Tana French - The Secret Place

The reasons hum in the air. ‘Hey,’ Holly says, too loud and ludicrous, into the wet grey silence. ‘That was mine.’

No one answers. It comes to Holly, for the first time, that someday she’ll believe – one hundred per cent believe, take for granted – that it was all their imagination.

Julia is texting again; Selena has slid back into her daydream. Holly loves the three of them with such a huge and ferocious and bruised love that she could howl.

Becca catches her eye and nods at the ground. When Holly looks down, Becca skips a pebble through the weeds and lands it on the toe of Holly’s Ugg. Holly has just time to feel a tiny bit better before Becca smiles at her, kindly, an adult giving a kid a sweetie.

It’s Transition Year, things would be weird anyway. The four of them do their work-experience weeks in different places with different hours; when teachers split the class into groups to do projects about internet advertising or volunteer work with kids with handicaps, they break up gangs of friends on purpose, because Transition Year is all about new experiences. That’s what Holly tells herself, on days when she hears Julia’s laugh rise out of a crowd across the classroom, on days when the four of them finally have a few minutes together in their room at lights-out and they barely say a word: it’s just Transition Year. It would have happened anyway. Next year everything will go back to normal.

This year when Becca says she’s not going to the Valentine’s dance, no one tries to change her mind. When Sister Cornelius catches Julia snogging François Levy right on the dance floor, Holly and Selena don’t say a word. Holly isn’t positive that Selena, swaying off-beat with her arms around herself, even noticed.

Afterwards, when they get back to their room, Becca is curled on her bed with her back to them and her earbuds in. Her reading light catches the flash of an open eye, but she doesn’t say anything and so neither do they.

The next week, when Miss Graham tells them to get into groups of four for the big final art project, Holly grabs the other three so fast she almost falls off her chair. ‘Ow,’ Julia says, jerking her arm away. ‘What the hell?’

‘Jesus, chillax. I just don’t want to get stuck with some idiots who’ll want to do a massive picture of Kanye made out of lipstick kisses.’

‘You chillax,’ Julia says, but she grins. ‘No Kanye kisses. We’ll go with Lady Gaga made of tampons. It’ll be a commentary on women’s place in society.’ She and Holly and Becca all get the giggles and even Selena grins, and Holly feels her shoulders relax for the first time in ages.

‘Hi,’ Holly calls, banging the door behind her.

‘In here,’ her dad calls back, from the kitchen. Holly dumps her weekend bag on the floor and goes in to him, shaking a dusting of rain off her hair.

He’s at a counter peeling potatoes, long grey T-shirt sleeves pushed up above his elbows. From behind – rough hair still mostly brown, strong shoulders, muscled arms – he looks younger. The oven is on, turning the room warm and humming; outside the kitchen window the February rain is a fine mist, almost invisible.

Chris Harper has been dead for nine months, a week and five days.

Dad gives Holly a no-hands hug and leans down so she can kiss his cheek – stubble, cigarette smell. ‘Show me,’ he says.

‘ Dad. ’

‘Show.’

‘You’re so paranoid.’

Dad wiggles the fingers of one hand at her, beckoning. Holly rolls her eyes and holds up her key ring. Her personal alarm is a pretty little teardrop, black with white flowers. Dad spent a long time searching for one that looks like a normal key ring, so she won’t get embarrassed and take it off, but he still checks every single week.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ says Dad, going back to the potatoes. ‘I heart my paranoia.’

‘Nobody else has to have one.’

‘So you’re the only one who’ll escape the mass alien abduction. Congratulations. Need a snack?’

‘I’m OK.’ On Fridays they use up their leftover pocket money on chocolate and eat it sitting on the wall at the bus stop.

‘Perfect. Then you can give me a hand here.’

Mum always makes dinner. ‘Where’s Mum?’ Holly asks. She pretends to focus on hanging up her coat straight, and watches Dad sideways. When Holly was little her parents split up. Dad moved back in when she was eleven, but she still keeps an eye on things, especially unusual things.

‘Meeting some friend from back in school. Catch.’ Dad throws Holly a head of garlic. ‘Three cloves, finely minced. Whatever that means.’

‘What friend?’

‘Some woman called Deirdre.’ Holly can’t tell whether he knows she was looking for that, some woman . With Dad you can never tell what he knows. ‘Mince finely.’

Holly finds a knife and pulls herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar. ‘Is she coming home?’

‘Course she is. I wouldn’t bet on what time, though. I said we’d make a start on dinner. If she gets back for it, great; if she’s still off having girl time, we won’t starve.’

‘Let’s get pizza,’ Holly says, giving Dad the corner of a grin. When she used to go to his depressing apartment for weekends, they would order pizza and eat it on the tiny balcony, looking out over the Liffey and dangling their legs through the railings – there wasn’t enough room for chairs. She can tell by the way Dad’s eyes warm that he remembers too.

‘Here’s me giving my mad chef skills a workout, and you want pizza? Ungrateful little wagon. Anyway, your mammy said the chicken needed using.’

‘What are we making?’

‘Chicken casserole. Your mammy wrote down her recipe, give or take.’ He nods at a piece of paper tucked under the chopping board. ‘How was your week?’

‘OK. Sister Ignatius gave us this big speech about how we need to decide what we want to do in college and our whole entire lives depend on making the right decision. By the end she got so hyper about the whole thing, she made us all go down to the chapel and pray to our confirmation saints for guidance.’

That gets the laugh she was looking for. ‘And what did your confirmation saint have to say?’

‘She said I should be sure and not fail my exams, or I’m stuck with Sister Ignatius for another year and aaahhh .’

‘Smart lady.’ Dad tips the peelings into the compost bin and starts chopping the potatoes. ‘Are you getting a little too much nun in your life? Because you can quit boarding any time you want. You know that. Just say the word.’

‘I don’t want to,’ Holly says, quickly. She still doesn’t know why Dad is letting her be a boarder, especially after Chris, and she always feels like he might change his mind any minute. ‘Sister Ignatius is fine. We just laugh about her. Julia does her voice; once she actually did it all the way through Guidance, and Sister Ignatius didn’t even realise. She couldn’t work out why we were all cracking up.’

‘Little smart-arse,’ Dad says, grinning. He likes Julia. ‘The Sister’s got a point in there, though. Been doing any thinking about what comes after school?’

It feels to Holly like the last couple of months that’s all any adult ever talks about. She says, ‘Maybe sociology – we had a sociologist come in to talk to us in Careers Week last year, and it sounded OK. Or maybe law.’

She’s focusing on the garlic, but she can hear that the rhythm of her dad’s chopping doesn’t change, not that it would anyway. Mum is a barrister. Dad is a detective. Holly doesn’t have a brother or a sister to go Dad’s way.

When she makes herself look across, he’s showing nothing but impressed and interested. ‘Yeah? Solicitor, barrister, what?’