Chapter 22
Later that night, when we got back home, Rachel went straight to bed. She’d cried more in the car, but quietly and to herself in a way that made it clear she didn’t want to talk about the counselling session. Or at least, not right now.
The atmosphere had been miserable anyway, as though the conversation was playing out silently in the air between us without either of us having to speak out loud.
I could sense the questions, the repercussions.
If my feelings hadn’t changed, did that mean it was somehow her fault?
That it was up to her to figure out why her feelings had?
After she’d gone upstairs, I took a beer outside and sat on the patio overlooking the old barracks.
No pale ghosts forming in the bushes tonight, but there didn’t need to be. I could feel one anyway.
Her.
Emmeline Levchenko.
I do my best not to bring my work home with me, it’s true, but still. Some cases stay with me all right.
And now, a tickle at the back of my mind, there was Buxton to think about too.
I took a swig of beer.
Whatever I told myself about nothing being weird, I couldn’t escape the feeling of storm clouds gathering.
A tightening, almost: the sensation that there was more going on with this case than I realised, and that as time went on, I was going to become more and more entangled in it.
Buxton meant nothing, of course; it was just a coincidence.
But there it was, all the same, and it was making me uneasy.
Irrational, Andy.
Remember? Being rational was one of the things Rachel loved about you.
Which brought me back round to the counselling sessions. They were a waste of time as things stood. What was the point, if I wasn’t going to engage? If I wasn’t going to tell her the truth?
I finished off the beer and stared out into the darkness. At the empty bushes across the street. It’s like there’s something he wants to say and won’t.
Intuition, all right – but she wasn’t entirely right.
Not won’t say, but can’t.