It’s just gone 3 A.M. now. I put myself in the shower and wash my hair twice. It’s such a relief to feel the warm water flowing over me, taking away the contamination and the revulsion. It can’t wash away my thoughts, though. I should leave here. The locals don’t want me here, I don’t want me here and even the Manse itself doesn’t want me here. I should leave tomorrow; I can do all the Presumption of Death stuff from a distance. And then I think of Carrie, and I know I won’t leave. Not until she does.

•   •   •

A scant few hours later I wake to the faint sound of running water. The light is slanting through the gaps around the edges of the thin curtains. I lie still on my side staring at the stripes of light on the chest of drawers and let reality soak into me. It’s been the kind of sleep that wipes memory clean of the where and the when; my brain needs time to get up to speed. I push my hair out of my eyes and find that it’s damp, and with that, the events in the kitchen come rushing back in.

The running water has subsided: Carrie is out of her shower now. I feel an urge to be in her company, as if that might reassure me that—what? That I haven’t done anything unforgivable? The vague sense of wrongness that sits within me reminds me of my university days, when it was the done thing to drink beyond one’s sensibilities at least once a week; the self-loathing that curled in my stomach each morning after, the inherent mental shudder when recalling the lack of control, was somehow never enough to prevent the next binge. The wine is to blame for my unease, surely. The wine and the undercurrents with Carrie, with Jamie, with Fiona.

I pull myself out of bed and head for the kitchen, where there’s not a single fly carcass to be seen, and no lingering chemical smell from the spray either. Carrie must have been through the kitchen already; the empty insect spray can is nowhere to be seen. She’s also replaced the cover of the alarm, which I’d left on the kitchen table; I was too tired to deal with that too after all my cleaning. The sun streams in at an angle through the rectangular leaded windowpanes, anointing bright diamond-shaped patches on the tile floor, the red-checked plastic cover, the daffodil walls. The sunshine is just another layer of artifice, I find myself thinking. Another way to hide what lies beneath.