“Beth,” he said, shaking his head, “come on, now. . . .”
“Why are you denying it?” I asked. “We could get her help. We could get us help.”
“So, what—you want her committed?” he replied, his distress adding a harsh, angry edge to his voice. “Locked up? Are you saying she’s—what?—some sort of future serial killer? Is that it?”
“No! No, of course I’m not saying that. I’m as scared as you are. I love Hannah! But I know there’s something badly wrong with our little girl, and we need to get her help as soon as possible. I know you’re frightened, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t love her. And what—what if she hurts Toby?”
He looked away. “That shrink we took her to before, he said there was nothing wrong with her.”
“He said she was too young to make a diagnosis.”
“Christ.” He got up and paced around the room, coming to a stop by the window, where he stood looking out in silence. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight and strange. “If this is true, if you’re right . . . what if they take her away from us, Beth? What if they say we can’t look after her properly, that it’s our fault she’s the way she is?”
“She’s getting worse, Doug,” I said gently. “She needs help. We all do.”
He nodded, and I held my breath while he continued to stare out the window. “Okay,” he said at last. “Okay. Let’s try to get her another referral.” He glanced at me. “As long as it’s not with that jerk in Peterborough.”
He smiled sadly at me then, something he hadn’t done, it seemed to me, for a long time, and I could have cried with relief. And I think it was that rare moment of closeness that moved me to say what I said next, to bring up something from years before that we’d both promised never to mention again. “I want to talk about what happened, Doug,” I blurted. “About what we did.”
He knew instantly what I meant, and he became very still. My words hung in the air between us. “Look, Beth,” he said at last, “I can’t deal with this now. . . .”
“Please, Doug,” I begged. “Just let me talk about it. I need to. I think about it all the time, don’t you? I wake up with it on my mind—the lies we told, that girl’s poor family. . . .”
His voice was sharp. “Beth, that’s all in the past. We agreed—”
“But what we did was wrong. It was so wrong, we should never have—”
He glanced at me and the sudden coldness in his eyes stopped me in my tracks. “You wanted to do it. And we have to live with that now.”
I gaped at him. “Me? I wanted? Doug, we both did.” He shook his head and got to his feet. “Please, Doug, please don’t go.” I started to cry.
He stopped, his back to me, he was very still and quiet, and then with a sudden movement, he went quickly from the room. Seconds later I heard the front door slam shut. He didn’t come back until many hours later, drunk and silent and still too furious to even look at me.
—
We barely spoke in the following days. I made the appointment with the GP, who referred me to a child psychologist in Cambridge who had a waiting list of several weeks. The loneliness in the days after my talk with Doug was unbearable. I sank deeper and deeper inside myself, brooding over things that should have been left firmly in the past. I knew there was only one person who could help me—the same person who’d provided all the answers once before; who knew our secret, as we knew theirs. It would be such a relief to talk about it, like lancing a wound that had been allowed to fester too long. Of course, I knew Doug would never agree, would be horrified at the very idea of us being in contact again—yet the more I fantasized about making the phone call, the more desperate I became to do it.
EIGHT
LONDON, 2017
After Mac had left, his revelation ringing in her ears, Clara sat motionless on the sofa, her shock so absolute that, for now at least, she felt nothing, the world stripped of sound and sensation, as in the aftermath of an explosion. But she knew the pain was coming, could sense the tsunami swelling on the horizon, gathering strength, waiting to break.
Her gaze fell to the photograph of her and Luke on Hampstead Heath, her face turned so lovingly toward his, her eyes shining with happiness. Idiot. She thought now of all the hundreds of times when he’d appeared to love her. Which of those had been a lie? When had he started to be dissatisfied with her, to begin to draw away, look elsewhere?
She remembered their first date. A hazy summer’s evening on the South Bank when suddenly he’d taken her hand and led her away from the crowds, the street performers, the bookstalls, the bars and restaurants, down mossy stone steps to the river’s bank. There small groups huddled on the silty sand, smoke rising from a small campfire, music from a busker’s guitar, the lights of the embankment trailing across the river’s surface, the last
