by Dani Atkins
I hesitated for only a few seconds. Perhaps I hadn’t known this man long enough or well enough to blithely agree to go back to his house. But he had rearranged his whole day at the last minute when I’d phoned and asked him to accompany me. Surely that earned him the right to be trusted?
It’s okay, Beth, spoke Tim’s voice reassuringly in my head, something he was now doing with worrying frequency. This guy’s okay. You’re safe with him.
Funnily enough, I hadn’t needed my dead husband to tell me that. Somehow, I’d known that all along.
22
Izzy
It was the longest and most emotionally exhausting two hours of my life. I felt like a diver going through decompression as I sat between Pete and Frankie in the busy Starbucks just around the corner from the hotel.
Frankie bought the coffees, informing us with a cheeky wink that it was okay, because we were actually the ones paying for them. As we’d yet to settle her account I wasn’t sure how she figured that one out, but I was too tired to question it. No one had spoken more than half a dozen words since we’d left the meeting room. This debrief was crucial, because even though I’d listened intently to everything that had been said that day, I still had no idea how the meeting had actually gone.
Frankie deposited the coffees on the table and took a reviving caffeine hit from hers before speaking. ‘Well, that went pretty well, all things considered, don’t you think?’ she asked chirpily.
Pete and I exchanged a similarly baffled look. ‘It did?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ Frankie said, sinking her teeth into one of the three oversized muffins she’d bought along with the coffees. I suspected hers was the only one that would get eaten.
I should probably have waited until she’d finished her mouthful before asking the question that had been blistering on my tongue for over two hours. ‘Did you know? About her husband, I mean. Did you know that he was dead?’
Frankie looked grateful for the delay the double chocolate chip muffin afforded her. ‘Not exactly,’ she said, reaching for a serviette and dabbing it with a debutante’s delicacy against her plum-coloured lipstick. ‘I knew she was a solitary claimant, but that could have meant anything. She could have been divorced, separated, or simply a woman who’d chosen to have a child alone.’
‘It’s going to make a difference though, isn’t it?’
Frankie looked like she really wanted to deny it, but lying didn’t seem to come easily to her. She was going to make a terrible lawyer.
‘It adds a… poignancy that skews things a bit in their favour,’ she admitted reluctantly.
Pete’s head was switching from left to right, as he tried to fill in the blanks of our conversation. ‘But don’t we still have the advantage here?’ he asked in confusion. ‘We’re able to give Noah the benefit of two loving parents. Doesn’t that score more highly than just having a single one?’
I looked at him sadly. ‘She’s a widow, Pete, and a really young one. The child she and her husband dreamt of having is never going to happen because of Westmore’s screw-up. There are no second chances for her.’
‘You sound like you’re almost on her side,’ he said accusingly. I braced myself, because I knew this man and understood perfectly what was coming next. ‘Was that why you did it? Was that why you gave her Noah’s photograph, because you felt sorry for her?’
‘I do feel sorry for her,’ I defended, a little embarrassed to discover I was closer to tears than I’d realised. ‘And I feel sorry for Noah, and for you, and for me. I feel sorry for every one of us.’
Pete’s face was a stony mask, and there was no sign of the usual compassion in his eyes as he glared at me.
‘I gave her the photo. I didn’t give her Noah,’ I said defensively, feeling the weight of both of them staring at me now. I dropped my gaze and studied the inside of my coffee cup. ‘I realised after speaking to her that she’s finding this just as devastating to deal with as we are.’
‘You spoke to her?’ I don’t know if Frankie had intended to raise her voice, but the words certainly came out several decibels higher than her normal speaking tone. ‘When exactly did you speak to her? And more to the point, why? You do you realise she could use whatever you said against us?’
I felt like a bug on the end of a stick being slowly dissected by the pair of them. I cleared my throat, knowing that the colour I was hoping for earlier had found its way back into my cheeks. I could feel them burning furiously. ‘It wasn’t like that. I bumped into her in the Ladies’.’
