Eyes swinging across the room. It could have been anyone. A fresh vodka stood glistening on the table. She sat and swirled the glass, rattling the ice. The young couple now sitting in silence. She still had hold of his hand in both of hers. He was still thumbing his phone. Orla sat back and looked out the windows. Rain falling hard. A bloom of indigo and a hot branch of lightning fractured the clouds, irradiating the car park in a cold, dead glare.

She went to the payphone beside the bar and held a coin in the slot but kept hold of it. Seconds stretched out. Then she let 187the coin fall and she dialled the number on Sweet’s business card. The phone rang. And rang. Then her call was answered. No one spoke.

Orla finally said: ‘Millar Sweet?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Room 201.’

She hung up and went back to her table. She considered calling Liam but to go through with this, she needed to remain in a vacuum and so she resisted. She would not talk to him on the phone. She would do this and then she would go home and gather him and their baby in her arms and never let them go. She looked at the football on TV. Half-time. She would go to 201 when the second half kicked off and she would turn out the lights and she would wait in the shadows for her assassin manqué and she would kill him. She would do these things and nothing would stop her.

Through the plate-glass windows, magenta lightning exposed immense waves, blazing oil platforms, a vague horizon. In a far corner of the car park, gleaming under a street light, a Jaguar parked sideways straddled two bays. She picked up the vodka and looked at the car, rain dancing on the roof, pouring down the windows. She drank and she looked at the hotel window beside her, at the glass itself, and the world outside slipped out of focus, became an intangible blur of raindrops and light and compressed depth.

Her focus readjusted when she saw in the glass the reflection of a man passing the bar. His movement odd, unsettling. Something wrong with his legs. She turned to look at him. He wore a baseball cap and a leather biker jacket and was carrying the orange case by its handle. As if sensing he was being watched, he stopped in his lurching gait and looked back across the room 188at her. A glass smashed behind the bar and all heads turned to look save two. He reached into his jacket and then raised his arm and pointed at her. She swallowed. A brilliant flash of white and she saw Liam and their daughter, Éabha, older and smiling and here. Then nothing. And nothing.

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