’s when she looks up and sees him, politely waiting for her to make her move, leaving a space for her to join the queue ahead of him.
He’s taller than her by some margin. Looks about the same age. Neither muscular nor soft, but solid. His dark hair is thick and messy, but she has no doubt it took forever to pomade into submission, to perfect. He wears a blue suit with a navy tie and a light blue shirt underneath, but the sleeves of the jacket are creased with strain, the shoulders bunched, and the back of the tie hangs longer than the front. The top button of his shirt is open, the collar slightly askew, the tie pulled off-centre. He looks a little red in the face, his cheeks pink above patchy stubble.
And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of pre-approval. But you don’t know it, don’t realise that you’re being ushered into the Priority lane of life every single day.
She wonders what that does to a person.
There’s an intensity to him, too, something simmering just beneath the surface. She imagines for him a whole life. He’s a man who works hard and plays harder. Who has a circle of friends he calls exclusively by inexplicable nicknames while they sit around a table in the pub necking pints and watching The Match. Who runs purely to run off bad calories. Who has someone somewhere that knows a completely different version of him, someone he is unexpectedly and devotedly tender to, who he only ever looks at with kind eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ she says, waving the bottle of water, starting to move away. ‘I’ve just realised I’ve got the wrong one.’ She turns and heads back towards the fridges, feeling his eyes on her as she walks away.
And the beat of her own heart, pulsing with promise.
_____
The second thing he says to her is, ‘Nice bag.’
She has just come out of the supermarket, on to the street, and doesn’t know who’s talking or if they’re talking to her.
When she turns towards the voice she sees him standing in the next doorway, looking right at her. The sandwich he’s just bought is tucked under his arm, getting squished by the pressure. There’s the hint of a grin on his face, tinged with something else she can’t readily identify.
She stops. ‘My …?’
‘Your bag,’ he says, pointing.
He means the little canvas tote she’s put her purchases in. He must do because her handbag is across her body and resting on her other hip, the one he can’t see from where he’s standing.
The tote is blue and has a Space Shuttle on it, piggybacking on an aeroplane as it flies over the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
She lifts and looks at it, then back at him.
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—’
‘New York,’ he finishes. ‘The one on the aircraft carrier, right?’ He says this not with smug knowingness but endearing enthusiasm. ‘Have you been?’
‘Yeah.’ She doesn’t want to sound like she’s too impressed with herself, so she adds, ‘Once.’
‘Was it good?’
She hesitates, because this is it. This is where she makes her choice.
People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like .
Her options:
Say something short and flippant, move on, end this now.
Or say something that prolongs this, stay longer, invite more, open a door.
She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: . Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s she struggles with. She thinks might be choosing between what you want now and what you want the most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the doors. To retreat. To stay in the place where she feels safe and secure.
But what she wants the most is to be able to live a full life, even if the expansion comes with pain and risk and fear, even if it means crossing a minefield first.
one, maybe.
Ciara grips the handles of the tote and imagines her future self standing behind her, pressing her hands into her back, pushing, whispering, . She ignores the heat rising inside her, her body’s alarm. She reminds herself that this isn’t a big deal, that this is just a conversation, that men and women do this all day, every day, all over the world—
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.’
He blinks in surprise.
He straightens up and steps closer.
Moving aside so a woman pushing a double-buggy can get past, she takes a step closer to him, too.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’ve never met someone who can name all five Space Shuttles.’
‘And I haven’t met someone who knows there are six.’
She bites her lip as every blood cell in her body makes a mad dash for her cheeks. What the hell did she have to go and say for? What was she thinking?
‘’ he says.
She’s already ruined it.
So she might as well make she has.
‘There was ,’ she says to the crack in the pavement by her right foot, ‘lost 28 January 1986 during launch. , lost 1 February 2003 during re-entry. , and are all on display – is the one in Kennedy Space Center. But there was also , the test vehicle. It flew, although never in space. It didn’t have a heat shield or engines, but it the first Orbiter. Technically. Which is actually what people mean when they say, “Space Shuttle”, usually. They mean the orbiter itself. The rest is just rockets. And is the one that’s at the Intrepid.’
A beat of excruciating silence passes.
She forces herself to lift her head and meet his eye, lips parting to mumble some lie about needing to get back to work, foot lifting in readiness for scurrying away from this absolute disaster, but then he says—
‘I was going to go get a coffee. Can I buy you one too?’
There are numerous coffee options on this street and the vast majority of them come served with a side of serious notions. There’s the café that roasts its own beans and makes you wait five minutes for a simple filter coffee that only comes in one size served lukewarm. It’s right next to the place that has spelled its name wrong and, inexplicably, with a forward slash: KAPH/A. The most popular spot seems to be a little vintage van in the service-station forecourt, the one with a hatch whose chalk-drawn menu lists not coffee blends but levels of depleted wakefulness: Fading, Sleepy, Snoring.
Ciara is relieved when he directs her past all of them and into the soulless outlet of a bland coffee chain instead.
‘Is this okay?’ he asks as he holds the door open for her.
‘This is great.’ She steps inside, turning to talk to him over her shoulder. ‘I like my coffee served in a bucket at a reasonable price, so …’
‘I’ve passed the first test, is what you’re saying.’
He winks at her and she laughs, hoping it didn’t come out sounding like a nervous one, although she nervous.
Because of the implication in the word .
Because has to pass this test too.
Because this is already the weight of one whole foot on the edge of the minefield and she has no idea how wide it is, how long it will take her to get all the way across, how long it will be before she feels safe and comfortable and secure.
In the minute it took to walk here, he has told her his name is Oliver and that he works for a firm of architects who have the top floor of the large office building across the street. He is not an architect, though, but something called an architectural technologist. He explained it by saying that architects design the buildings and then architectural technologists figure out how they’re going to actually build them. He tried to dissuade her of the idea that it’s any bit as interesting as it sounds, promising that, in reality, it’s mostly spreadsheets and emails. When she asked him if it’s what he always wanted to do, he said yes, once he’d come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be astronaut.
Then he asked her what she does.
She explained that after astronaut dreams fell by the wayside, she ended up working for a tech company who just happen to have one of their European hubs in a sprawling complex of glittering...
