It’s enough. She doesn’t need to read any more. She takes off her glasses, letting the screen go fuzzy and unreadable, then clicks “Move to Requests” and watches the email disappear.
Afterwards, she sits there holding her glasses in one hand and her phone in the other, staring at the blank screen. Her fingers are suddenly ice-cold, and she pulls her jumper down over her hands to try to warm them. She can feel her pulse running sickeningly fast and shallow, and she wonders, in a kind of detached way, what the stress is doing to the baby. They’re very tough. She hears her mother’s voice in her head, reassuringly robust. Women give birth in war zones, for goodness’ sake.
“Are you okay?”
The voice comes from behind her and she jumps, even as her conscious brain is registering Will’s presence. He squeezes into the armchair beside her, puts his arms around her, and she shifts and settles into his lap.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I didn’t mean to go all stiff upper lip on you. I just—I needed to process it a bit.”
She leans into his chest, feeling the muscles in his arms flex as he wraps himself around her. There’s something about his strength and heft that’s inexpressibly reassuring in a kind of unreasoning way. It shouldn’t matter that Will is taller and broader and stronger than she is—she had gone far beyond fearing John Neville as a physical threat, even before her mother’s call—but somehow it does matter, and his physical presence is more comforting than any number of soothing words.
She curls into him, her forehead on his chest, feeling his breath on her parting and the heat of him, warming her still-frozen fingers. As if reading her thoughts, he speaks.
“God, your hands are like ice. Come here.”
He takes them in his and puts them firmly up under his shirt, shuddering for a moment as her cold fingers connect with the warm, naked skin over his ribs, but then relaxing into her touch as the first chill subsides.
“How are you always so hot?” she manages with a shaky laugh, and he rests his chin on the top of her head, stroking her hair with one hand.
“I don’t know. Years of shit central heating at Carne, maybe. Oh, sweetheart. I’m really sorry this had to come now. I know how hard this is for you.”
She nods, pressing her forehead to his collarbone, staring into the warm darkness of the hollow between their bodies.
He knows. Perhaps he is the only person who really does, who understands the complicated maelstrom of feelings Neville’s death has stirred up.
Because on the surface, this should be good news. John Neville is gone—forever. And long term, it probably is for the best. But short term, this is going to mean a flurry of interest, a shattering of their hard-won illusion of normalcy, just when she and Will should be concentrating on the new life they are bringing into the world, not thinking about the one they both saw snuffed out. She remembers the days and months after April’s death—that searing, relentless searchlight of media obsession—the feeling that something appalling had happened, and all she wanted was to hide in the shadows and rock back and forth as she tried to come to terms with what she had seen, but wherever she ran, whatever she did, that searchlight kept seeking her out. Ms. Jones, a quick comment, please! Hannah, could we have an interview? Five minutes, I promise.
For ten long years, ever since the trial, in fact, she’s been hiding from that spotlight. For ten years April’s death has been the first thing she thinks about when she wakes up, and the last thing at night. And she knows it’s been that way for Will too—they have spent the whole of their relationship with the shadow of April’s memory looming over them. But these last few months, with the baby and everything else, she has allowed herself… not to forget, exactly, because she could never do that. But to feel like April’s death was no longer the defining part of her life. And although she and Will have never discussed it in so many words, she’s pretty sure it’s been the same for him.
Now, with Neville’s death and the inevitable media flurry, it will be back to changing their numbers and screening their messages. Hannah will find herself looking twice at customers coming into the bookshop. At Carter and Price, the accountancy firm where Will is a junior partner, the new receptionist will be told what happened, instructed to ask a few more questions before routing calls and setting up appointments.
It’s been hard for him too. Harder, in some ways, though he would never say so. But it’s no coincidence that he followed her here, to Scotland, a country with its own legal system, its own newspapers, a place almost as far away from Oxford as it was possible to get without leaving the UK altogether. She remembers the gray September day eight years ago when he walked into the bookshop. She was helping a customer choose a birthday present, debating the merits of the new Michael Palin versus the latest Bill Bryson. Something, a noise or a movement behind her, had made Hannah turn, and there he was.
For a moment she had lost the power of speech. She had simply stood there, the customer rattling happily on about Rick Stein—while Hannah’s heart beat and beat and beat with a kind of fierce joy.
Three months later they moved in together.
Two years later they were married.
It’s strange—Will is the best thing that ever happened to her, and yet they are bound together by the worst events of her life. It shouldn’t work. But it does. She would not have survived this without him, she knows that.
Now she lifts her head, looks him in the face, and runs her fingers down his cheek, trying to read his own feelings beneath his concern for her.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says reflexively, and then, “I mean—not fine exactly.” He’s struggling, she can see that. It’s been a bone of contention their whole relationship, his tendency to shut himself away from her, to pretend everything is fine just when he’s closest to falling apart. The worse things are, the more stressed he is at work, the more worried he is about money, the less he says. Talk to me! It’s been her cry for almost ten years, and he’s still figuring out how to deal with the vulnerability of opening himself up when his entire childhood was about not showing weakness.
“I’m okay,” he says at last. “Or I will be. When I’ve had time to process the news. But I’ve not had to deal with it in the same way you did. I didn’t see—” He stops, begins again. “I haven’t had to go through everything you did.”
She nods. Because it’s true. Yes, Will was there, and yes, April meant just as much to him, maybe even more. But he didn’t see what Hannah saw that night. And he didn’t have to spend the next weeks, months, even years going over and over and over what happened. First with the police. Then with the prosecution lawyers. And finally in court, in the witness box. But it didn’t stop, even after the conviction. Because the fact is that the case against John Neville rested on her evidence—and that’s something no one has ever allowed her to forget.
Will is speaking again now, his voice sounding softer and deeper than usual, with her head resting on his chest.
“Maybe… I mean, maybe in a way this is for the best?”
Hannah doesn’t speak at first. Why now? is what she’s thinking. Why now, when they should be so happy, so wrapped up in each other and in the baby they have made. She shouldn’t have to be dealing with retrospectives and newscast specials at all—but especially not now.
But then she thinks of the years stretching out ahead of them, filled with a never-ending parade of newspaper articles and appeals and requests for comment, and she knows Will is right. And yet… why doesn’t this feel right?
“The BBC said he was preparing another appeal,” she says. Appeal. The word feels sick with dread in her mouth. “I don’t think I could have taken that. I just don’t want all the renewed interest, but you’re right. When this is over…”
She stops, almost too fearful to voice it.
Instead it’s Will who says the words, his voice firm as he tightens his arms around her.