_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

I will give something of myself. That’s my plan for today. I will talk
about something real. I will talk about wanting a child. I’ll see whether
that provokes something—an unnatural response, any kind of reaction.
I’ll see where that gets me.
It gets me nowhere.
He starts out by asking me how I’m feeling, when I last had a drink.
“Sunday,” I tell him.
“Good. That’s good.” He folds his hands in his lap. “You look well.”
He smiles, and I don’t see the killer. I’m wondering now what I saw the
other day. Did I imagine it?
“You asked me, last time, about how the drinking started.” He nods. “I
became depressed,” I say. “We were trying . . . I was trying to get
pregnant. I couldn’t, and I became depressed. That’s when it started.”
In no time at all, I find myself crying again. It’s impossible to resist
the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know
you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done:
you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. I confide in him and I
forget, once again, what I’m doing here. I don’t watch his face for a
reaction, I don’t study his eyes for some sign of guilt or suspicion. I let
him comfort me.
He is kind, rational. He talks about coping strategies, he reminds me
that youth is on my side.
So maybe it doesn’t get me nowhere, because I leave Kamal Abdic’s
office feeling lighter, more hopeful. He has helped me. I sit on the train
and I try to conjure up the killer I saw, but I can’t see him any longer. I
am struggling to see him as a man capable of beating a woman, of
crushing her skull.
A terrible, shameful image comes to me: Kamal with his delicate
hands, his reassuring manner, his sibilant speech, contrasted with Scott,
huge and powerful, wild, desperate. I have to remind myself that this is
Scott now, not as he was. I have to keep reminding myself of what he
was before all this. And then I have to admit that I don’t know what
Scott was before all this.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 9, 2013
EVENING