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T his time, Jack drove them out of Sanctuary in the opposite direction, making a left turn east on 30A. Within five minutes, he was parking in what a pleasantly weathered sign said was called R OSEMARY B EACH .

Emily couldn’t see any beach. They were in what appeared to be the main square of a small, quaint town that couldn’t have had less in common with the sterile white masonry, emptiness and straight lines they’d left back in Sanctuary. Here, there were mature weeping willows, trickling fountains and rows of crowded, colourful buildings that made her think of New Orleans a lot and Amsterdam a little bit. A towering flagpole stood in its centre; stars and stripes billowed gently in the breeze. There were people, too, and plenty of them – relaxing on park benches, dining al fresco outside cafés, lazily cycling around the square – but not enough to make a crowd, and no one seemed to be in a rush to get anywhere. The skies had cleared but the sun was already sinking, painting the whole scene with a warm, golden glow.

‘This is lovely,’ she said.

‘This was also master-planned and built from scratch, just like Sanctuary. By the same people who designed and built Seaside, actually. I think they broke ground in 1995.’ When she looked at Jack questioningly, he added, ‘Wikipedia. Again.’

‘Really? But it feels so real .’

‘It is real.’

‘You know what I mean. Organic. Haphazard. Messy.’

‘Like urban sprawl?’

‘I’d love a bit of urban sprawl right now,’ Emily said. ‘I think I might even miss it.’

Jack pointed to the café he’d parked right outside a place called Amavida Coffee Roasters.

‘Do you want to go inside or …?’

Emily shook her head. There was absolutely no way she was going to have this conversation in a public place. ‘Can we just stay here?’

‘Sure.’

A rhythmic buzzing sound: his phone, which he fished out of the pocket in the driver’s door and then frowned at the screen. ‘Ben is ringing me.’ He tapped the device a few times before putting the phone away again, back in the door. ‘Look, I think I know what you’re going to say and it’s not a big deal, all right? You don’t have to justify anything to me. I get it.’ He released his seatbelt and twisted around to face her. ‘I heard you. Yesterday morning, when I first came into the room and you were already there with Grace. You said something about owing Morningstar money and a second book? Or, I guess, owing them money because you owed them a second book? I’m presuming that’s how they convinced you to do this. And that’s fine. It’s not like I thought this was your dream gig or anything. I just hope you felt like you had options, that’s all. That you didn’t come here because you thought you had no other choice.’

Emily didn’t know what to say, in part because she was undone by the revelation that the moment he was referring to wasn’t even thirty-six hours ago.

She felt like she’d been here for weeks.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean, yes, that’s true. I do owe them a book, and money because of that.’ And that’s exactly why I came here . ‘But that’s not what I need to tell you.’

‘Then what it is? What’s wrong?’

But now, Emily hesitated.

The idea of saying it out loud felt like tearing through the fabric of her life and letting something dangerous seep out, to break through. And it seemed almost silly to have kept this secret for so long, only to reveal it in this car in this picture-perfect town, to a man who, as soon as he set foot on Irish soil, would be arrested as part of a murder investigation.

But what other choice did she have?

‘We spoke a little about my book,’ she said. ‘My novel? The Witness ?’

‘Yeah?’

‘The thing is … I didn’t make it up. I didn’t have to. Because the story is true.’

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Jack said slowly.

‘ The Witness is about a girl,’ Emily explained. ‘Roxie, she’s called in the book. The night before her twelfth birthday, two teenage girls, fifteen and sixteen, go missing in her town. A few weeks later, their bodies are found weighed down in the local lake. It’s all over the news. It’s all anyone can talk about. The guards are crawling all over the place, going door to door. And Roxie remembers that, that night, she woke up at three, maybe four in the morning and went downstairs – and saw her dad coming in, soaking wet.’

Jack didn’t react, waiting for more.

‘Her father is a violent man,’ she continued. ‘She’s seen it, with her mother, but neither of them know that she has. They think they’ve been hiding it. And she was hiding, that night, when he came in, so he doesn’t know that she saw him either. She’d crept downstairs to see if she’d got what she’d asked for for her birthday. A keyboard. And she had. It was there. But before she could slip back upstairs, she heard a key in the front door. She was crouched behind an armchair when he came in. She doesn’t tell anyone what she saw. Not until she’s much older. Then, she only ever tells her best friend.’

‘You said that in the book,’ Jack started, ‘she’s standing outside a Garda station, at the end.’

