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21 " Very well. May I offer you a glass of champagne?” She indicated a tray on a small table by the entrance, and I nodded and took a frosted flute. I knew I should keep a clear head for tomorrow, but one glass for Dutch courage couldn’t hurt "
― Ruth Ware , The Woman in Cabin 10
22 " I choose not to think about these images,” I muttered. “I choose to think about . . .” And then I stopped. What? What? None of Barry’s tutorials had focused on what happy images to choose when you were being held prisoner by a murderer. Was I supposed to think about my mum? About Judah? About everything I loved and held dear and was about to lose? “Insert happy image here, you little fucker,” I whispered, but the place I was inserting it probably wasn’t the one Barry had in mind. "
23 " STOP DIGGING.' The letters on the mirror were etched in my memory. Now, as I finished my make-up with a swipe of lip-gloss, I huffed on the mirror, and wrote in the steam obscuring my reflection one word: 'NO'. "
24 " But I was almost certain—almost completely certain—that she was the woman in cabin 10. "
25 " Back inside the suite, I got into my jeans and boots, and my favorite hoodie. Then I checked the lock on the cabin door and huddled on the sofa with a cushion hugged to my chest. There was no possibility of sleep now. "
26 " Of course the one type of sashimi you really must try is fugu,” Alexander said expansively, smoothing his napkin across his straining cummerbund. “It’s simply the most exquisite taste.” “Fugu?” I said, trying to insert myself into the conversation. “Isn’t that the horribly poisonous one?” “Absolutely, and that’s what makes the experience. I’ve never been a drug taker—I know my own weaknesses, and I am very aware of being one of life’s lotus-eaters, so I’ve never trusted myself to dabble in that sort of thing—but I can only assume that the high one experiences after eating fugu triggers a similar neuron response. The diner has diced with death, and won. "
27 " airless "
28 " For a travel journalist I’m worryingly bad at geography. "
29 " Tiger fallen immer auf die Füße "
30 " There was genuine hurt in his voice, but I refused to let myself soften. It had been Ben’s favorite tactic in arguments, when we were together, to divert the discussion away from whatever was annoying me to the fact that I’d hurt his feelings and was acting irrationally. Time and again I’d ended up apologizing for the fact that I’d upset him—my own feelings completely ignored, and always, in the process, we’d somehow wound up losing sight of the issue that had provoked the disagreement in the first place. I wasn’t falling for it now. "
31 " Was it really possible she was dead?But the alternative was not much better. Because if she wasn't, the only other possibility - and suddenly I wasn't sure if it was better or worse - was that I was going mad. "
32 " Thank you, everyone, for coming to join us here on the Aurora on this, its maiden voyage,” he began. "
33 " I dwelled heavily on the image of me chipping away at the lock with a nail file and didn’t tell her about the gloves, or the general sense of powerless terror, or the horribly vivid flashbacks that kept ambushing me just as I was rummaging for change, or stirring tea, or thinking of something else completely. “Shit. "
34 " Anon, I have no idea who you are and to be honest you can fuck off. Yes, Lo takes medication (although FYI it’s for anxiety, not depression and if you were really a friend of hers you’d know that) but so do literally hundreds of thousands of people, and the idea that that automatically makes her either “unstable” as you put it, or suicidal, is fucking offensive. "
35 " As the shower trickled and gurgled to a halt, I groped my way back to the door, my dripping hair plastered to my face, and felt for the light. I hit the switch and light flooded the shower room – and that’s when I saw it. "
36 " Written across the steamy mirror, in letters maybe six inches high, were the words ‘STOP DIGGING’. "
37 " I knew what Nilsson wanted. He wanted me to forget what I'd heard, the scream, the stealthy slide of the screen door, and that horrible, huge slithering splash. "
38 " Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe. "
39 " But I’d seen this kind of willful blindness before, women who insisted their boyfriends weren’t cheating in the face of all the evidence, people working for horrendous employers who’d persuaded themselves they were just following orders and doing what was necessary. There seemed to be no limit to the capacity of people to believe what they wanted to see... "
40 " I felt my breath whimper in my throat. I tried to speak, but I was dumb. I tried to move, but I was frozen with fear.She opened her mouth, and I knew that she was about to speak - but then she reached inside, and pulled out her tongue. "