‘What did you talk about?’ fired Frankie. I took it all back. She sounded exactly like a barrister in a courtroom drama. Frankie was going to be a terrific lawyer.
‘Nothing about the case, or Noah.’
‘Phew,’ said Frankie, looking visibly relieved as she pantomimed wiping her brow free of sweat. ‘That should be okay then.’
‘So what happens next?’ asked Pete. ‘Will they want to meet with us again for further discussions?’
‘They might do,’ Frankie admitted. ‘But if they suggest it, I recommend we politely decline.’
Pete and I both sat up a little straighter in our chairs as Frankie leant in closer towards us. ‘We did our bit today. We went along and listened to what they had to say.’ Pete and I were nodding in unison, like two model dogs on the parcel shelf of a car. ‘They’re trying to snow-blind us with legal precedents that have no bearing on your particular circumstances. They’re underestimating us. And they’re underestimating me,’ said Frankie, with a wry smile. ‘It happens quite a lot, actually.’
Both Pete and I remained tactfully silent.
‘But it really doesn’t matter, because I take it the bottom line here hasn’t changed? You’re both still unwilling to give Elizabeth Brandon access to Noah, or grant any kind of shared custody?’
‘Absolutely not.’ We said the words with perfect synchronicity, as though singing a duet.
‘That’s what I thought. So I’ll give them a few hours to stew things over, and then I’ll call William Sylvester later this afternoon.’ Frankie did her best to suppress the smile, but it was a losing battle. ‘I’ll dress it up nicely. Thank them for the meeting blah blah blah. But basically, I have only one thing to say to them.’ She paused for a beat before executing the line with perfecting timing: ‘See you in court.’
*
The atmosphere was strangely muted after Frankie had gone.
‘I don’t suppose we have a choice anymore,’ Pete said dolefully. ‘I guess we’re going to have to talk to Noah about all of this now.’
Panic jolted through me like an electric current. ‘Not yet. Let’s wait until they’ve set a date for the hearing. Anything could happen before then.’
Pete’s hands were clenched on the tabletop, the calloused oil-stained fingers jarring incongruously with his smart suit. ‘Are we going to be okay with this, Izzy? Are we ready to be on the front pages of every newspaper? To be talked about – and judged – by total strangers all over the country?’
‘I don’t see how we have a choice,’ I said.
Frankie certainly hadn’t pulled any punches when she’d warned us the road ahead would be far from easy. ‘There’ll be support flooding your way from all over the world. But be prepared – there’ll also be vilification. There’ll be hate mail. You’ll change your phone numbers half a dozen times, and the press will still manage to get hold of them. And there’ll probably be trolls all over the internet.’
I’d almost laughed at the expression on Pete’s face at that one. He was clearly thinking only of the kind with bright orange hair and squidgy noses, who lived under bridges.
‘We’re ready,’ I’d said, with a whistling-in-the-dark confidence I’m not sure any of us believed in.
*
Something had been bothering me during the meeting – a mental itch I couldn’t quite scratch, and it was only as we got up to leave that I snagged the elusive memory. ‘That man today, the one with Beth Brandon – I know him.�
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Pete looked understandably shocked. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I couldn’t place him until just now. He’s a client at the practice. He owns a cute little Jack Russell.’
Pete’s mouth was a tightly set line. ‘You should probably mention it to Frankie,’ he said darkly. ‘It might be a conflict of interest… or something.’
Lately, we were both guilty of dropping random legal phrases into our conversation, without a clue what they meant. ‘I suppose so,’ I said with a sigh, not liking this new world we suddenly inhabited, where nothing was simple or straightforward anymore. ‘I want to ask her about her bill anyway. I wondered if we could pay it in instalments.’
Pete rarely blushed, but there was a flush now that began at his neck and crept slowly up his cheeks. The pink was a vivid contrast to the white of his shirt.
‘You don’t need to. I’ve taken care of it.’
