Normal

The alarm went off at seven fourteen and Indigo Derby hit it without opening her eyes.

She lay there for a moment in the specific grey light of a New York morning coming through curtains that had never quite fit the window properly — a gap down the left side that she'd been meaning to fix for two years and hadn't — and did the thing she did every morning which was lie still and let the day arrive at its own pace before she had to be part of it.

The city was already going outside. It was always already going. That was one of the things she'd liked about New York when she first arrived at seventeen with two bags and a decision — the way it didn't wait for you, didn't notice you, just continued at its own velocity and left you to find your place in it. After Vicrock, after the months of being looked at and talked about and handled carefully by everyone who knew what had happened, the anonymity of a city that genuinely did not care about her had been the closest thing to relief she'd found.

Five years on it still felt like that on good days.

She sat up.

Lucas was still asleep beside her, face down, one arm thrown over where she'd been lying, the duvet pulled up to his shoulders. He slept deeply and completely, the kind of sleep that didn't leave room for anything else, and she watched him for a moment in the grey light — the line of his shoulder, the particular stillness of him — and felt the thing she always felt looking at him which was a warmth she'd spent a long time deciding she was allowed to have.

She got up quietly and went to find her cigarettes.

The fire escape was cold at seven fifteen in the morning. It was always cold — the building faced north and the sun didn't find this side until early afternoon — but she'd long ago stopped noticing the cold the way she'd long ago stopped noticing a lot of things that had once required active adjustment. She sat on the top step with her back against the brickwork and her feet on the metal grating and lit the first cigarette of the day and looked out at the city doing its thing below her.

She'd started smoking at nineteen. She knew exactly why and had never particularly pretended otherwise — it was something to do with her hands, something that required a small focused decision every few hours, something that made her stand outside in the cold and just exist for five minutes without needing to be doing anything else. Her mum had said exactly what you'd expect a mum to say and Indigo had listened and kept smoking and they'd reached an unspoken agreement to leave it alone.

She took a long drag and looked at the street below.

A Tuesday. The particular rhythm of a Tuesday morning — not the fresh start energy of Monday, not the halfway point of Wednesday, just a day in the middle of the week doing what days did. Delivery trucks double parked on the kerb. A woman walking a very small dog with enormous seriousness. Two men in high vis sharing something from a paper bag outside the bodega on the corner.

Ordinary. Completely, unremarkably ordinary.

She'd worked hard for ordinary. She wanted it on record that she'd worked very hard for it.

The office was forty minutes on the subway and she was usually there by eight forty five which gave her fifteen minutes before anything was expected of her which she used to make coffee and sit at her desk and look at her computer screen without actually reading anything on it.

The job was data entry and administrative support for a mid sized logistics company on the fourteenth floor of a building that smelled like carpet cleaner and old coffee. She had been there for three years. She was good at it in the specific way of someone who is organised and reliable and asks for nothing beyond their remit and gives nobody any reason to look at them too closely. Her manager thought she was excellent. Her colleagues thought she was quiet. Both of these things were true and neither of them was the whole picture.

Rebecca was already at her desk when Indigo arrived, which was normal. Rebecca was always already at her desk. She had the particular energy of someone who genuinely liked mornings which Indigo found baffling and oddly comforting in equal measure.

"Coffee's fresh," Rebecca said without looking up from her screen.

"You're a good person," Indigo said.

"I know." Rebecca looked up then, pushing her glasses up her nose, and gave Indigo the once over she gave her every morning — not intrusive, just the particular attention of someone who paid attention. "You look tired."

"I'm always tired."

"You look more tired than your baseline tired."

"Lucas had a work call at midnight. It woke me up."

Rebecca made a sympathetic sound and went back to her screen. That was one of the things Indigo liked about her — she accepted information at face value. She didn't dig. She didn't probe. She offered sympathy when sympathy was appropriate and left it there.

Indigo poured her coffee and sat down at her desk and looked at her screen and thought about nothing in particular for the fifteen minutes before the day properly started.

