Why Did You Lie? by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Katherine Manners, Hodder, Stoughton

kitchen table. Surveying the scene, Nína felt the overall impression still left something to be desired. Removing the Christmas candlestick from the top of the fridge made a slight improvement. After that she sat down and waited.
    Her eyes strayed to the window and a chill ran through her but she wouldn’t let herself look away. It was a garage. A square, concrete box that had stood there for decades. It wasn’t the building’s fault that Thröstur had tried to kill himself in there; the decisive factor had been the presence of a suitably sturdy support from which a rope could be slung. That was all. Nína continued to stare out of the window. The sooner she accepted that the problem had lain with Thröstur not the garage, the sooner she’d be reconciled to the building.
    As if to dispute this, the brightly coloured plastic ball was still lying there in the slush. But it wasn’t only the ball that made her uneasy: high up in the garage wall, two rectangular windows squinted like black eyes. On one of the sills was a flower pot, the shrivelled plant like a skeleton in silhouette. Nína tried to force herself to look at the windows but couldn’t, she was so afraid of seeing a movement inside. Perhaps Thröstur had felt the same when he stood here staring at the garage as if mesmerised. She pushed away the thought. She was not going the same way as him, that much was certain.
    The big, ugly cracks in the pebbledash wall put her in mind of the broken veins on the cheeks of the man who had shared a ward with Thröstur for the first week. In the end she had plucked up the courage to ask if her husband could be moved to a single room so she could be alone with him. To her surprise, he had been moved two days later and she no longer had to cope with other visitors or patients. But having her wish fulfilled turned out to be a mixed blessing. Now there was nothing to distract her, so she sat alone for the most part, listening to the beeping and sucking of the machines Thröstur was hooked up to. Occasionally one of the nurses would pop their head round the door, but otherwise they might have been alone in the world, Nína and the empty carapace that had once been Thröstur.
    Dusk slowly filled in the cracks in the garage wall. Her sister was already a quarter of an hour late. This was unusual, as normally you could set your watch by Berglind. But it didn’t really matter; she wasn’t going anywhere except up to the hospital, and Berglind only had home waiting for her. In spite of this, Nína was keen to get the visit over with as quickly as possible.
    She opened the kitchen window a crack. It was as if the wind had been waiting to pounce because instantly a violent gust blew the curtain in. Old notes and photos of her and Thröstur tried in vain to escape their moorings on the fridge door. Then all was still again. The faint rumble of traffic blended with the noise of the dishwasher and Nína felt a little better. Silence was a constant reminder of what she had lost. Thröstur used to turn on the football the moment he walked in the door. But it didn’t cross her mind to let the excited sports commentators loose in the room, any more than it did to lay the table for Thröstur and pretend he still lived here. The television sat unused in the sitting room and Nína averted her eyes from it on the rare occasions she went in there. If she gave it half a chance the reflection in the black glass screen would unnerve her by showing odd shadows and movements, just as the garage windows did.
    The doorbell rang shrilly and Nína stood up. At last. She paused briefly in front of the hall mirror and swore under her breath when she saw how haggard she looked. There was no point pretending she was in good spirits if she had black rings under her eyes and wild hair – Berglind would think she had finally tipped over the edge or was overdoing the meds. Nína had in fact refused all the pills she was offered, whether they were to help her