‘Hey, Daniel, do you know why you can’t hear a pterodactyl going to the toilet?’

Daniel’s reply was lost to me.

I turned and went back to unpacking clothes into the wardrobe, a feeling of fear and sickness building so fast inside I had to sit down on the bed. I knew Sean better than I knew anyone else. I knew when he was unhappy, when he was telling jokes to hide nerves, when he was lying. And the look on his face as he’d said he was grand? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him like that. At his father’s funeral, perhaps.

My phone beeped with a muffled sing-song Messenger tone and I stood up, digging it out of my shorts pocket, unlocking it with my thumbprint.

No new messages.

I frowned and put it back in my pocket.

The beep came again, still muffled. Across the room.

On the bed? I went to the clothes Sean had left there, a short-sleeved shirt and jeans. Without thinking too much about what I was doing, I picked up the jeans and felt the pockets. A few coins, but no phone. I dropped his jeans back on the bed and listened to the silence of the villa around me. From downstairs, outside, came the faintest sounds from the pool. Splashing, laughing, Daniel’s excited voice.

The muffled Messenger tone sounded for a third time.

Sean’s bedside drawer.

From where I stood, it was close enough to touch. I put my hand out and snatched it back. Sat for a long moment, without moving. Then reached out again and pulled the drawer open slowly.

It was empty apart from his phone, face-down. He’d started going everywhere with it, as if man and phone were connected by an invisible umbilical cord. So much so that I’d started watching him these last few days, only half-deliberately, looking out of the corner of my eye whenever he picked up his phone, trying to see what was absorbing so much of his time and attention. Trying to see the unlock pattern he traced on the screen. Trying to see if I really was going mad, or if this was the start of something unimaginable.

I watched my hand reach in, pick his phone up. Watched my thumb press the power button. Watched the screen light up with a picture of the kids from our last holiday together.

Just a quick look, I told myself. To put my mind at rest.

Before I could talk myself out of it I drew his unlock pattern, my heart racing.

I know I shouldn’t have looked. I know.

But I did.

And that was when everything started to come apart at the seams.

Chapter 4

4

This is what it feels like: it’s as if you’re falling.