My head twisted so rapidly that my neck muscles twanged painfully in objection. ‘How? Where did you get the money from?’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Actually, it does. You didn’t…’ I heard the incredulity in my voice. ‘You didn’t do anything… illegal, did you?’
I deserved the withering look he gave me. I knew him better than that. Pete was the kind of man who’d point out to shopkeepers if they gave him too much change. He didn’t ‘do’ dishonest.
‘A bank loan?’ I queried, knowing how unlikely that was given our credit history. He shook his head and frowned, realising I wasn’t about to let it drop.
‘A friend helped me out,’ he admitted finally. ‘Can we just leave it there, please, Izzy.’
For him the subject was closed, but for me it was a Pandora’s box that I couldn’t stay away from. It had to be Maya. There was no one else it could possibly be. Pete had mentioned years ago that her family were extremely wealthy. He kept insisting they were just friends, but do friends lend each other that kind of money? Was she the one he was spending his evenings with, and how much more was there to their relationship than he was willing to admit? No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
A day I’d hoped was done with delivering unpleasant surprises had actually been saving the best until last.
*
I’m sure it was more for Noah’s sake than mine when Pete asked, almost hesitantly, if he could join us for dinner that evening.
‘You don’t have to ask me that,’ I said, my heart in serious trouble when it saw the uncertainty in his eyes. ‘This is still your home.’
I let myself pretend that our world wasn’t slowly crumbling to dust as I prepared Noah’s favourite pasta dinner and the three of us sat down to eat it, as if nothing bad could ever touch us. We played junior Monopoly after dinner, turning a blind eye when Noah blatantly stole from the bank when he thought we weren’t looking. His dishonest streak hadn’t come from his dad, I thought with a smile as I watched him embezzle a handful of banknotes. Except Pete wasn’t Noah’s dad, and we actually knew nothing about his biological father. What if there were important facts about him that we should know? Suddenly, a hundred unanswered doctors’ questions over the years began to make more sense.
‘Are you sure there’s no family history of allergies, Mrs Vaughan? Did either you or your husband ever suffer with asthma or eczema as a child?’
‘No, neither of us did. Nor either set of grandparents. There’s no family history of anything like that whatsoever.’
Except now, maybe there was. It was just a different family. Noah’s real family.
23
Beth
If I’d had to guess the type of home a man like Liam Thomas owned, I would have gone for a sleek bachelor flat in a maintained block, with gated security and lots of plate glass and chrome. Or perhaps a penthouse suite with a classy roof terrace, offering the best views in town.
The sprawling development of family-style properties took me by surprise. We drove through a twisting maze of streets, passing avenues of practically identical ‘executive homes’. I glimpsed porches full of colourful wellington boots, and gravelled drives with carelessly strewn bicycles, tricycles and skateboards littering a pathway to the door. This was the sort of place where summer evenings would be filled with the aroma of barbecues and the sound of children’s laughter. It was a curious choice for a widower in his early forties.
Liam’s spacious driveway – unlike those of his neighbours – was clutter-free, although it was immediately apparent that he didn’t live alone from the sound of scrabbling claws coming from the other side of his front door. I stayed several paces behind him as he unlocked it, but was too slow to avoid being pounced on by a small wiry creature who torpedoed down the length of the hallway towards me.
‘Sally. Sally. No. Get down.’
The small dog was leaping up around my knees, and it wasn’t clear if those rows of tiny white teeth were bared in a threat or a cheerful welcoming grin. Liam bent down and slid his fingers beneath the terrier’s leather collar, pulling her back.
‘You’d never tell that we were the obedience class dropouts, would you?’ he asked wryly.
‘That’s okay, I’m sure she’s just protecting her territory… or you.’
‘Hmm,’ murmured Liam, as he led the feisty dog into the lounge and shut the door firmly behind her.
‘I’m sorry. She’s not used to visitors,’ he said, still sounding apologetic. ‘We don’t have that many.’ That told me an awful lot more than I think he had intended to reveal, and he quickly sought to get back to the reason we were there.
