Chapter 212

The cafeteria at Fairfield is louder than Westbridge’s was, which Elias had not anticipated, and the noise is doing nothing useful for the particular quality of silence he is trying to maintain inside his own head.

He has been sitting at the corner table for twenty minutes. His lunch is in front of him, untouched, and he has been moving it around the tray with a fork for fifteen of those minutes.

Carver is alive.

He turns the sentence over again. He has been turning it over since David’s car dropped him back on Crane Street last night, since he walked up to the flat and made himself eat something and lay on his bed staring at the ceiling until the ceiling offered nothing further. He has run it through from every angle he can access and he keeps arriving at the same wall, which is that he was there, he fired the shot, and he watched the man go down.

Did he… somehow survive?

No, that’s impossible. He shot him point blank in the head. But then again, he