In the Woods

Over the weekend, Rob goes to his parents’ house for dinner. They share a distantly polite dynamic in which nobody talks about Knocknaree. When his mother realizes he’s working on the Devlin case, she mentions some incidents from his childhood that contradict his own memories. These discrepancies disturb Rob:

I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. (280)

Later, he receives a message from Cassie reminding him of their court appearance the following day. Rob is upset because he’d completely forgotten about it. Other than his childhood amnesia, his memory is usually retentive. He becomes completely unnerved when he even draws a blank on the details of the case.

The next morning on the witness stand, Rob stumbles through his testimony and makes a fool of himself. He leaves Cassie to repair the damage when she takes the stand. Rob heads to a nearby pub. He feels he’s falling apart: “All my instincts were shrieking at me to get off this horrible, treacherous case, get as far away from it as possible” (288).