56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  She turns on her heel and hurries off in the opposite direction.

  And now he thinks, Gotcha.

  He knew coming back to Ireland would be a risk, but he had presumed that enough time had passed for him to be yesterday’s news. Besides, anyone interested in exposing him would have to find him first. He goes by his mother’s maiden name now. He’s severed all contact with anyone he knew or had known on the day he left London, save for two people: his brother, who can be trusted, and Dan, who is professionally obligated to be. Oliver has a better cover story now and is more practiced in sticking to it. He doesn’t take risks. He won’t take them.

  There can’t be a repeat of what happened in London.

  But now he’s seen this vaguely familiar woman swinging her little space shuttle bag in the supermarket across from his office every day for five days in a row, at a slightly different time each day, and it’s got him paranoid.

  Who is she, really?

  What is she?

  When Oliver gets outside, he ducks into the nearest doorway and takes out his phone again. Opens the browser and types his name into the search bar. His actual, given one. Nothing comes up except the same old stuff. He checks Twitter by using twitter.com/ireland as a URL. It loads the @ireland page and, crucially, a search bar; he doesn’t have an account himself but this lets him search while also bypassing signing in. The laws that govern reporters and the publications they work for don’t seem to apply to this apparent cesspool of a site, but he finds nothing there either. Maybe he is just being paranoid.

  That’s when it happens.

  He looks up and sees her, just about to walk past him, swinging that damn bag.

  He isn’t planning to do it. There’s no premeditation at all on his part—and that, right there, is the problem, the same thing that got him into trouble the last time, in London, and the first time, all those years ago.

  He doesn’t think, he just does.

  He opens his mouth and the words, “Nice bag,” come out.

  She stops dead, blanches. “My . . . ?”

  He’s already regretting it. He shouldn’t speak to her. He knows that, he’s not stupid. But the only thing worse than her being a journalist is her thinking he’s too stupid to see that she is.

  And he’s done it now.

  “Your bag,” he says, pointing.

  She looks down at it, then back up at him.

  “Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—”

  “New York,” he finishes. This one must really have done her homework. “The one on the aircraft carrier, right?” Let’s see how much of it she’s done. “Have you been?”

  “Yeah. Once.”

  That’s smart of her. It won’t take much detail to make that story sound convincing because, hey, she was only there the one time.

  “Was it good?” he asks.

  “Ah . . .”

  And it’s this, her hesitation, that does it. That’s what convinces him that his suspicions are correct.

  In this moment, the fear of what that might mean for his future is dwarfed by the high of the win, by the smugness of having smoked her out. But he can’t say that he has, can’t tell her that he knows. If he confronted her, that would only give her the confirmation she seeks and the fodder whatever rag she works for desperately wants.

  So he opts for the next best thing: playing dumb and watching her squirm.

  Because why should he suffer?

  Why the hell can’t they just leave him alone?

  Yeah, okay, the space shuttle thing was clever—the T-shirt with the NASA logo was one of the most reported-on pieces of evidence all those years ago—but there’s no way she’s as prepared as she thinks she is. She can’t be. This is all just a thin layer of cover and he’s sure he won’t have to dig too deep to find the bottom of it, to expose her for who—and what—she really is.

  “Yeah,” she answers finally. “But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.”

  Oliver blinks in surprise. This one has come to play.

  He steps closer to her, watching for the telltale flinch or ripple of unease across her face. But not only does she fail to react, she actually takes a step closer to him.

  “You know,” he says, “I’ve never met someone who can name all five space shuttles.”

  “And I still haven’t met someone who knows there are six.”

  Her tone is somewhere between challenge and condescension, and it throws him. If she is a journalist, shouldn’t she be doing her best to butter him up? Isn’t insulting him the last thing she would do if her goal was to get him to talk?

  Or is this a double bluff, an attempt to throw him off her scent?

  “Six?”

  She starts naming them.

  But not just naming them. She also tells him where each one ended up. She has dates. She even includes the Enterprise. She calls it an orbiter. And she says all this to the footpath, which goes to strengthen his suspicions that she’s prepared this in advance and is now reciting it from memory.

  But . . .

  It also gives him a chance to see her lanyard up close. The passport-style photo on it is definitely her, just with longer hair and standing in an unflattering, bleached-out light. The text says her name is Ciara W. and that she is something called a Tech CS Concierge.

  It looks legit.

  It swings him back to unsure.

  Maybe she isn’t a journalist. Maybe she really does work for the tech company around the corner and likes space shuttles enough to carry around a bag with one on it and where he’s seen her before this week is here, on this street, because she works nearby.

  But that doesn’t account for why, five days in a row, she’s been here at the same time he has when he’s been here at a slightly different time each day. Not by much, granted—he always leaves within the same twenty- or thirty-minute time frame—but still.

  This fact is a stone in his shoe: something small, but incredibly bothersome.

  He needs to find out more, to know enough to get rid of it.

  “I was going to go get a coffee,” he says to her. “Can I buy you one too?”

