LOGINAdrianI counted to ten out loud, as I'd been told, and she didn't stop breathing. She didn't do anything. She stood with her palm on the glass, looking at a woman who was looking back, and the only sound in that cupboard was my own voice getting quieter.At ten, Sienna took her hand off the mirror."Stay," she said."Sienna""I asked you to stay where I could see you." She still hadn't turned. "In ninety seconds you can come to the door. Not before."She went out. I heard her footsteps on the corridor tiles, steady, unhurried, and then a pause, and then the click of a handle. Through the glass I watched the far door of the pleasant room open and a woman in a dark jacket step inside as though she'd been invited.I got to eighty-one before I couldn't stand it."This is highly irregular," said Corinne's lawyer.She was already on her feet, notebook clutched against her chest. Corinne hadn't moved from the armchair by the window. She sat with her hands folded and her eyes on Sienna, and
AdrianThe observation room was the size of a wardrobe, and Sienna had been standing in it for eleven minutes without moving.I'd timed it. It's a habit, and it was the only thing in that cupboard I could do anything about. She stood with her arms at her sides and her face six inches from the glass, in a dark jacket Elena had found her, with her hair pushed behind her ears and a visitor's badge clipped to the lapel that said OBSERVER above a name that wasn't hers. Through the glass was a pleasant room. Two armchairs. A low table. A potted fern, a box of tissues, a framed print of a beach. A window with the blind half down. The kind of room built to make you want to confess.Elena had stopped me in the corridor on the way in, with her hand flat on my chest, and said very quietly, "I know that name. I've seen it before, written down. I'll tell you when I can." She looked sick. She'd gone before I could ask what she meant, back to sit with the lawyer's papers, and I'd filed it with every
AdrianThe courtroom had a low ceiling, and I hated it before I sat down.Wood panelling the colour of strong tea. Fluorescent tubes in cages. A single window set so high that all it showed was a rectangle of grey sky, and the air smelled of old carpet and other people's coats. I counted two doors and a judge's private exit, and then I made myself stop, because Elena was watching me do it from the next seat with the expression of someone who'd decided not to say anything."It's a family court," she murmured. "It's meant to be small. It's meant to feel like a room where nobody shouts.""It feels like a cellar.""I know."She squeezed my wrist once and let go. On my other side the reporter sat with his notebook closed on his knee and his phone switched off, because phones weren't allowed, and I could see how much that hurt him. Behind us the public benches were full of people who'd come to watch a famous family fall apart. One of them had brought a sandwich.At the front, on the left, C
AdrianI have broken into buildings, run across roofs, and once held a door shut with my back while someone on the other side tried to shoot through it. None of it prepared me for a man in a grey suit holding a folded piece of paper in a farmyard, because there was nothing to hit."Mrs Vale," he said again, kindly. "I'm so sorry to intrude. I act for your husband's family. I'm told you've had a terrible few days, and nobody wants to add to them."Corinne came across the yard in her borrowed boots. She didn't hurry. She'd taken off her gloves, and there was soil under her nails, and she held her hands loose at her sides as if she'd decided they had nothing to hide. I'd seen her do it before, in a diner, across a van, on a street at dawn in front of a hundred cameras. I knew now what it was. She was reading the room. The only difference was that this time she wasn't trying to fit into it."May I see that?" she said."Of course." He held it out. "It's a copy. The original's with the cour
AdrianI didn't go to bed. Nadia went in around midnight with a hand on my shoulder and no advice, and Theo took himself off to the barn without a word, and the kitchen light stayed out. I sat on the top step with a blanket round my shoulders and my bad leg stretched in front of me, and I watched the sky go from black to the colour of dishwater.I'd done a lot of waiting in my life. Cars, stairwells, rooftops. It had always been a job. I'd never once waited for a door to open because I wanted to see who came through it.At first light the latch clicked.Sienna stood in the doorway with her arm still strapped against her ribs. She'd taken out what was left of the braid, and her hair hung ragged at the nape where somebody, Elena probably, had hacked the burned end off with kitchen scissors. She looked at me, and the blanket, and the step."You're still here," she said."You said not forever.""I said that about the kitchen.""I'm bad at fine print."Something moved at the corner of her
AdrianThe boy left before dark. Elena drove him to the station, and he went without looking back, one hand clamped over the pocket where his phone was. When I came in from the porch, Theo was sitting at the kitchen table with the photograph in front of him and his hands flat on either side of it, as if it might lift.Sienna sat opposite. She hadn't touched her tea. I took the chair at the end, where I could see them both, and nobody spoke until the fridge began to sound like an argument."The estate manager," Theo said finally. "That's him. He hired me in the winter when I was twenty-seven, and I thought he was the most respectable man I'd ever met.""Go on," said Sienna."The east door was the coal store. That's what he told me. Would I carry the coal out a few buckets at a time, to see what was left." He turned his mug a quarter turn. "I carried it for five weeks. Nobody ever burned a lump. It sat in a pile behind the stable. I told myself the family was frugal.""That's what the p







