For nearly a minute it held and she lay, listening to the cars’ engines pause and rev as they changed down for the corner and watching the pattern of headlights sweep across the ceiling. Then she remembered: John was dead; not, as in the dream, powerful and in charge, driving them to where they needed to go, and making everything come right. Nothing was going to come right now. However she reworked the evidence, it got worse. Nothing Trish Maguire had made her listen to since the first day had been as important as the revelation of John’s depression. She hadn’t noticed it. She’d loved him; she’d believed the feeling between them was like superglue and felt it made all his irritability and the privations and anxieties bearable; but she hadn’t noticed he was on the edge of despair. He hadn’t even told her he’d been to the surgery. What else had she missed? She still didn’t believe Maguire’s shitty insinuations about suicide. No farmer would need to create a toxic fire to kill himself.