She'd met Rebecca on her first week at the company. They'd been assigned adjacent desks by the particular randomness of office logistics and had spent the first month in the careful polite orbit of two people deciding whether they were going to be work acquaintances or something more. The something more had happened gradually — lunch together once, then regularly, then the occasional drink after work, then the specific intimacy of knowing someone's coffee order and their sister's name and the particular face they made when their manager said something frustrating.

Indigo didn't have many people. That was just the truth of her life in New York — she'd kept it small deliberately, kept the circle tight, because the alternative was too many people knowing too much and she'd learned what happened when the wrong person knew too much about you. Rebecca was one of the few she'd let properly in and she'd done it slowly, incrementally, making sure at every stage that it was safe.

She'd told Rebecca about Vicrock eventually. Not everything — not the full shape of it, not the details that still lived in her body rather than her memory — but enough. Enough that Rebecca understood why Indigo was the way she was. Why she sat with her back to walls in restaurants. Why she checked the locks twice. Why sometimes in the middle of an ordinary conversation her eyes went somewhere else entirely for a few seconds and then came back.

Rebecca had listened and then said "okay" and then asked if Indigo wanted another drink and that had been that.

That was exactly the right response. Indigo had never told her that but it was.

Lucas called at twelve thirty.

She stepped away from her desk and took it in the corridor, leaning against the wall beside the water cooler, watching people move through the office behind the glass partition.

"Hey," he said. His voice had that particular quality it had during the day — slightly distracted, one part of him always somewhere else. He worked in tech, something with servers and infrastructure that she'd had explained to her multiple times and retained approximately none of. "How's your morning."

"Fine. Yours."

"Long. I've got a call at two that I'm already dreading."

"What's it about."

"Migration something. I stopped fully understanding about twenty minutes in." A pause. She could hear him moving, the particular sound of his office. "You okay?"

"Fine," she said. "Why."

"You sound a bit flat."

"I'm always a bit flat on Tuesdays."

"Fair." Another pause. "Dinner tonight? I can cook."

"You can attempt to cook."

"That's the same thing."

"It really isn't."

She could hear him smiling. She knew the sound of it — not a laugh, just a shift in the quality of his voice, a warmth that came through even on a phone in a corridor outside a logistics office on a Tuesday. Three years and she still noticed it. She thought that probably meant something good.

"Seven?" he said.

"Seven," she confirmed.

She hung up and stood in the corridor for a moment looking at nothing in particular and felt the specific contentment of a life that had a shape to it. Lucas at seven. Rebecca through the glass partition frowning at her screen. Coffee going cold on her desk. The ordinary Tuesday machinery of a life she'd built from scratch in a city that hadn't known her name.

She went back to her desk.

It was Rebecca who had the news on.

She had a habit of playing low volume background noise while she worked — sometimes music, sometimes podcasts, occasionally the news channel that played on the small monitor mounted on the partition between their desks. Indigo had long ago tuned it out the way you tune out anything that's always there.

She wasn't tuned out at two forty seven when the words Vicrock Forest came through the speaker.

She looked up.

The monitor showed aerial footage — she recognised it immediately, the specific shape of the forest from above, the pale ribbon of the main trail visible through the canopy, the car park of the visitor centre at the edge of the frame. Blue lights in the car park. Vehicles she recognised as forensics vans from five years of knowing what forensics vans looked like.

The newsreader's voice was calm and measured the way newsreaders' voices always were regardless of what they were saying.

— identified as Sarah Beaumont, sixteen, from Guildford. Two other teenagers who were present at the scene escaped unharmed and are assisting police with enquiries. The Vicrock Forest site, which was the location of the Kill Count murders five years ago, has been sealed pending investigation. Police have not yet confirmed whether the death is connected to the previous—

Indigo looked away.

She looked at her screen. At the spreadsheet open on it. At the data in the cells that needed entering. She looked at all of it with the focused attention of someone making a decision about what they were going to feel.

It wasn't him.

Jacob Cain was dead. The police had confirmed it — not confirmed confirmed, no body recovered confirmed, but confirmed in the way that mattered which was that nobody had seen him in five years and people who got shot and tied up in forests generally didn't survive and she had pulled that trigger herself and she knew where she'd aimed.

