by Lisa Jewell
“These are good,” she said, nestling one into the palm of Tyler’s hand. “Sleeping pills. Kind of trippy.”
They’d swallowed them down with tap water and lain about in the park all afternoon feeling swoony and silly and nice. She wonders now how many of those little pills it would take to knock Grace out. Knock her out sideways. Just for a while. Just for long enough to show everyone in Virginia Park what kind of a girl she is, to humiliate her—completely. She pictures herself crushing some of those little pills and dissolving them in water, but she can’t work out how she’d get Grace to drink them. And then she remembers seeing Adele injecting Gordon’s bad leg with something the other day. She remembers the pile of dressings and hypodermics on his chest of drawers. She glances again at the alleyway, sees Leo leaving Grace there and heading back to his flat. She can see then the shadows of Leo and Adele moving about in their kitchen, clearing things away, Gordon appearing behind them. She looks behind her at the figures in the playground. Catkin and Fern. Her Virginia Park sisters even if she knows now that they’re not her actual sisters. She has no time to lose. She moves fast and quiet. And then the plan comes together like a dream.
But half an hour later she’s forced to abandon her project halfway through, has to leave Grace there, not quite ready, not quite paying the price. She burrows through the tunnel behind the bench and runs back to the playground. Then Dylan appears, sits there on the swing, waiting for Grace. Waiting like an idiot.
And then a moment later, there’s little Pip, the sister who hasn’t fucked up Tyler’s life, and she comes toward them and says: “Have you seen Grace?” and they all say they thought she went home. And oh, her face, her little face. Poor Pip, not understanding. Heading up the hill. Tyler sees her cross paths with Max. They do not talk. And then it all begins.
The drunk mum comes.
Then everyone else comes.
Then the blue lights come.
Then Grace is gone.
And Tyler watches disconsolately from a distance, watches and thinks: You didn’t get all that you deserved. Not even half.
TEN MONTHS LATER
36
Cherry-blossom spume overhead, sugar-pink sharp against baby-blue sky. Adele had brought the girls to the Tate for a learning trip. It was too nice to be indoors, one of those spring days that made you nostalgic for a summer that had yet to begin. The girls walked ahead, light-footed in summery clothes. The Thames ran lazily alongside, like an old dog.
A woman came toward them, slow-walking in a cream jacket and cream skirt, blond hair bobbed and fringed, tanned legs and a small smile, as though someone had just said something nice to her.
As she came nearer Adele felt a jolt of recognition. Was it? Could it be? After all these months?
“Clare?”
“Oh my God, Adele.”
Hard to gauge whether Clare was pleased or horrified.
“Wow, how are you? I haven’t seen you since . . .”
“Last summer, I know.”
“How are your girls? How is Grace?”
“They’re both fine. Really good. And yours?”
Adele pointed to her girls, standing now at the water’s edge, hands gripping the wall, staring into the river. “All present and correct.”
Clare smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that I didn’t say good-bye. It was all so . . . you know. After Grace was discharged, she really didn’t want to come back to the flat. So Chris found us another place, about a mile away. It was ready to move into and it all happened so quickly.”
“We miss you.”
“Oh, gosh.” She laughed wryly. “I’m sure you don’t. I don’t think we were really cut out for that kind of communal living. All that . . . exposure . . . I don’t think we were very good at it. We’ve got our own backyard now. Totally private.”
“So, you and your husband, you got back together?”
“Yes.” Clare smiled that small, warm smile she’d been wearing when Adele first saw her just now. “Yes, we’re back together. It’s good.”
Adele sensed that any second now Clare was going to say: Well, I must be on my way. She checked the girls from the corner of her eye. They were still standing at the river wall. She looked at Clare. Clare did not seem alarmed to be here talking to Adele. She did not seem to hate her. And here, finally, was a chance for Adele to know.
