Afterwards

him and I think he’d exploit that. But the same is true of her father. I think both Silas Hyman and Donald White would exploit Rowena for their own ends.’

Penny is hurrying down the corridor towards them.

‘Donald White has been released without charge,’ she says. She sees Sarah’s expression. ‘He has an alibi and a good lawyer. There was nothing we could do to legitimately keep him any longer.’

‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ Sarah asks.

‘No.’

‘And Silas Hyman?’

‘We’re looking at the building sites. Nothing yet.’

So both Donald White and Silas Hyman could be here in the hospital.

* * *

I follow Sarah along a glassed-in walkway towards ICU. As I look down to the parched, too-hot garden beneath, I can see Jenny’s blonde head and, beside her, Ivo. From above I watch him move closer towards her. She bends her body towards his.

32

You are in the corridor of ICU with Sarah, keeping watch on Jenny through the glass.

‘But there must be some way they can find him?’ you say, incredulous; furious.

‘We don’t even know if he’s actually working on a building site, or if that’s a line he spun his wife. We’ll keep looking for him. And Donald White.’

‘I only spoke to Donald at school things. And it was years ago. But I don’t think he’s the type of bloke to do this.’

‘There isn’t really a type,’ Sarah says. ‘Have you spoken to Ads?’

Emotion tenses your face. You shake your head. ‘I’ll go and see him as soon as you’ve found them both.’

Sarah nods. ‘Maybe when the arsonist is locked up it’ll be different for Addie,’ she says.

Will he speak then? Surely he will.

Ivo walks past you and into Jenny’s ward. But only I see that Jenny is with him. They go up to her bed.

This is the first time she has seen herself since right after the fire. Her face looks worse than it did then, more swollen and blistered. Even though she knows she won’t be scarred, I dread what she must feel as she sees her burnt face; her plastic-encased body.

I make myself look at her.

Her tears are falling onto Ivo’s face and he wipes them away as his own.

I think she was afraid of his rejection before and she was protecting herself. And now she doesn’t have to. It’s his love that gives her the strength to look at herself.

Sarah comes up to Ivo, moved by his distress.

‘She’s not going to scar,’ she says to him.

‘Yes, her dad said.’

But I know it’s not her appearance that distresses him. It’s what she must have suffered.

You tell Sarah and Ivo that you need to see me for a little while. Sarah wants to catch up with the police, but there’s now Ivo as a member of the guard rota at her bedside. And I trust him, as you do.

Jenny and Ivo stay at her bedside together.

I join her.

‘Dad’s got Ivo guarding me now?’

‘Yes.’

For the first time she doesn’t argue that there’s no need for a guard; doesn’t say it’s ridiculous. Maybe now Ivo’s here she can face this fear, as she’s facing her body.

You reach my bed and hold my hand. My fingers look pale after being out of the sun for nearly four days; my ring mark is disappearing. But your fingers, with the dark hairs and square-cut nails, still look strongly capable.

‘Ivo’s with Jenny, darling,’ you say to me. ‘I think that’s what she wants.’

‘Yes.’

Because I was right about Jenny after all – she does love him. But I was right too when I said I don’t know her; not all of her. Just as I can’t physically pick her up any more, she is no longer entirely knowable by me.

‘You think she’s too young for something to be so serious,’ you say. ‘But…’

‘She’s nearly grown up now,’ I finish off. ‘And I ought to see that.’

She’s become an adult; a young adult, yes, but still an adult with spaces that are hers alone.

‘I know she’ll always be little Jen too, to us,’ you say.

‘Yes.’

‘But we have to kind of disguise that. For her sake.’

You understand.

‘I don’t think any parent really ever lets go,’ I say to you.

‘Some parents are just better at pretending,’ you say.

As we talk, with only me hearing both of us, but you intuiting my words, I remember, again, that we have spoken every day since we first met. Nineteen years of talking to each other.

When you were away filming, we spoke long distance, the words between us hissing and fading in and out, but I still painted a picture of my day, and you – well, I was going to say you framed it, neat and pat, but it’s not that. Because we might not have young love, or find each other beautiful in that eyebeams-threading way any more, but you give me the canvas to paint on tomorrow.

And it’s only now, right now, that I properly appreciate you sitting with me and still talking to me. Every chance you get, whenever Sarah and now Ivo can guard Jenny, you come to me.

Do you remember Sarah’s reading at our wedding?

At the time I didn’t take much notice. We were only in the church to please my father (‘It’ll mean so much to him’ and I’d wanted to make up for being a pregnant bride) and we’d gone for the usual off-the-shelf ready-made-for-weddings reading from Corinthians.

‘Love is patient and kind,’ Sarah read out, standing in the pulpit. But I felt far from patient or kind as she read, so bloody slowly! My shoes were much too high, Mum had been right about that, and my toes were pinched. How come the guests were allowed to sit down but we weren’t?

‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’

Apart from killer-heels on a hard church floor.

But I do remember the ending of her reading.

‘… now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.’

And I think that you loving me still takes faith.

And your faith that I can hear you now takes love.

Again a watched-pot hope as we return to Jenny’s bedside together.

She isn’t here.

A nurse sees your panic and tells you she’s just been taken to the MRI suite and her boyfriend and a doctor from ICU have gone with her.

You hurry out.

ICU is secure with its locked door and high ratio of medical staff but out here danger prowls the corridors and jostles into the crowded lifts and maybe a murderer is striding towards our vulnerable daughter.

I try and still my panic. Ivo is with her. And there’s a doctor with her too. They won’t let anything happen to her. Besides, surely both Donald and Silas are too intelligent to risk another attack.

I slow my pace to a walk while you race on.