It wasn't him. It was a copycat. It was someone who'd read the forums, watched the documentaries, decided to play at something they'd seen online. It happened. The Kill Count case had enough notoriety by now that it attracted that kind of attention. Two years ago someone had broken into the site and spray painted things on the visitor centre. This was the same category of thing. Darker, worse, a girl was dead, but the same category.

It wasn't him.

"Oh god," Rebecca said, looking at the monitor. "Isn't that—"

"Yeah," Indigo said.

Rebecca looked at her. "Are you—"

"Fine," Indigo said. "I'm fine."

She went back to the spreadsheet.

She entered four rows of data with complete accuracy and then sat very still for a moment with her hands in her lap and breathed.

In. Out.

It wasn't him.

She picked up her phone and texted Lucas. Still on for seven?

He replied in thirty seconds. Obviously. Picking up pasta on the way home. You want the good wine or the normal wine.

She looked at the text for a moment.

Good wine, she sent back.

She put the phone face down on the desk and went back to the spreadsheet and didn't look at the monitor again for the rest of the afternoon.

The subway home was the usual Tuesday evening crush — bodies and noise and the specific underground smell of the New York transit system that she'd long ago stopped noticing. She stood with her hand on the overhead rail and her bag against her chest and looked at the dark tunnel walls rushing past the window and thought about nothing.

That was a skill she'd developed. The ability to think about nothing. To sit in the space between thoughts without anything rushing in to fill it. It had taken a long time to learn — in the first year after Vicrock her brain had refused to leave her alone for a single second, filling every quiet moment with things she didn't want to see — but she'd gotten there eventually. Therapy had helped. The city had helped. Lucas had helped, though she hadn't known that was what he was doing when it started.

She got off at her stop and walked the four blocks to the apartment building and stopped outside it for a cigarette before going up.

The street was quiet in the particular way of a residential block early evening — a couple walking a dog, a kid on a bike, the smell of someone cooking something with garlic coming from an open window above. She leaned against the wall and smoked and watched the street and felt the day beginning to leave her the way it did when she got home.

She was on the last inch of the cigarette when she saw it.

Movement. Across the street, between two parked cars, in the gap between a van and a saloon. Just a shape. Just the suggestion of one — there and then not there, the way things were when your brain filled in the dark with what it expected to find.

She stared at the gap between the cars.

Nothing. Just the cars. Just the street. Just the ordinary Tuesday evening carrying on regardless.

She dropped the cigarette and ground it out under her boot.

It wasn't him.

She went inside.

Lucas had made pasta. It was genuinely good — she always acted surprised when his cooking was good and he always acted offended by her surprise and this had become one of their rituals, a small loop of pretence they both enjoyed. They ate at the kitchen table with the good wine and talked about his two o'clock call, which had been exactly as bad as he'd predicted, and about Rebecca's ongoing situation with her upstairs neighbour which had been running for three months and showed no signs of resolution.

She didn't mention the news report.

She'd decided on the subway not to mention it and she held to that decision through dinner and through the washing up and through the two of them on the sofa with the television on and his arm around her shoulders and her feet tucked up beside her.

She was fine. The report was nothing. A copycat, a terrible thing, a girl who'd gone somewhere she shouldn't and paid for it, nothing to do with her, nothing to do with five years ago, nothing to do with anything that touched her life now.

She was fine.

At eleven she went to brush her teeth and stood at the bathroom mirror for a moment looking at herself.

She looked tired. More tired than her baseline tired, like Rebecca had said. She looked like someone carrying something they hadn't put down in a long time.

She looked like herself.

She turned the light off and went to bed and lay in the dark beside Lucas and listened to the city outside the window doing what the city did and waited for sleep.

It came eventually.

Before it did she thought about the gap between the parked cars. The shape that might have been there. The suggestion of something in the dark.

She thought about it and then she put it somewhere else and closed her eyes.

It wasn't him.

It wasn't.