She must have been mad. Could she tell herself that story? Could she convince herself that she’d been delirious with pain, with grief, that she’d acted unthinkingly?
Sitting in the visitor’s room of the largest women’s prison in Europe, sharing space with the bewildered, the sad, and the deprived, as well, of course, as the very worst that British womanhood had to offer, she asked herself, did she belong?
What, after all, might she have done differently, had she not been mad? Had she been sane, could she have let it be? Could she have chosen to go on living her life, taken the knowledge of what Daniel had done and chosen to lock it away somewhere? Only, how could she possibly have sanely chosen that? How could she have chosen to live in a world in which Daniel was still alive, in which she might see him, breathe the same air that he breathed? A world in which there existed the possibility that she might still feel something for him, some tenderness, something like love.
That possibility she had to kill.
* * *
“Mrs. Myerson? Do you regret it?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Sarah Adams and Sarah McGrath for their incisive edits and apparently limitless patience.
Thanks to Lizzy Kremer and Simon Lipskar, the best agents on both sides of the Atlantic, for their brilliant advice and unfailing support.
Thank you to Caroline MacFarlane, winner of the CLIC Sargent charity auction, for the use of her name.
Thanks to early readers Petina Gappah, Frankie Gray, and Alison Fairbrother.
And thank you to Simon Davis, because God knows the past three years can’t have been easy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paula Hawkins is the author of the #1 New York Times–bestselling novels Into the Water and The Girl on the Train. An international #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train has sold 23 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a major motion picture. Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in London.