Three weeks after the night on the tower, I go home and relearn how to do my life. I let the basic things make me strong again. I cook dinner, I read in the sun, I play with Ben. I can’t get enough of him: his tiny body, his heart-shaped face, his endless questions. Scott and I talk, cautiously at first and then with more confidence, making plans. I will return to work—it’s part of who I am—but it will be different this time. We will try to do it together. I vow to keep no secrets from him. I tell him about Jacob, about Rosalind, all of it.
Felix hovers between us but I push him aside: my final secret. Only time will tell if I can keep him buried in my past.
Five weeks after the shooting I visit Jacob’s grave. The sweet smell of a dying summer rolls across the hill. Bees fly low around the headstones, flitting over the recently turned earth, before settling on their chosen flowers. Rosalind is buried in the Ryan plot on the other side of the hill near the rose garden, right next to the grave of George Ryan. I try not to think about her. I need to row my boat towards calm waters. I pull tails of weeds from the concrete cracks on Jacob’s headstone and smooth my fingers over the chiselled letters, laying my carefully picked bunch of wildflowers across the top.
I breathe in the fresh air and read his name over and over.
I gently run my fingers across my scar as I remember him. Remember how much he loved me.
I sit down on the soft grass next to his grave and stretch my legs out in the sun. Two little sparrows near my feet weave around each other, playing an elaborate game of chase, before jumping into the air and flying into the sky.
acknowledgments
Although I wrote alone, I have quite a few people to thank for The Dark Lake becoming an actual book.
To Tom, for the gift of extra hours and for wrangling our small humans so I didn’t have to deal with reality quite as much as usual.
To my early readers, of which there are a few, you are all excellent people. Thank you for taking the time and for caring enough to give feedback. It was incredibly important to me. My parents, Kevin and Susan, were especially helpful early readers, which appeals to my strong sense of irony, seeing as they taught me to read (and write) in the first place. I would like to thank them also for lots of general things, as well as several of the commas that appear in this book.
To Deanne Sheldon-Collins, for giving me ‘proper’ writing advice and a much-needed confidence boost at the halfway mark.
To my amazing agent, Lyn Tranter, for responding to my pitch email in the first place, and to both her and Sarah Minns for helping me to shape my story, name it and save one of the characters from an untimely death.
To Jane Palfreyman, Ali Lavau, Sarah Baker, Louise Cornege, Kate Goldsworthy and all the other magicians at Allen & Unwin, thank you so much for your passion and enthusiasm. Thank you also for being very good at your jobs and making my book SO much better than it was when you met it, and for introducing it to so many people.
I would also like to thank the stranger on the plane who read sections of my draft during a long flight and who, when I noticed, told me that it was ‘quite good’ and then begged me to tell her what happened next. Your unprompted interest was strangely motivating.
And, to the difficult-to-define but reliably awesome New York City, the magical place in which I wrote a decent chunk of this book and where I decided once and for all that I would finish it and get it published (so presumptuous!)—thank you for the epiphany.
Writing a book really is such a ridiculous thing to do. So ridiculous that I might just go and do it all over again.