Killing Me Softly by Nicci French

outside.
    ‘Pauline, can you tell Jake that I’ll do this…’ I made a wide, vague gesture round the room, at all our shared things ‘… however he wants.’
    She looked at me but didn’t reply.
    ‘Goodbye, then,’ I said.
    We stared at each other. I saw that she, too, wanted me to go so she could cry.
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    ‘I must look dreadful.’
    ‘No.’ He wiped my eyes and my snotty nose with a corner of his shirt.
    ‘I’m sorry. It’s so painful.’
    ‘The best things are born out of pain. Of course it is painful.’
    At any other time, I would have hooted at that. I don’t believe pain is necessary or ennobling. But I was too far gone. Another sob rose in my chest. ‘And I’m so scared, Adam.’ He didn’t say anything. ‘I’ve given up everything for you. Oh, God.’
    ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know you have.’
    We walked to a simple restaurant round the corner. I had to lean against him, as if I would fall over if I was unsupported. We sat in a dark corner and drank a glass of champagne each, which went straight to my head. He put his hand on my thigh under the table and I stared at the menu, trying to focus. We ate salmon fillets with wild mushrooms and green salad, and had a bottle of cold greeny-white wine. I didn’t know if I was elated or in despair. Everything seemed too much. Every look he gave me was like a touch, every sip of wine rushed round my blood. My hands shook when I tried to cut up the food. When he touched me under the table I felt as if my body would crumble into soft fragments.
    ‘Has it ever been like this for you?’ I asked, and he shook his head.
    I asked him who there was before me and he stared at me for a moment. ‘It’s hard to talk about.’ I waited. If I had left my whole world for him, he was going to have to tell me at least about his previous girlfriend. ‘She died,’ he said then.
    ‘Oh.’ I was shocked and also dismayed. How could I compete with a dead woman?
    ‘Up on the mountain,’ he continued, staring into his glass.
    ‘You mean, on that mountain?’
    ‘Chungawat. Yes.’
    He drank some more wine and signalled to the waiter. ‘Can we have two whiskies, please?’
    They arrived and we downed them. I took his hand across the table. ‘Did you love her?’
    ‘Not like this,’ he said. I put his hand against my face. How was it possible to be so jealous of someone who had died before he ever set eyes on me?
    ‘Have there been a lot of other women?’
    ‘When I’m with you, I know there’s been no one,’ he replied, which meant, of course, that there had been lots.
    ‘Why me?’
    Adam looked lost in thought. ‘How could it not be you?’ he asked at last.

Ten
    Unexpectedly I had a spare few minutes before a meeting, so I dared myself and rang Sylvie. She is a solicitor and I had generally found it difficult to be put through to her in the past. It was usually a matter of her calling back hours later, or the following morning.
    This time she was on the line within seconds. ‘Alice, is that you?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said limply.
    ‘I need to see you.’
    ‘I’d like that. But are you sure?’
    ‘Are you doing anything today? After work?’
    I thought. Suddenly things seemed complicated. ‘I’m meeting… er, somebody in town.’
    ‘Where? When?’
    ‘It sounds stupid. It’s at a book shop in Covent Garden. At half past six.’
    ‘We could meet before.’
    Sylvie was insistent. We could both leave early and meet at a quarter to six at a coffee shop she knew off St Martin’s Lane. It was awkward. I had to rearrange a conference call that had been scheduled, but I arrived at twenty to six, breathless and nervous, and Sylvie was already there at a table in the corner, nursing a cup of coffee and a cigarette. When I approached she stood up and hugged me. ‘I’m glad you called me,’ she said.
    We sat down together. I ordered a coffee. ‘I’m glad you’re glad,’ I said. ‘I feel I’ve let people down.’
    Sylvie looked at