Hana’s about to follow when she realizes that Jo’s missed something: a crumpled piece of paper. Bending down, she picks it up. Her eyes skitter across the page.
It says Hana, then three small sentences all the same, but the first two crossed out, and started again.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
3
When Elin reaches the apartment, sweat is pouring off her, a damp ring marking the neck of her tank top a deeper shade of blue. Her skin is burning, not from the exercise but the conversation she’d had with Anna walking back up the hill. They’d exchanged small talk, but Elin knew the real reason for her call. Steed had been in touch. Told Anna he’d seen Elin.
She replays their exchange in her head: “Steed messaged you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he was concerned—”
“It’s Hayler, isn’t it? He’s back.”
It’s like a pulse in her head: Hayler. Hayler. The first case to work its way inside her like a parasite, scrape her clean. Hayler had murdered two young girls, tied their bodies to a boat, let the propeller do its work. She’d let him slip away. It broke her: the Hayler case triggered her career break, the rapid, brutal excision from the MCIT, the Major Crime Investigation Team, the job she loved. Marked the start of her panic attacks, her anxiety.
It was only when she found her brother’s fiancée’s murderer in Switzerland that the darkness haunting her loosened its grip. Though devastating, the experience reaffirmed the question she’d grappled with for months—that she did still want to be a detective. She made the decision to come back, but so had Hayler. The worst possible timing: her slow return to the MCIT will become a crawl. They won’t want her anywhere near . . .
Her mouth was thick, her words clumsy. “I can cope with it, Anna. If I come back on the team, I don’t have to be involved, I can sit it out.”
A weighty silence. Anna’s embarrassed. “No, it’s not Hayler. That kid you saw on the beach went missing a few days ago. Suicide. Already dead when the boat went over him.”
It wasn’t Hayler.
She’d leaped in, jumped to the wrong conclusion. She’d panicked, like she always did. The thought snags in her mind, but Elin forces it away as she opens the door.
She walks down the hall of the apartment. She can’t yet refer to it as home, still feels as though she has to treat it carefully, a precious object that belongs to someone else, and she knows it isn’t right. Two months in and it should feel like hers.
It isn’t the apartment’s fault. It’s spacious, beautiful—part of a Regency-style crescent overlooking the sea. She and Will had made the big decisions together: a simple design, neutral palette, carefully chosen soft furnishings—an L-shaped sofa, a jute rug, a love seat in egg-yolk yellow.
All of it, Elin had raved over—wanted to make a fuss of her flexibility—prove to Will that she’d turned a corner, and that this time, there was no looking back. But she is looking back, can’t help it. She misses her place: her squashy two-seater, watching the rain fall on next door’s apartment, book time while eating, uninterrupted.
Will’s on the sofa, his laptop propped open. Elin catches bits of sentences: “award prep now the priority . . .” The phone is pressed to his ear; he’s talking in a low, urgent voice.
Will’s an architect, his job both a career and a passion. His love for his role is one of the things she admires most about him: how he perceives the world in a different way, privy to a level of beauty that for her will always be just out of reach. Walking to the kitchen, she pours a glass of water.
A few moments later, Will turns. “You’re back early.”
“Cut the run short in the end.” She sips her water. “Who was that?”
“Jack. The project in Stoke Gabriel has passed planning.” Tilting his head, he scrutinizes her. “Something up?”
He knows her too well. “Could say that.” Her voice wavers. “Made a bit of a fool of myself.” She explains what happened: following Steed, the awkward call with Anna.
Will’s face softens. “I wouldn’t stress—Hayler was your last case. It’d be odd if you didn’t think about it.”
“But it wasn’t just that, I panicked . . . it made me think about Sam.”
“Elin, you got the answers you needed. You can move on.” Will’s right, but while she got answers about her brother’s death, they were ones she’d never, in her darkest imaginings, considered—her older brother, Isaac, wasn’t there when Sam died as a child, as she’d believed. It was her. When he fell in the water, hit his head on a rock, she froze. Did nothing to help. “No one blames you. You were a kid.”