Trespass

"I had always assumed there was a line I would not cross. Grief walked me straight through it, and never once let me feel my feet stop."

We crossed the corner block in the last of the light, through long grass gone wet round our ankles, and the house came up to meet us — a dark two-storey shape with the dusk draining out of the sky behind it. Sharon went ahead of me, straight and certain, no checking of her bearings, no second thoughts, as though she had walked this exact line before. She had, of course. That afternoon. I made myself hold on to that, because it was the only thing that made the sureness of her bearable.

My boots sank and squelched in the soft ground. My heart was going so hard I could feel it up in my throat. Every step took me further from anything I could call safe, and I kept taking them.

The porch was small and square, hemmed in by a stand of flax gone rank and overgrown, the long leaves stirring and rustling in the cold breeze — the only sound out there, and not a comforting one. The driveway was empty. The windows were black. The whole house had the shut-up stillness of a place with nobody in it, and I stopped at the foot of the step and could not make myself like any part of it.

"It's very quiet," I whispered, hardly any voice behind it, as though a normal voice might wake something.

Everything in me was jangling at once, nerves and adrenaline gone to a thin electric hum, my arms too heavy and too light at the same time. I looked round for Sharon, wanting her steadiness, wanting somebody to tell me this was all right —

— and she was already at the door. Down on one knee in front of the lock, a set of thin metal tools in her hands.

"Sharon! What are you doing?" It came out a sharp, disbelieving hiss. She was bent right over the lock, and the tools moved in her fingers quick and sure and practised, and my stomach dropped clean through the porch boards, because those were not tools a person happened to have on them. Those were tools she had brought.

"Getting answers," she said, even and cold, not looking up, not slowing.

"Shit," I breathed, and put my hand out to the porch rail as if a length of cold timber could hold me up. I wanted to run. Some large sensible part of me wanted to be off that porch and down the block and back in the car with the doors locked. Another part — the part that had got up every morning that week only because Nial was still out there somewhere needing to be found — wanted to stand exactly where I was and see it through.

Where had she learned to do that? When had she got hold of those tools, and thought to bring them, and said not one word to me about it? Each question stacked on the last, and every one of them came down to the same place: that Sharon had been planning this — not since her phone call, not since that afternoon, but for days — and that she had been a long way out in front of me the whole time, and I had followed her here anyway.

The lock gave with a soft click, small and final. Sharon straightened and pocketed the tools in one smooth motion and looked back at me over her shoulder — grim, set, waiting, a look that dared me to lose my nerve now. God help me, underneath all the fear of her there was still that thread of terrible kinship, because she wanted the same impossible thing I did, and she was the only other person alive who did.

Without a word she turned the handle and pushed the door open.

"Wait!" I lurched forward and caught her sleeve, my fingers closing on the cold cloth of her jacket before I had decided to reach. The chill of it under my hand was something real to hold, and it did nothing at all for my heart.

She turned back to me. Whatever patience she had left was thin and nearly gone, but under it was that same immovable certainty that had carried her the whole way to this door.

"Do you really think..." I started, and lost it, the question coming apart in my mouth before I could find the end of it. I did not even know what I was asking. Whether she thought this was wise. Whether she could promise me it was safe. Whether one of us was finally going to say the sane thing and turn us both around — and I knew, even as I reached for it, that I did not want her to. I found my voice again and asked the only thing I could make into words. "Are you sure there's nobody home?"

She looked at me a long moment, and I could not read one thing in her face. Then she gave a small shrug, so calm it was obscene against everything the moment held, and said it so quietly the words barely made it into the air between us.

"Nobody alive."

The bottom went out of me. My hand came off her arm on its own. I had asked whether the house was empty and she had answered a different question altogether, the one I had not had the courage to put — and the answer settled in me cold and enormous: there was someone inside that house, and they were dead, and Sharon already knew it. The black windows stopped being empty windows. Every one of them had turned into a held stare.

Sharon stepped across the threshold with that same steadiness I would have given anything to borrow, and the dark of the hallway took her.

I stood on the step with the open door in front of me and the quiet street at my back, and for one long breath I felt the whole weight of what I was about to do — walk into a stranger's house, in the dark, towards a body, behind a woman I was not sure I should trust an inch. Then I thought of Nial. I thought of the not-knowing, stretching on and on for the rest of my life. I drew the breath in, and I stepped after her, over the threshold, into the house.