_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

face. I gave her to him and ran. I ran out of the house into the rain, I ran
to the beach. I don’t remember what happened after that. It was a long
time before he came for me. It was still raining. I was in the dunes, I
think. I thought about going in the water, but I was too scared. He came
for me eventually. He took me home.
“We buried her in the morning. I wrapped her in a sheet and Mac dug
the grave. We put her down at the edge of the property, near the disused
railway line. We put stones on top to mark it. We didn’t talk about it, we
didn’t talk about anything, we didn’t look at each other. That night, Mac
went out. He said he had to meet someone. I thought maybe he was
going to go to the police. I didn’t know what to do. I just waited for him,
for someone to come. He didn’t come back. He never came back.”
I’m sitting in Kamal’s warm living room, his warm body at my side,
and I’m shivering. “I can still feel it,” I tell him. “At night, I can still feel
it. It’s the thing I dread, the thing that keeps me awake: the feeling of
being alone in that house. I was so frightened—too frightened to go to
sleep. I’d just walk around those dark rooms and I’d hear her crying, I’d
smell her skin. I saw things. I’d wake in the night and be sure that there
was someone else—something else—in the house with me. I thought I
was going mad. I thought I was going to die. I thought that maybe I
would just stay there, and that one day someone would find me. At least
that way I wouldn’t have left her.”
I sniff, leaning forward to take a Kleenex from the box on the table.
Kamal’s hand runs down my spine to my lower back and rests there.
“But in the end I didn’t have the courage to stay. I think I waited about
ten days, and then there was nothing left to eat—not a tin of beans,
nothing. I packed up my things and I left.”
“Did you see Mac again?”
“No, never. The last time I saw him was that night. He didn’t kiss me
or even say good-bye properly. He just said he had to go out for a bit.” I
shrug. “That was it.”
“Did you try to contact him?”
I shook my head. “No. I was too frightened, at first. I didn’t know
what he would do if I did get in touch. And I didn’t know where he was
—he didn’t even have a mobile phone. I lost touch with the people who
knew him. His friends were all kind of nomadic. Hippies, travellers. A
few months ago, after we talked about him, I Googled him. But I
couldn’t find him. It’s odd . . .”
“What is?”