_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

RACHEL
• • •
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013
EARLY MORNING
One piece of the memory led to the next. It’s as though I’d been
blundering about in the dark for days, weeks, months, then finally caught
hold of something. Like running my hand along a wall to find my way
from one room to the next. Shifting shadows started at last to coalesce,
and after a while my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and I could
see.
Not at first. At first, although it felt like a memory, I thought it must
be a dream. I sat there, on the sofa, almost paralysed with shock, telling
myself that it wouldn’t be the first time I’d misremembered something,
wouldn’t be the first time that I’d thought things went a certain way
when in fact they had played out differently.
Like that time we went to a party thrown by a colleague of Tom’s, and
I was very drunk, but we’d had a good night. I remember kissing Clara
good-bye. Clara was the colleague’s wife, a lovely woman, warm and
kind. I remember her saying that we should get together again; I
remember her holding my hand in hers.
I remembered that so clearly, but it wasn’t true. I knew it wasn’t true
the next morning when Tom turned his back on me when I tried to speak
to him. I know it isn’t true because he told me how disappointed and
embarrassed he was that I’d accused Clara of flirting with him, that I’d
been hysterical and abusive.
When I closed my eyes I could feel her hand, warm against my skin,
but that didn’t actually happen. What really happened is that Tom had to
half carry me out of the house, me crying and shouting all the way, while
poor Clara cowered in the kitchen.
So when I closed my eyes, when I drifted into a half dream and found
myself in that underpass, I may have been able to feel the cold and smell