‘She never went in. Not that time, or any of the others.’

‘What happened to him? The father?’

‘He died suddenly, five years after the murders.’

‘He was never, like, charged or anything?’

‘He was never even suspected.’

‘So you were, what? Seventeen when your dad died?’

His framing of this question took her by surprise, enough for her to catch her breath in her throat.

‘I was seventeen when he died, yes,’ she said. ‘But he wasn’t my dad. The real Roxie was – is – my best friend. I’m the only person she’s ever told. She let me write her story.’

He stared at her for a long moment, unblinking.

Since Jack had killed the engine and with it the air-conditioning, the car had been slowly warming up, the air collecting a solidity that was beginning to get uncomfortable. When Emily shifted her weight now, she felt a dampness under her arms and behind her knees and in the small of her back.

She longed to roll down a window, to hold her face against a breeze.

‘Let you,’ Jack repeated. ‘Not asked you to?’

‘Encouraged me to. All I ever wanted was to write a novel. But I could never finish one. I was forever starting something, getting three or four chapters into it and then abandoning it because it ran out of story. I decided it was because I only had bad ideas – ideas too weak or flimsy to last for ninety thousand words. And then, one day, A— Roxie and I are talking, and she says, “Why don’t you write about the one story only you can tell?”’

‘Why only you?’

She smiled a little. ‘Because she’s a dentist, and no one else knows.’

Jack put an arm onto the steering wheel, letting his wrist lean on it while he stared at something in the middle distance, lost in thought. Doing this put his injuries on display and, when he seemingly realized this a few seconds later, he dropped his arm back down into his lap.

He looked back at her. ‘And then?’

‘I write it,’ Emily said. ‘And I actually finish it. I change – or I think I change – all identifying characteristics. I make up names for places and people. I set it in a different part of the country, at the opposite end of the year, in the present day. But the thing is, I’m thinking that, if I’m lucky, a couple of thousand people will read this, max. And pretty quickly, I start to lose track. When I get an agent, she wants me to do another draft. I get a book deal and do two more drafts before it’s published. You start to forget what you changed and what you didn’t. You start to forget, honestly, what’s real and what’s not. And there’s one thing you didn’t even know you needed to change.’

‘What?’

‘The shirt he was wearing that night. It had a distinctive pattern. What my friend didn’t remember was that it was ripped, but it was. The, ah …’ She took a breath. ‘The missing piece was clutched in the hand of his victim.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I got a letter. Addressed to Roxie’s real name. Just before the paperback came out, so maybe nine months after the book was first published? It had been sent to my publisher’s Dublin office.’

‘By who?’

‘The mother,’ Emily said. ‘Of the murdered girl.’

‘Girl, singular? I thought there were two?’

‘That was a detail I changed,’ Emily said. ‘There was one. The case is still unsolved. That girl’s mother – she’s in her seventies now – never stopped searching for answers. At some point, she happened upon The Witness , and felt like she’d found some. You see, the piece of the shirt was never made public, but the guards had told her about it. And, of course, she had found some answers. But we couldn’t tell her that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It would expose us. I didn’t do anything wrong, legally, I don’t think, although I doubt Morningstar would be too happy with me. But that’s nothing compared to what might happen to my friend. I don’t have to tell you, Jack, what people are like these days. All those so-called citizen sleuths, the things they do to people – and it’s not just online anymore. They’re in the real world now. Doorstepping people and harassing them and shoving phones in their faces while they shout demands for answers. It could completely upend her life. No, it would . And for what? Who can even prove at this point whether or not he did have something to do with it? And even if they could and he did, so what? He’s dead. He can’t be punished for it now. The only person who would suffer for it is my friend.’

‘What did you tell her? The mother of the murdered girl?’

His eyes were asking his real question: What did you tell the other person desperate for answers after their loved one was murdered who came to you for help?

Emily had to look away, down, at her hands.

‘Nothing,’ she said, her face burning with shame, her voice barely a whisper. ‘We ignored her. We didn’t know what else to do.’

Jack shook his head, either in disgust or disbelief or a combination of the two.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know . It’s awful.’

‘Did she contact you again?’

