56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

3 Days From Now

On Tuesday the two-kilometer restriction becomes five, and Ciara is up with the dawn. She knocks back a coffee—she’s kept that habit, even investing in a knock-off Nespresso machine she saw on sale in Aldi—before sticking her feet into her sneakers and heading outside. The sun is weak and chilly, but pushing its way up into a cloudless sky. She walks along the canal, then cuts down Haddington Road past St. John’s College, turning right onto Bath Avenue. When the expanse of Sandymount Strand comes into view—and, beyond it, the gentle steel-blue waves of the Irish Sea stretching all the way to the horizon—she feels a physical release, a lead weight disappearing from her shoulders, a lightness shooting through her heart. And then the assault of the sea breeze, whipping her hair in every direction and sandblasting the skin on her face.

She likes it.

It’s waking her up, bringing her back.

For more than two weeks now, she’s been mostly hiding out in the studio apartment, scurrying out after dark to buy groceries and newspapers, scouring them and the internet for news on Oliver St Ledger. It finally came on Friday online, Saturday morning in print: Gardaí in Dublin are investigating the death of a 29-year-old man whose body was found at an apartment block in Harold’s Cross, Dublin 6, early this morning. The grim discovery was made following reports by neighbors of an odor emanating from the man’s apartment . . . foul play is not suspected.

She had thought she would’ve spent those two weeks with Oliver. She was going to tell him the truth, all of it: who she was, why she’d felt compelled to find him, and that she had, in little ways, started to love him.

That she wanted to stay with him, to see if that love could grow.

But his admission had changed everything. Now she grieves for two people: the Oliver who never was, and the Shane who never got to be.

The pain in her heart is acute, mixed, and confusing. She catches herself thinking of Oliver, of being with him, of believing in him, and finds herself wishing things had turned out a different way. But then she remembers what he said, that he had been the ringleader, that what had happened all those years ago had happened because of him, and with a cold, steely certainty she knows things couldn’t have gone another way.

She’s not worried they’ll come for her. She had set out to build a lie that would protect her, a kind of shark cage that would keep a distance between her real self and Oliver, and she’d inadvertently created a phantom. She’d realized this standing feet from his unconscious body, watching a puddle of water build in the bottom of the shower, knowing what could happen when a person’s nose and mouth were resting against the tiles.

Knowing she could just walk away.

She had borrowed the job and last name of a real Cirrus employee she’d found on LinkedIn and made her own profile in the hope that if he looked, he’d find the fake one first and go no further. She had only ever communicated with Oliver via a pay-as-you-go-phone, which she’d registered to Oliver’s name and the KB Studios address, and before she’d left his apartment for the last time, she’d used it to send a text message that suggested her and Oliver had broken up. She’d watched the text message light up Oliver’s phone’s screen and found another layer of protection: that day by the canal he’d asked her for her last name, but he’d never actually entered it. She was just “Ciara” in his contacts. Her real phone had never left the studio apartment back at Sussex Court.

She’d stayed in his apartment that night, while Oliver’s body grew pale and cooled, scrubbing every trace of herself away. The only person other than Oliver who ever even knew she was there is the journalist, Laura, and what information does she have, really? Not much more than the Gardaí. Laura knows what Ciara looks like, yes, but Ciara is already making an effort to change that.

And why would anyone be looking for her? Oliver fell and died. He had a tragic accident.

He had got himself into that shower, in that position, and was slipping into unconscious. She had turned off the water when she’d first entered the bathroom, when his head was in the sink. All she’d done is reset the scene. Put the shower back on, like it was when she’d found him. Back to first positions.

There was no responsibility to shoulder.

As far as she was concerned, Oliver had done it to himself—and apparently, the Gardaí agreed.

Foul play is not suspected.

In the dark, though, late at night, when she’s on the cusp of sleep and doesn’t have the energy to tell herself any more stories, she has to accept that she has done the very thing she’s spent her life terrified that her brother had, that in the pursuit of that truth, she’s found another one: there is a killer in her family.

But it’s her.

The only solace she’s been able to find is that she understands now there might be a difference between killing and being a killer.

She hopes, for her sake, that there is.

Even though it’s early, the beach is dotted with dozens of people, but with the tide halfway out there’s more than enough room for everyone. Ciara can walk along the water’s edge without even coming close to any other early morning beachgoers.

She watches the ripples of the waves for a while, the sun splintering into shards on the surface, shifting and disappearing, breaking over it again.

Then she feels, rather than hears, her phone ring in her pocket.

Siobhán.

As far as her sister is concerned, Ciara came to Dublin for a job interview at a phantom hotel, owned by the chain she already works for, for a position on their opening team, the staff who ready everything in the months leading up to the day they open their doors and welcome their first arrivals. When things with Oliver began to look promising, Ciara had called her sister and told her she was taking the job but that it was temporary, just for a few weeks. Her real job, in the meantime, had been decimated by the coronavirus restrictions; there were no events going on at all during lockdown, and eventually most hotels closed. Her boss in Cork had instructed Ciara to apply for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, which she did, and she passed her “workdays” in Oliver’s apartment reading and playing Solitaire. Eventually she’d made her continued stay in Dublin more plausible by telling Siobhán that, under the circumstances, the hotel had offered her a room to stay in for the duration, free of charge.

Now the government has announced the reopening plan, she can’t expect to actually return to work until July at the earliest. She can’t afford to stay in Dublin that long and keep paying rent in Cork, so she’s going to chance taking the train home at some stage this week. She’s not worried about meeting a Garda checkpoint along the way; it turns out, she’s pretty damn good at lying.

She’ll tell Siobhán now that she’ll be home soon, she thinks, as she answers the call. First order of business when she gets there is to visit her mother. She’s not sure what the likelihood of that is at the moment, but surely when a patient is in hospice care, allowances can be made.

She needs to tell her what she’s found out, about Shane.

“Hello?”

Siobhán said there was nothing Ciara could do to bring him back, but she was wrong. She’s brought Shane back to himself, to who he was before, in their memories. She’s been able to correct them, to clean them, to make them accurate and true.

“Ciara?” Her sister’s voice is faint, barely audible above the whipping wind. “Can you hear me? Are you there?”

“I can barely hear y—”

“Ciara, it’s Mam. She’s about to go.”

Running.

Ciara is doing it before she even forms the intention to, holding the phone to her ear, shouting, “Hang on, hang on, hang on . . .”

She’s saying it to her sister, but willing her mother to, too.

As she runs back up the beach, up to the steps to the path and around the corner of some cement structure that she hopes, if she stands in its shadow, might block the wind.

“Siobhán?”

“You sound much better now.”

“Is she lucid?”

“I think she can hear me. She can’t talk, but . . .”

“Is it just you there? Are you alone with her?”

“Yeah?”

“Put me on speaker.”

There’s a rustling noise and then, when Siobhán speaks again, it has the amplified, echoey quality that assures Ciara that her mother is now listening too.

She takes a deep breath.

She bites back her tears.

“Mam,” she says, “it’s me. Ciara. There’s something I need to tell you. It’s . . . It’s about Shane.”