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T en minutes later, Emily realized she was checking her emails.

She hadn’t decided to do it. She had no recollection, even, of picking up her phone. But she must have – after putting down her pen, closing the notebook and pushing them both to the side, where they were sitting now.

Because The Sunset Bell felt like a short story and Emily didn’t know how to write those well. AI Tradwives sounded like a Black Mirror episode she would totally watch, but writing science-fiction wasn’t really her thing. And while she thought a story about following Tall Blonde Woman around like a stalker could be great if, at the midpoint twist, it turned out that Tall Blonde Woman was stalking her , she had no idea what would happen for the other 89,950 words of that book.

So her brain, knowing that the giving-up was coming before she did, had run a little ahead of her conscious thought and conveniently put the device into her hand.

Emily sighed resignedly, but didn’t put the phone away.

No new emails; at least that. She opened a new message, entered Beth’s address and started typing. Hi Beth. Sorry to bother you, but could we speak? We break here between 12 and 12.30p.m., which I think in GMT is but she stopped there. She wasn’t completely sober and things might look different in the light of day, after she’d got some sleep. It was probably wiser to wait until tomorrow and see if she still wanted to complain to Beth about Grace then. It was starting, already, to feel like an overreaction. She deleted the draft.

She’d thought she might try to find a picture of Jack at the airport, out of morbid curiosity more than anything else, but since Twitter had stopped being Twitter you couldn’t search on it without an account anymore, and she no longer had one.

Instead, she went on YouTube and searched for videos of Kate Smyth.

There were hundreds. In most of them, Kate was dressed in blocks of daring colour, wearing shiny lip-gloss and brightly lit, a Sunrise logo on screen just below her right elbow. She wasn’t one of the two presenters who got to relax on the couch throughout the show, but a roving reporter, sent out into the real world to pre-tape segments about – in the videos Emily watched – getting beach-body ready, the Men’s Shed Association and the turning-on of Dublin city’s Christmas lights on a soggy November night.

There were also lots of videos of her vox-popping members of the general public, soliciting their views on the news near the top of the escalators in some dreary shopping centre. ‘News’ in the Sunrise universe wasn’t what you’d recognize from the headlines, but stories that began with phrases like A new study suggests , or A recent survey of Irish men has revealed . Kate’s interviewees often seemed distracted, better at answering the yes-or-no questions she posed than generating their own complete sentences. A few of them couldn’t even seem to manage that. They spent their time gazing at her in naked awe.

Because she was beautiful.

So beautiful she was out of place – movie-star looks inexplicably holding a microphone by the trollies outside a tatty Tesco. But she also seemed to be genuinely interested in the people she was talking to, and she was kind to them, encouraging them and joking with them and putting them at ease, and she had a mischievousness about her that seemed to say to the viewer, Yes, I know we’re trying to get five minutes out of this nonsense but sure look we’re having a laugh here, aren’t we?

Emily couldn’t imagine anyone sitting down to write a list of insults to this woman, or that woman taking any of them to heart.

She pictured Jack, lying in the dark with the glow of his phone on his face, watching his dead wife interview strangers about how often they changed their bed sheets, and she felt sorry for him.

And now, finally, Emily admitted to herself that she had been feeling sorry for him all bloody day.

‘Fuck,’ she said out loud.

And then she thought fuck it , slid off the stool and went to the fridge to pour herself a glass of wine.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew that no matter how Jack seemed, no matter how nice or thoughtful or caring, he still could’ve killed his wife. It could’ve been an accident, or a moment of madness. People were complicated and good people did bad things.

She knew that better than most.

There was also the possibility that Jack Smyth was a full-blown psychopath wearing a human suit who knew charm was his superpower, and that was why it had taken him less than twenty-four hours to suck her right in.

But it was just so hard for her to believe .

If he had accidentally killed Kate, wouldn’t he be suffering more, from the guilt? (But how much suffering was enough? What did it look like?) Wouldn’t he be wrecked by it all, broken by keeping the secret, stressed by maintaining the lies? (Unless he hadn’t done it, in which case none of those afflictions applied.) Why would a person commit murder, proclaim innocence, thus far avoid criminal charges and then decide to write a book about it? (Because if he’d got away with the killing, maybe he felt confident that he’d get away with this too.)

