Page 41 of Where the Snakes Sleep

Yet he had expected the possibility—no, more than the possibility. He had prepared himself for it.

I scoff at myself. Ryan is nothing but a pleasurable means to an end. No matter what has happened in his past, what has shaped him to make him fear a partner’s reaction to him, it doesn’t matter. Knowing more is of no use to me.

I carry the empty glasses to the kitchen, rinse them because I don’t want to leave them for the morning, then stand at the sink longer than necessary, watching water run over my fingers.

I tell myself what happened tonight was lust.

Exceptionally good sex, certainly.

Compatibility.

Novelty.

Ryan is responsive in a way I find compelling. Expressive. Hungry without being passive, despite what he seems to believe about his own desire to surrender control. Even when overwhelmed, he participates in his own undoing with remarkable enthusiasm.

Naturally, I enjoyed him.

I would like to enjoy him again.

This requires no deeper analysis.

I dry my hands.

There are more useful things to think about tonight.

Alberte Legrand, for example.

I leave the kitchen and cross the eastern wing toward my study. The walls are lined with locked cabinets, bookshelves, specimen photography, and two large worktables where I review research outside the university. My desk sits beneath the windows.

I switch on the desk lamp, then flex my hand against the drawer handle, as if resistance might give me an excuse not to revisit the file. This is a dance I perform almost nightly. I have learned that obsession is simply compulsion with a doctorate.

Tonight, I set the folder on the blotter, touch the cover, and hesitate. The window glass reflects my face, faintly—my expression haunted and pinched, features inverted by the night like a death mask. I ignore the phantom and flip the file open. The pages inside are brittle along the fold lines, sticky with the residue of ancient scotch tape and the oils of my hands. I have memorized each word. Sometimes, out of a perverse hope, I wish to catch myself in an error—maybe I have misread a phrase, skipped a line, misunderstood the cadence of a statement, and thus failed to see what it had meant all along. But the file is stubborn; it yields only what it has always yielded.

I scan the first page, then the second, ignoring the sense that tonight’s ritual is particularly pointless. I nearly miss the movement outside the study window. The glass vibrates, faint and high, with the engine note of a car running. I look up instantly.

The windows here are tall, and the study overlooks the little spur of road that connects my property, as well as Ryan’s, to the wider world.

At this hour, the lane is meant to be still.

I have lived here for enough years now to recognize the different cars of the locals, but this vehicle is unfamiliar, predatory, and moving slowly enough to be noticed but not identified. It’s a sedan, dark and low, with its headlights dead. It coasts past my drive, too far to discern a badge or make.

The hairs along my arms rise. I close the file, finger pressed against a page as if silencing a witness, and wait. The car should not return; lost drivers rarely turn back on these dead-end lanes. Instead, two minutes later, I see brake lights pulse at the far edge of the trees, just beyond the boundary wall. The car idles, engine so soft that I can only hear the change in air pressure as it stops. I strain, listening. There is no door slam, no voices, no movement of gravel. The car just sits there; it watches.

I flick off my lamp, move deeper into the shadow, and angle myself at the window to reduce reflection. My pulse is steady, but the rest of me is at attention. The vehicle lingers another thirty seconds—then it continues, gliding down toward the river bend, where the lane dead-ends into a municipal barrier.

The thought of Ryan’s place, isolated and still half-ruined, makes my jaw tighten. His windows would be dark now. He keeps no exterior lights, probably because he hasn’t replaced the bulbs yet, and the curtains are always drawn. The lock on his door is a joke.

If I concluded that Alberte might have hidden evidence in the cottage, I cannot be the only person capable of reaching the same conclusion.

And if Henri knows the property has passed to Ryan—merde.

The prospect of this car, this stranger, passing by his door twice in one night fills me with an entirely irrational urge to call him, to ask if he is awake, to suggest that perhaps he check his windows and verify that the doors are locked.

Except I’m now realizing I haven’t gotten his number yet.

And anyway, how would I explain my own vigilance, my habit of surveilling the road after dark as if expecting an army? He would think me mad.

My thumb works a groove into the edge of the desktop while I wait for the car to reappear. It does, this time moving faster, headlights flicked on for the twenty meters between shadows. It passes the cottage, then my own drive, and disappears toward the village. I watch for another five minutes, counting out the seconds, but it does not return.