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“I would like you to tell me about a woman.” My voice is the unmoving surface of a still ocean, perfectly calm. “A woman named Caroline Lynch.”
“Who?”
The stupidity of his confused frown tells me that he’s not putting it on. He genuinely doesn’t remember her name. My hand curls into a fist in my pocket, but I give no other reaction.
“Caroline Lynch,” I repeat instead.
He stares at me. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“Yes.” I rake him with a cold look. “Take your time.”
“I don’t know a fucking Caroline Lynch!” There’s a trembling in his voice; it lets on the fact that he’s more afraid than angry, more nervous than irritated. “What do you want from me?”
The whining lilt of his voice makes me want to reach across the table and backhand him like the pathetic slab of meat he is. I say nothing. It’ll come to him, and I’m in no rush.
I never rush personal matters.
His eyes search the room frantically, like he’s expecting Caroline Lynch to materialise out of the wall. But Caroline Lynch is dead—does he even know that?
“Look, I, I’m not sure who you’re talking about. I’ve, I’ve dated quite a bit, I’ve been around for a while, I’m not young like you.” He tries to give me a sort of faux fatherly smile. It falls limp, a sad, squirming thing between us. He swallows. “Maybe she’s someone I dated when I was younger? I don’t know, I’m not sure.”
“Ten years ago,” I tell him. “You can’t have beenthatyoung, Dick.”
His eyebrows draw down. “Look, my name is Richard, and—”
“Caroline Lynch. You were with her for eight years, Dick. Don’t play games with me because, as you can deduce, I’m not in the mood for games, and even if I were, no game that requires willful ignorance could be any fun for me to play. So search your memory, Dick. Dig deep in that sordid cesspool you call a mind and tell me about Caroline Lynch.”
He raises his eyes to mine. He can’t even hold my gaze for the length of a second. His head drops, shoulders slumping. “I was in a bad place when I met her. Things were complicated.”
“I’m not asking you to spin some tragic tale for me. I’m asking you to tell me about her.”
“What about her?”
“What was she like? What did she look like? Why did you chooseher?”
“Caro—Caro was—she was one of those women who would do anything for the man she loved. She didn’t want to be alone, she was like this empty void, cramming things in to make it feel less empty. I couldn’t—I couldn’t have made her happy even if I’d tried.”
“So why bother, right?” My entire body is ice. I don’t even have it in me to pull a sarcastic smile. “Where did you meet her?”
“A bar, of course. She—”
“What did she look like?”
“Like any other woman you might find in that kind of bar on a weekday. Her skirt was too short, her eyes were too sad. That kind of woman. Cocaine blonde. That type.”
I sneer at him. “Love at first sight, then.”
He shakes his head. “She seemed lonely—so was I. I’m not lying to you about how we met. Why does it matter anyway?”
“Did you know she had a kid?”
His mouth drops open with a wet noise. I suppress a shudder of disgust. Everything about this man is repulsive; everything about him makes my blood run sharp with icy violence, and I haven’t even gotten to my actual point of contention yet.
“She didn’t tell me she had a kid,” Richard says, a flash in his eyes. “I told her I don’t like children,shechose not to tell me.”
“Why didn’t you leave when you found out she had a kid?”
“Because—I… I wanted to give her a chance.”