She took her wine to the couch and scanned the headlines on ThePaper.ie. There was nothing there about Jack, but then idle chatter online did not actual news make.

She returned to Neil Wallace’s website to digest his A BOUT page for a second time. Not only was he an experienced ghostwriter, but a decorated journalist too. He’d won several awards and published two non-fiction titles under his own name.

Emily tapped C ONTACT and stared into the void of the form.

She couldn’t turn off her curiosity about why Neil had quit this job. It didn’t make any difference to her – she was still going to have to do it – and it could be something as boring and innocuous as a schedule conflict.

But she didn’t think it was.

There was just something , snagging on her insides, like a tiny bit of loose grit in your shoe that you can feel but can’t find.

Maybe it was because Neil was a journalist. He’d know what his colleagues on the crime beat might have unearthed, but couldn’t report for legal reasons. Had he said yes, and then found out something that made taking this job too morally repugnant? Did he know something that made him think Jack was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt? If the answers to both those questions were no and he just didn’t like the Florida heat or something, then at least she could stop worrying about it.

She started typing a message. Hi Neil. Hope you don’t mind me reaching out. She immediately deleted the last two words in a fit of self-loathing and typed sending you this random message instead. I think we might have a mutual ghostwriting client . Grace would be pleased. I suspect he was yours before he was mine and I would love to know why the job became available. Am in Florida with him now and it’s a LOT – and we’re only on day one! No, she couldn’t possibly say that. Am in Florida with him now and after 24 hours I have more questions than answers. There was no need to tell him about the location. She changed it to am with him now but then thought that sounded like she was sitting next to him, so she changed it again to am away with him now working on it and would appreciate if we could chat . She typed out her phone number and then, because it was coded into her very DNA, signed off with No worries if not! She pressed S END before she could change her mind.

Then she went looking for Kate Smyth’s Instagram.

Her account had nearly four hundred thousand followers, a huge number for someone whose fame was down to Irish TV. Her last grid post was dated 17 November 2023, the day before she died. Kate’s final post was a view of an empty beach under wintry grey skies, with a headland in the distance and what looked like a mile of sand exposed by low tide. There was no caption and tens of thousands of comments, which could easily be identified as being from before and after Kate’s death, and before and after Jack became a suspect in it.

The first lot were all some variation of love that spot and STUNNING. Then came the kind that made Emily’s stomach churn with second-hand cringe: OTT social media condolences from people who were almost certainly complete strangers. RIP gorgeous girl. God needed an angel. Hope you’re at peace now . Finally, there was the prison too good for him and obvious he did it and let him burn. They made up the vast majority. The newest one had been posted just three days ago.

She scrolled down, into the last few months of Kate’s life.

In this period at least, she hadn’t been a regular user and seemed to post mostly views of beaches and woodland, restaurant meals she’d eaten and, for a stretch during her last summer, close-ups of flowers blooming in what was presumably her own garden. Emily had to rewind to six months before Kate’s death before she found a photo of the woman herself, sunkissed and sunglassed, posing on a bluff overlooking a breathtaking stretch of cerulean sea with her arms outstretched.

Looking at the photo made Emily suddenly hot with shame.

This woman had lost her life at just twenty-nine, three years younger than Emily was now, and, in death, been demoted to a supporting character in it.

The story had become all about Jack. This book would be all about Jack.

How he’d suffered. How the accusations had made him feel. What he was doing the night she died.

And Emily was helping him write it.

She scrolled on, looking for another photo of Kate – and when she found one, it made her do a double-take.

It was a group shot, Kate plus five other women, all in evening wear and holding slim champagne flutes, a ballroom behind them.

But there were two familiar faces in it.

Grace was in the picture, standing right next to Kate.

Emily put down her wine glass and sat straight up. She zoomed in, to confirm that it definitely was her – and it was . Moreover, Grace was tagged, although when Emily clicked on the username, she found the account set to private. But it gave her something new: Grace’s last name.

When she put Grace Park into Google, LinkedIn offered her some perplexing information.

Grace didn’t work for Morningstar.

Grace worked for Exis , Jack’s athleisure brand. Her current position was listed as personal assistant to the managing director and she’d been in that role for eighteen months.

What the …?

Emily was trying to puzzle this out when she heard a soft knock on the connecting door and then Jack’s muffled voice saying, ‘Emily? Emily, are you there?’