‘No, but ever since, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I thought she might get a solicitor and force me to respond, or give up my notes or earlier drafts or something like that. I don’t know what’s permissible, legally, but I’m sure she could do something. She could tell Morningstar, try to get them on my case. Or worse: she could go to the guards and convince them to do something about it. I think that’d be a tall order, but you never know. My friend’s mother could get a knock on the door. That’s why I couldn’t deliver the second book. I was falling apart over the fear of it all coming out – and absolutely destroying my friend’s life – and because I hadn’t really written the first one. I hadn’t made it up. I took a real story and changed it. Garnished it with some fiction. That’s all.’ The car was getting unbearably warm. Emily looked at the controls on the door: electric windows. ‘Jack, do you think you could put d—?’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ he asked, cutting her off.

‘Because ever since I’ve been here, someone else has been threatening to.’

‘What? Who?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They sent emails, to start with. An anonymous Hotmail account with “Emily Joyce” as the sender’s name. The address was mostly what looked like random numbers until I realized that they’re my ISBN. That’s the number that appears with the barcode on a book. Each message was just one sentence, typed in all caps. The first one said, I know who you are . The second one said, I know what you did . And the third said, Tell him or I will . And then today, a fourth was hand-delivered.’

Jack’s facial expression suggested he was curious but not concerned about the emails, but the news of the hand-delivered note seemed to genuinely shock him.

‘It was slipped under the connecting doors.’ Emily dug it out of her pocket, unfolded it and handed it to him. ‘Do you recognize the writing?’

He frowned. ‘Should I?’

‘You tell me.’

They locked eyes, then Jack rolled his.

‘Not this again,’ he said.

‘On the beach. Just now. Ben asked me if I got his message.’

‘You think this is from him ?’

‘Who else would send it?’

‘But how would he know?’ Jack’s voice was rising. ‘And why would he care? What’s this got to do with anything ?’

‘Maybe he’s trying to stop this book.’

‘That’s ridiculous. He’s helping me. He gave us the house.’

‘Maybe because that way, it’d be easier for him to interfere.’

‘ Interfere? ’ Jack said incredulously. ‘Look. On the beach, just now, and earlier, up in the room. Those are the only two times in your life you’ve met Ben, right?’

Emily nodded reluctantly, suspecting what was coming.

‘So you’ve spent, what? Five? Ten minutes with him? Let’s be generous. Let’s say it was a full fifteen. And yet you think you know him. Well, I’ve known the guy since I was a teenager. And there’s no way …’ He shook his head. ‘No. No way. It’s just not even possible. No. Not Ben.’

Emily was thinking of what Ruth had said, about how she didn’t know if Jack was really friends with Ben or if he had pretended to be for so long, out of fear or loyalty or both, that he’d just come to believe that he was.

Ruth had also said that Kate didn’t like him.

‘The woman on the beach,’ Jack said then. ‘Was he with her?’

‘They seem to know each other, yeah.’

‘Who is she?’

‘I don’t know. But I saw her before today. She was on both my flights here, which was some doing considering my route. And she was in Seaside, last night. At Bud and Alley’s, but downstairs on the lower deck.’

‘When we were there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is she Irish?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard her speak.’

‘What the fuck is going on?’ Jack muttered to himself.

It sounded rhetorical, so Emily didn’t respond.

And she couldn’t answer him. She had no idea what was going on. All she knew was that something was.

‘Ben denied being here,’ Jack said then. ‘I mean, before today. He told me he only arrived in Sanctuary this morning. I didn’t say anything about you being followed around town, but I did tell him about Grace seeing a man in the courtyard last night. He said it wasn’t him. That it couldn’t have been, because he was in Atlanta on a layover.’

‘Did he say why he came here?’ Emily asked.

‘He heard about the arrest.’

‘And so he flew here from France without even calling you first? And on what? Concorde?’

Jack’s jaw worked. ‘He was going to Miami, he said. For a trade show. He was already in Atlanta. He made a detour.’

But Ben had told Ruth he’d come here to meet a client at Fort Walton Beach Airport.

‘Where’s he staying?’ Emily asked.

‘In the same hotel as Joe and my sister, and Grace. In a place called Sandestiny? Sandustin? Sandestin? Something like that.’

Through the windscreen, Emily saw what was presumably a mother and her two young kids exit the store next to the café, clutching tote bags. Only now did she notice its colourful window displays and the sign hanging near its door: T HE H IDDEN L ANTERN . A bookshop.

‘You know what’s weird?’ Jack said. ‘Remember I told you that Kate was getting messages? Anonymous messages?’

Emily turned towards him. ‘Yeah?’

‘Some of them were emails. With her own name as the sender. And they were always in all caps, too.’