‘The kitchen’s this way,’ he said, sounding more like an estate agent than a host. He really wasn’t used to entertaining guests, which was strange because he certainly wasn’t antisocial. It was a mystery I was still pondering as I followed him down the hallway. And how many people – who aren’t related to you – have you invited home recently? asked a voice in my head. Touché. Not that many.
‘What can I get you?’ asked Liam solicitously. ‘Tea, coffee, or a glass of something stronger? I have some wine in the fridge.’
I was trying not to stare enviously at his large, well-equipped kitchen, and concentrate on his question. ‘What I’d really like, if you happen to have them, are some paracetamols. I’ve got a really bad headache.’
‘That’s not surprising. It’s been a tough morning.’ He’d get no argument from me on that score. ‘I’ve got a few different types you can choose from,’ he said, turning on his heel and striding back across the hallway. It took a split second before I realised he was waiting for me to follow him.
The downstairs shower room was fairly spacious, as these things go, but even so it obviously hadn’t been designed with twin adult occupancy in mind. I was suddenly very much aware of the personal space boundaries we were both breaching. I shrank back as far as I could as Liam reached up to open both sides of a mirrored wall cabinet. His reflection in the glass doors looked curiously sheepish, and when I turned my attention to the closely packed shelves of the cabinet, I knew why. The last time I’d seen that many pharmaceuticals, I’d been in my local branch of Boots.
‘Whoa. I’m lucky if I can find a sticking plaster at my place.’ I threw him a curious sideways glance. This was the cupboard of a serious hypochondriac, or a closet survivalist, and I couldn’t exactly picture Liam as either of those.
‘These aren’t mine,’ Liam explained in a slightly embarrassed tone. ‘They’re Anna’s.’ As his wife had died over eight years earlier, that didn’t make the cache any less weird. ‘She liked to be prepared.’ Liam smiled fondly as his hands rifled past the medications on the shelves. ‘Every time we flew we were fined for excess baggage, because she’d insist on bringing all of this with us.’
He turned to me and the humour on his face was suddenly replaced with something far more vulnerable. ‘A couple of years after the accident I threw everything out – it was all out of date anyway. But the night before the bins were emptied I crept down a
t two o’clock in the morning and hauled it all out again.’
The pain medication in the cupboard had suddenly got a lot less appealing, but Liam only smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘I took it all to the pharmacy and replaced every single item with a new one.’ His fingers settled on three slim boxes, which he plucked from the shelf. ‘I’ve done the same thing every couple of years ever since,’ he admitted, dropping the packets of painkillers into my hands. He shook his head, almost in disbelief. ‘You know, I’ve never told anybody about that before. I thought it would sound too crazy. And now that I hear it out loud… I realise I was right. It did.’
I stayed longer in the cloakroom than I needed to, giving Liam time to regain his composure. There are times when even the most secure protective armour can slip a little; mine was certainly all over the place. When I felt enough minutes had passed, I went to rejoin him in the kitchen, only to find a small dog with a very big attitude in my way.
Sally looked up at me, a challenge in her ageing brown eyes. I considered calling for Liam, but instead took a small cautious step forward. The elderly Jack Russell gave a low rumbling growl, which I pretended didn’t faze me at all.
‘It’s okay, little lady, everything’s all right.’
The dog cocked her head on one side, hearing something in my voice, and then without warning flopped onto her back, her front legs waggling, as her tail thumped steadily against the wooden floor. I don’t know much about dogs, but I recognised an invitation when I saw one. I bent down to rub the wiry fur on her exposed belly and I was still doing so when Liam emerged from the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching us with an unreadable expression on his face.
‘I’ve not seen her do that with anyone for a very long time,’ he admitted quietly.
He’d been busy in my absence. Two places had been set at the breakfast bar and there was a bowl beside the six-ring range cooker containing an extraordinary number of eggs for just two people.