_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

And now I feel desperate, thwarted. I can’t see through the mob of
people in the carriage across to their side of the tracks—my side—and
even if I could, with the rain still pouring down I wouldn’t be able to see
beyond the railway fence. I wonder whether evidence is being washed
away, whether right at this moment vital clues are disappearing forever:
smears of blood, footprints, DNA-loaded cigarette butts. I want a drink
so badly, I can almost taste the wine on my tongue. I can imagine exactly
what it will feel like for the alcohol to hit my bloodstream and make my
head rush.
I want a drink and I don’t want one, because if I don’t have a drink
today then it’ll be three days, and I can’t remember the last time I stayed
off for three days in a row. There’s a taste of something else in my
mouth, too, an old stubbornness. There was a time when I had willpower,
when I could run 10k before breakfast and subsist for weeks on thirteen
hundred calories a day. It was one of the things Tom loved about me, he
said: my stubbornness, my strength. I remember an argument, right at the
end, when things were about as bad as they could be; he lost his temper
with me. “What happened to you, Rachel?” he asked me. “When did you
become so weak?”
I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t
remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit,
by life, by the living of it.
The train comes to an abrupt halt, brakes screeching alarmingly, at the
signal on the London side of Witney. The carriage is filled with
murmured apologies as standing passengers stumble, bumping into one
another, stepping on one another’s feet. I look up and find myself
looking right into the eyes of the man from Saturday night—the ginger
one, the one who helped me up. He’s staring right at me, his startlingly
blue eyes locked on mine, and I get such a fright, I drop my phone. I
retrieve it from the floor and look up again, tentatively this time, not
directly at him. I scan the carriage, I wipe the steamy window with my
elbow and stare out, and then eventually I look back over at him and he
smiles at me, his head cocked a little to one side.
I can feel my face burning. I don’t know how to react to his smile,
because I don’t know what it means. Is it Oh, hello, I remember you from
the other night, or is it Ah, it’s that pissed girl who fell down the stairs
and talked shit at me the other night, or is it something else? I don’t
know, but thinking about it now, I believe I have a snatch of sound track
to go with the picture of me slipping on the steps: him saying, “You all
right, love?” I turn away and look out of the window again. I can feel his