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The real question now was could she trust herself? Her feelings had, in the past, led her astray. She saw the good in people. But no more. It was possible that Bochko’s agents were already aware of her presence here. It was possible that Bochko had alerted Matthieu and Matthieu had already made contact with the people who would come to deal with her. And then written sixty emails to himself.
What did a capacity to deceive look like? It would mean a talent for hiding yourself, for expressing feelings you didn’t have. The truth was that if Matthieu’s heart had been broken by her revelations, or if he was a liar who had sold her into slavery, his reaction to her homecoming would have been the same. The performance would be as credible as if it were real. It would have been simple for Bochko to tell Matthieu that she had escaped. Matthieu could have been preparing for a while now to perform his shock and horror at learning the “truth.”
And so, in the end, it was impossible to know the truth. As it had been with Henry Wiest, for that was his name, the name of her first victim. Choosing to see the good in people was an invitation to evil. If she was wrong about Matthieu, then a life of wedded bliss awaited her. If she was right, she’d be dead before the summer ended.
She got out of the bed and paced nervously in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette and smoking it over the sink. Do I have a choice? she asked herself. Do I not owe it to those girls I suffered with to be truly free? To start over? To really survive?
She went back into the bedroom and quietly opened the closet where all of her clothes still hung, as if in tribute to her. She slid a suitcase out from inside and laid it on the floor and silently piled her things into it, pausing to ensure that Matthieu did not awaken. She would not need much, just enough to get her through a few weeks of instability, enough to keep her looking tidy until she found a place to settle and a job. She would have to be careful: her name was not uncommon and if Matthieu or Bochko tried to track her down, she would be found under that name. There were going to be a hundred little details to attend to. Another haircut, another colour. New clothes. She packed her toiletries and went into the front room, where the lights from a billboard across the road played over the bookshelves and she selected a few novels, a number of collections of poetry, and the collected works of Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak, and wedged them into her suitcase.
Matthieu kept sleeping. She took the suitcase into the kitchen and sat down to write a note. She began a number of times, tearing up her efforts and stuffing them into her jeans pocket, and on her fourth attempt, she was satisfied. She looked at the words she had written:
My dearest Matthieu. I hope you will forgive me for doing this to you. I hope you can understand why it’s necessary that I do it. I feel I don’t have a choice but to protect myself from all danger, even, perhaps, imagined danger. I wish I could explain to you what it is like to lie in your arms and feel doubt about everything. I hope one day I will be able to love and trust again, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t think I can. The Larysa who loved you will never forgive herself for this. But that Larysa is gone, and so is her life, and Kitty must live. Kitty must live, no matter the cost.
I am Kitty.
This is Kitty.
Goodbye.
She folded the paper up tightly and pushed it down into one of her pockets and then she took the thin, gleaming fish knife out of its slot in the block and returned to the bedroom. He was lying on his back with his mouth slightly open, snoring quietly, his chest rising and falling. She placed the knife gently against the base of his throat and drew it across quickly, pressing down, and the flesh opened in a broad red grin. He didn’t even open his eyes. A mercy.
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