Free The Trespasser by Tana French Page A

friends since we were kids. I didn’t say we were best friends.’
    ‘No? Then what were you?’
    ‘Friends. We hung out in school, we stayed in touch when we grew up. We didn’t have a Vulcan mind meld.’
    Steve has this lovely mix of worried and reproachful growing on his face. He says, ‘You know how we got your name? Aislinn had you down as her emergency contact. When you’re picking that, you pick someone who you think cares about you.’
    Lucy’s head jerks away from the reproachful frown. ‘Her mum died a few years back, her dad’s not around, she’s an only kid. Who else was she going to put?’
    Lying again. For some reason she’s trying to make the friendship sound like a leftover stuck to her shoe, but the layer of warmth when she talked about Aislinn’s idiot rules said different. I say, ‘You’re also the person Aislinn texted and rang most often. Like you said, she didn’t have a lot of mates. She thought of you as her closest friend, all right. Did she know you didn’t feel the same way?’
    ‘We are friends. I said that. I’m just saying, we don’t live in each other’s pocket. We don’t know everything about each other’s life. OK?’
    ‘So who would know all about Aislinn’s life? Who was her best friend, if it wasn’t you?’
    ‘She didn’t have one, not like you mean. Some people don’t.’
    Her voice is pulling tighter. I leave it: she’s holding herself together by her fingernails, and I don’t want her going to pieces on us right now. ‘Regardless,’ I say. ‘Me, when I’m going out with someone, I tell my friends, even if they’re not my best bosom buddies. Don’t you?’
    Lucy takes a gulp of her water and gets herself back. ‘Yeah. Sure. But Aislinn didn’t.’
    ‘You said she was dying to talk to you about Rory, how great he was. Did she tell you about other boyfriends, before him? Introduce them to you?’
    ‘Yeah. I mean, it’s been a few years since she went out with anyone, but yeah, I met him.’
    ‘She wanted to talk about him, see what you thought of him, all that. Right?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘But not this time.’
    ‘No. Not this time.’
    Steve asks, ‘Why did you figure that was?’
    Lucy rubs her water glass over a smear of purple paint on the knee of her combats, scrapes at it with a fingernail. She says, ‘I figured the guy was married. Wouldn’t you?’
    She’s looking at me. I say, ‘That’d be my first thought, all right. Did you ask her?’
    ‘I didn’t want to know. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who’s taken is well off limits, and Ash knows that. Neither one of us wanted to have the conversation. It would only have turned into a fight.’
    ‘You’re saying she might’ve been OK with seeing a married guy, though. They weren’t off limits to her.’
    Purple paint flakes away. Lucy rubs it to a smudge between her fingertips. ‘That makes her sound like some homewrecker vamp manhunter. She’s not like that. At all. She just . . . she’s really unsure. Of a lot of stuff. Does that make sense?’ A quick glance up at me. I nod. Her face looks older than it did when we got here, dragged down around the edges. This conversation is taking a lot out of her. ‘And if the other person’s totally sure, a lot of the time she ends up thinking they’re probably right. So yeah, I could see her hooking up with a married guy. Not because she thought it was OK, or because she didn’t care, but because he convinced her that it might not be not OK.’
    ‘Gotcha,’ I say. I’m glad Aislinn is the vic and Lucy is the witness here, not the other way round. By this point I would’ve brained Aislinn with something gingham.
    ‘So you must’ve been well pleased when she hit it off with Rory,’ Steve says. ‘Nice single guy, nothing to cause tension between the two of you, nothing to cause Aislinn hassle. Yeah?’
    ‘Yeah.’ But there’s a fraction of a second before it. Another brush past something Lucy isn’t telling us.
    I say,