“But it wasn’t a one-off!” she said.
“I slept with her once, I swear, Clara. I know that doesn’t make it okay, but it was a terrible, stupid mistake that I regretted immediately.”
She thought about this. “I don’t believe you,” she said simply. “Mac told me that it went on for a while.”
Luke shook his head, his face desperate. “But that’s not true. I don’t know why he would say that. I told him it was only once and that’s the truth!”
But she had pulled her hand away. “And then there’s Amy, Jade, Ellen, the way you treated them.”
His eyes widened. “I admit that I behaved terribly to Amy. I was so scared of letting my parents down; they were still so devastated over Emily. But Ellen was a complete nutcase. She lied, Clara, she fucking lied! I kissed her once, when I was drunk, when Jade and I were going through a rough patch. She wanted more, she wanted me to stay the night with her, and when I said no, she just . . . I don’t know—she started this vendetta. She made the whole thing up.” His face was pleading. “For God’s sake, Clara, I’m telling the truth!”
Clara looked at him sadly. “But that’s the thing: I have no idea whether to believe you, and I don’t want to live like that, wondering whether I can trust you or not. I just can’t.”
A miserable silence fell between them. At last Luke spoke. “Do you think I’m like him?” he asked. “Because of what happened with Sadie. Do you think I’m as bad as my father?”
“I don’t think your father has anything to do with the mistakes you made, Luke,” she replied. “But I do think you can change. I think you can learn from this. I hope you can.”
After a while they got up and continued walking, and by the time they started to make their way back toward the Willows, they had both known it was over.
When they got to her car, they stopped and faced each other.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had a letter from my sister, from Emily.”
Clara gasped, shock rendering her speechless for a moment. “Seriously?” she said at last. “I mean, my God! Are you sure it’s really her?”
He nodded and smiled properly for the first time. “She sent a photo. She’s got a kid, a girl aged twelve. She’d seen the trial on TV, and now everything’s out in the open, she wants me and Tom to meet her.”
“And your parents?”
He looked down and shook his head.
So Hannah had been lying about Emily after all.
The sun slid lower, a throbbing red orb on the horizon now, and around them the summer evening was heavy with the sound of crickets, the scent of scorched grass. She glanced around at the beautiful view she knew she’d never see again. “I’m happy for you, Luke,” Clara said. “I really am. I’m glad that something good has come from all of this.”
At last they’d hugged good-bye, and she’d seen that he was trying to be brave, that he was doing his best to let her go. She’d taken one last long look at the Willows before she got back in her car and drove away.
—
Now, four months later, as she stood outside the courts, she put her phone back in her bag. The future stretched out before her and for the first time in a long while, she felt an undeniable feeling of hope. Everything had changed. She’d found a new, better-paying job and moved into a shared house with some friends in Greenwich, not too far from where Zoe lived. She’d even, in the odd snatched moments after work and at weekends, started jotting down the beginning of the novel she’d always wanted to write. She would be thirty later this month, and it felt as though her life were starting anew. It was a good feeling.
The traffic cleared and she saw, on the other side of the road, a familiar figure standing by his car, talking on his phone. Mac. He looked up and smiled, and she raised her hand and waved, stepping toward him, to where he was waiting for her, her heart lifting at the sight of her friend.
THIRTY-FOUR
LONDON, 2017
As Clara began to cross the road toward him, Mac hastily hung up his phone, put it in his pocket, and, despite the deadweight of panic bearing down upon him, forced himself to smile. It was the fifth time Hannah had contacted him from her remand center, and every time she did so, his fear of her, of how she might punish him, deepened.
When they’d met seven months before, it had been the start of a brief but intense affair, appearing as she had so out of the blue, a welcome distraction from the futile misery of his growing infatuation with Clara. It had been at the opening night of a friend’s photography exhibition, and the attraction he’d felt for the pretty brunette serving behind the bar had been instant and intoxicating.
Soon they were meeting once a week. The sex had been, frankly, the best of his life, but he’d sensed with some relief that she didn’t want the relationship to develop into anything more. At first he’d been hesitant to confide in her about his misery over Clara, but she had been so sweetly sympathetic, so gently encouraging, that bit by bit he’d told her of the hopelessness of it all, including his anger at Luke’s one-night stand with Sadie.
