The Woman in Cabin 10 Read Online Free Page B

thank God. As I checked and rechecked the doors and locks, I reflected that the one silver lining to being so shattered was that it couldn’t possibly be a repeat of last night.
    I was so tired that even if a burglar did come, I’d probably sleep right through it.
    A t 10:47, I realized I was wrong.
    At 11:23, I started to cry, weakly and stupidly.
    Was this it, then? Was I never going to sleep again?
    I had to sleep. I had to. I’d had . . . I counted on my fingers, unable to do the maths in my head. What . . . less than four hours of sleep in the last three days.
    I could taste sleep. I could feel it, just out of my reach. I had to sleep. I had to. I was going to go crazy if I didn’t sleep.
    The tears were coming again—I didn’t even know what they were. Tears of frustration? Rage, at myself, at the burglar? Or just exhaustion?
    I only knew that I couldn’t sleep—that it was dangling like an unkept promise just inches away from me. I felt like I was running towards a mirage that kept receding, slipping away faster and faster the more desperately I ran. Or that it was like a fish in water, something I had to catch and hold, that kept slipping through my fingers.
    Oh God, I want to sleep. . . .
    Delilah turned her head towards me, startled. Had I really said it aloud? I couldn’t even tell anymore. Christ, I was losing it.
    A flash of a face—gleaming liquid eyes in the darkness.
    I sat up, my heart pounding so hard that I could feel it in the back of my skull.
    I had to get away from here.
    I got up, stumbling, trancelike with exhaustion, and pushed my feet into my shoes, and my sleeves into my coat, over the top of my pajamas. Then I picked up my bag. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d walk. Somewhere. Anywhere. I’d try to exhaust myself into sleeping.
    If sleep wouldn’t come to me, then I’d damn well hunt it down myself.

- CHAPTER 3 -
    T he streets at midnight weren’t empty, but they weren’t the same ones I trod every day on my way to work, either.
    Between the sulfur-yellow pools of streetlight, they were gray and shadowed, and a cold wind blew discarded papers against my legs, leaves and rubbish gusting in the gutters. I should have felt afraid—a thirty-two-year-old woman, clearly wearing pajamas, wandering the streets in the small hours. But I felt safer out here than I did in my flat. Out here, someone would hear you cry.
    I had no plan, no route beyond walking the streets until I was too tired to stand. Somewhere around Highbury and Islington I realized that it had begun to rain, that it must have started some time back because I was wet through. I stood in my soggy shoes, my exhausted punch-drunk brain trying to formulate a plan, and almost by themselves my feet began to walk again, not homewards, but south, towards Angel.
    I didn’t realize where I was going until I was there. Until I was standing beneath the porch of his building, frowning dazedly at the bell panel, where his name was written in his own small, neat handwriting. LEWIS .
    He wasn’t here. He was away in Ukraine, not due back until tomorrow. But I had his spare keys in my coat pocket, and I couldn’t face the walk back to my flat. You could get a cab , carped the small, snide voice in the back of my head. It’s not the walk you can’t face. Coward.
    I shook my head, sending raindrops spattering across the stainless-steel bell panel, and I sorted through the bunch of keys until I found the one for the outside door and slipped inside, into the oppressive warmth of the communal hallway.
    Up on the second floor, I let myself cautiously into the flat.
    It was completely dark. All the doors were closed, and the entrance hall had no windows.
    “Judah?” I called. I was certain he wasn’t home, but it wasn’t impossible that he’d let a mate crash there, and I didn’t want to give anyone a middle-of-the-night heart attack. I knew, all too well, what that felt like. “Jude, it’s just me, Lo.”
    But there was no