  He leads her to the branch of Insomnia a little farther up the street, because he knows that, being a chain, the counter will be laid out a certain way. He’s not sure he has enough cash on him to pay for the drinks, and he won’t take his debit card out in front of her. If she is what he suspects she is, she could know his mother’s maiden name, and seeing it printed on something official after his first name would be confirmation for her that she’s found her man.

  She says she’ll have a cappuccino so he orders two, and suggests they get them to go so they can drink them outside, maybe by the canal if they can get a spot. She seems eager to accept this invitation and inordinately pleased that he has offered.

  He swings back to suspicious.

  But then she goes to wait at the end of the counter while he stays by the till to pay. It doesn’t matter anyway because he finds a ten-euro note in his pocket, but if she was trying to confirm his identity, wouldn’t she have stayed close and tried to get a glimpse inside his wallet?

  Back to unsure.

  This is so bloody exhausting.

  The weather has been changing its mind all day, but when they go back outside, the sun is shining. They find an empty spot on the low wall by the service station that offers them a view of the canal, and once they’ve settled down he asks her to tell him about Kennedy Space Center.

  He has never been, but he has seen things about it online and on TV. They never went anywhere but France on holiday when he was young and now, travel to the United States is out.

  Have you ever been arrested or convicted for a crime that resulted in serious damage to property, or serious harm to another person?

  Ciara doesn’t seem fazed by the quest
ion. If anything, she seems eager to talk about the place. She tells him about a bus tour that takes you around the launch pads, the “VAB—the Vehicle Assembly Building,” and the famous blue countdown clock. About the IMAX cinema and the Rocket Garden, which seems to be exactly what it sounds like. The “ride” that simulates a space shuttle launch and which, she says, makes your neck hurt. The Apollo Center where you get to see a Saturn V rocket and the shuttle Atlantis on display.

  “It’s revealed to you,” she says. “Unexpectedly. A surprise. You’re herded into this big, dark room to watch a video about the shuttle program, and then, at the end, the screen slides up and reveals the shuttle just . . . just there, in all its glory, right in front of you. With the cargo bay doors open and at an angle so it actually looks like it’s flying through space. It’s amazing. People actually gasped. After I’d walked around it and taken all my pictures and read all the exhibits and stuff, I went back to where I’d come in and I waited for the screen to go up so I could watch other people’s faces, so I could see their reactions, and it was . . .”

  She is really laying this on thick, if it is an act. Too thick.

  His face must be saying as much because she looks at him then and seems to realize the same thing.

  “It’s just that I wanted to go for so long,” she says quickly. “Since I was a child, really. So it was a bit like, I don’t know . . . walking around in a dream.”

  He says, “I really want to go.”

  This isn’t a lie.

  She looks relieved. “You should.”

  “Thing is, I hate the heat.”

  That is one.

  “Don’t let that stop you. It’s all ice-cold air-conditioning and misting machines. Plus, it’s not always hot and steamy in Florida. I went in March and it was actually quite nice.”

  “Was this a girls’ trip or . . . ?”

  She pretends not to have noticed that he is fishing for information and he pretends not to have noticed her noticing but pretending not to.

  “Work, primarily. A tech conference in Orlando . . .”

  One of the guys he shared an apartment with back in London attended a conference there last year—something to do with sustainable travel, ironically—so Oliver happens to know that there is a big convention center in the city. And because he’d been surprised to hear this, thinking it was all roller coasters and human-sized rodents in red shorts, he’d said, “Orlando? Really?” and his roommate had told him that the city actually has the most convention space by square meter of any US city and only Las Vegas has more hotel rooms. So her story fits, but does it do that because it’s the truth, or because she’s done her research?

  She’s looking toward the canal now, sipping her coffee silently, and he uses the opportunity to study her.

  “Cork, right?” he asks.

  He’s not especially good with accents but he thinks he can hear traces of the city’s in hers.

  “Originally,” she says. “We moved to the Isle of Man when I was seven.”

  He doesn’t think he’s ever met anybody who actually lives there. All he knows about it is that it’s in the Irish Sea and they have motorcycle races.

  When she asks him where he’s from, he says Kilkenny. No one remembers where he was from originally, only where it happened, so this is a relatively safe share of some truth. When she asks him how long he’s been in Dublin, he offers a little more of it by admitting it’s been six weeks.

  “And where were you seven weeks ago?”

  “London,” he says. “And you?”

  “How long am I in Dublin?” She makes a show of thinking about this. “Well, next Monday it’ll be, ah . . . seven days.”

  “Seven days?” And on five of them, he’s seen her? “And here was I thinking I was the newbie.”

  She laughs. “Nope. I win that game.”

  “Where were you before?”

  “Cork. Since I finished college. I went to Swansea. Not-at-all-notable member of the Class of 2017, here.”

  He does the math in his head.

  Class of 2017. Presuming she went to university when she was seventeen or eighteen, that’d make her . . . twenty-five or -six. She said they moved to the Isle of Man when she was seven, which would be . . . around 2002.

  A year before it happened. Two years before the trial.

  “What about you?” she asks. “Where did you go?”

  “Newcastle,” he says absently.

  He’s thinking about her being out of the country back then and which column to put this information in. The timeline is pretty tight—tight enough to make him wonder if it wasn’t designed to be that way. And even if it’s true, who’s to say that Irish news headlines didn’t reach the Isle of Man?

  He feels tired suddenly, spent by the effort of playing this game. Of having to play some version of it, always. Even now, years after the fact.

  And not being able to get a reading on this woman, at least not one he can hold on to for very long.

  There has to be a more efficient way to find out who she really is.

  “I’m going to be late back.” He looks at his watch—he still has a good twenty minutes left on his lunch hour—and stands up.

  She stands up as well. “Yeah, I better go, too. Well . . . thanks for the coffee.”

  And then he has an idea.

  “Look,” he says, “I was going to go see that new Apollo documentary. On Monday. Night. They’re showing it at this tiny cinema in town. Maybe—if you wanted to—we could, um, we could go see it together?”

  He can’t read her expression.

  Is that shock? Unease? Panic?

  Maybe he’s pushed her too far. If she’s been tasked with getting close to him then this should be welcome, but if that’s the case she also knows who he is, what he is, and this would explain her hesitation at the prospect of spending more time with him.

  “God,” he says, looking away. “I’m so shit at this.”

  But then she appears to recover and tells him that sounds great. He offers to book the tickets and suggests they meet at 5:30 p.m. outside his office. She asks where that is and he explains.

  “I’ll give you my phone number,” he says then. “Just in case there’s any last-minute problems.”

  He calls out the digits and she taps them into her phone—and just as he’d hoped, she sends him a text message so he has hers.

  “I’ll add you to my contacts as Space Shuttle Girl,” he says.

  She smiles. “I like it.”

  “Better put in your actual name as well.” He keeps his eyes on his phone as he says this, tapping away at the screen, tone as casual as he can make it. “Ciara . . . ?”

  “Wyse,” she finishes. “W-Y-S-E.”

  Mission accomplished.

  They walk back together as far as his office, then wave goodbye.

  As he turns to enter the building, he realizes that she never asked him his last name.

  Oliver takes the lift up to the fourth floor and turns left into the offices of KB Studios. Friday is always busy with off-site client meetings and this combined with the time of the day has most of the desks deserted. He goes to his and tilts his computer screen so that even if someone were to come and sit down right next to him, they’d have a hard time seeing what he was doing.

  He opens the internet browser and types Ciara Wyse into Google. When he presses Enter, the screen fills with results.

  A Ciara Wyse recently retired as the principal of a local school. Another has a professional bio on the website of a firm of Donegal accountants. There’s a smattering of social accounts belonging to teenage girls with the same name and a Pinterest board linked to that name filled with ideas for tattoos.

  None of them seem to be her.

  But there are also a number of LinkedIn profiles. He logs on to the site and double-checks his
privacy settings; as ever, they are set to hide his identity when browsing other users’ pages. When he searches for her within the site, he finds her straightaway; she’s the top result.

  The photo is a professional headshot of her with longer, darker hair. Under Education, it lists a secondary school in the Isle of Man and a BSc in business management from the University of Swansea. Class of 2017, just as she’d said. Experience includes three different positions in something called Operation and Supply Chain at Apple’s plant in Cork—she went back there after Swansea, then—and her current role: Technical Customer Service Concierge for Cirrus Web Services, Dublin office. The start date is listed as February 2020. There’s very little else on the profile and she only has a couple of dozen connections, but everything on it fits with what she’d said.

  Still, it’s just a page on a website where the user enters the text. He could make one right now that says he went to Harvard and works as a NASA astronaut.

  What he needs is independent confirmation.

  He searches on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, but finds nothing—at least, nothing set to public—that looks like it could be her.

  He drums his fingers on his desk, thinking. Then he goes back to Google and puts Cirrus Web Services Dublin into the search box.

  There’s a local phone number listed for the building on Burlington Road. He doubts it’s anything more than a connection to a faraway call center where Ciara won’t be, but it’s worth a try.

  He punches the number into the phone on his desk and puts the receiver to his ear.

  It rings just once before a recorded voice says, “Thank you for calling Cirrus Ireland. If you know the extension number, please enter it now. Otherwise, press zero for reception. Please note that—”

  He presses zero. There’s a click and one ring, and then a male sing-song voice says, “Good afternoon, Cirrus. How can I help you?”

  “Ah, hi. I’m not sure I have the right number—is this the building on Burlington Road?”

  “Who are trying to reach, sir?”

  “Ciara Wyse. She’s a”—he flips back to the other window on his computer screen and reads from her LinkedIn profile—“Technical Customer Service Concierge.” He can hear a distant clacking of keys on the other end of the line as he speaks.