“Listen, Clare,” she said. Her breath stopped halfway up her throat. Her heart thundered beneath her ribs. “I just wondered. In those days after the summer party, the police were everywhere. Asking questions. Then when Grace woke up, it all stopped. And I wondered: What did Grace say? About that night? Did you ever find out what happened?”
Clare blanched. “Well, sort of. Grace told us that she did something. Earlier, before the attack. She wouldn’t tell us what exactly, but we guessed. It tied in with the forensic evidence and of course it was all a bit shocking. But it meant at least we knew that nothing had . . . I mean, that she hadn’t been attacked sexually.” She shrugged. “Teenagers. They think they know what they’re doing. But they don’t. And that’s the thing with a communal space like yours—there’s so much leeway for them to make mistakes. Isn’t there?”
Adele nodded. “But the overdose. Did the police ever find out who was responsible?” Please say no, she thought. Please say no.
Clare sighed. “Grace said it was an accident. Someone had offered her something and she’d taken too much.” Clare shrugged, clearly unconvinced by Grace’s explanation but not able to push past it. “She said she wanted to put it all behind her. Get on with her life. So she begged us to get the case dropped. And we did.”
“Gosh,” said Adele, overawed by the gentleness of this reaction. “But she might have died.”
Clare shrugged. “I know. It was a hard decision to make. Chris and I—we wanted someone to blame. We wanted someone to suffer. But in the end, we had to respect what Grace was asking of us. We had to let her choose.”
Adele nodded. This echoed her liberal parenting ethos, but she had found the uncertainty of the past few months unbearable. The not-asking. The not-knowing. Every time the doorbell had rung at an unexpected time of day she’d half expected to see PC Michaelides standing there; May I come in, Mrs. Howes, there’s been a development. “Well,” she said. “I admire your restraint. I really do.”
“I don’t think there’s much to admire about any of it, to be honest. The whole thing was just a terrible aberration.”
“And Dylan? Are he and Grace . . . ?”
“They’re still an item.”
Adele recoiled slightly with surprise. This she had not imagined. “Really?”
“Yes. He’s over all the time. They appear to be that rarest of things: real teenage sweethearts.” Clare smiled, and then shrugged, as if to say: We’ll see how long it lasts. Adele had barely spoken to Dylan since the summer. He and Tyler were no longer friends and he’d stopped coming out into the park in the weeks after the party. Then winter had swallowed him up and even on the odd occasion when their paths had crossed, Adele had felt oddly reticent about engaging him in conversation, scared by the possibility of how much he might know about what had really happened that night.
“How’s Gordon, by the way?” asked Clare brightly. “Did you ever manage to get him back to Africa?”
Adele smiled. It already felt like a distant memory, and in some strange way she almost missed him. “Yes. He went back last August. Three stone lighter. Apparently he’d put it all on again by Christmas. His wife likes him fat.”
“Or maybe she likes him dead.”
Adele laughed loudly. Clare laughed too. And Adele felt something settle deep inside her, something that had been jumping around her gut in the dead of night for months. The sense of unfinished business. But here she was, here was Clare, pretty and bright, reconciled with the events of last summer, in a house with a garden and a husband. And maybe now Adele could forget about the other things, the unsettling things that had emerged in the da
ys after the summer party: the Google search for “how to fill a hypodermic needle” that Leo had found in their browsing history, timed 9:22 p.m. on the night of Grace’s attack. The packaging from one of Gordon’s NHS-prescribed sterile hypodermic needles that she’d found buried in the bottom of Fern’s wastepaper basket when she’d emptied it the next day. The awful pondering on the unknowables, like: How could tiny Tyler have single-handedly felled a big girl like Grace? Pulled her up the hill? Without any help? And the terrible flicker of her girls’ eyes as they watched the girl with the blond ponytail creeping across the bottom of the computer screen at the police station, the awful heaviness in the car on the way back home that seemed full of buried words.
Because although Tyler was the girl with the broken heart and the damaged mother and the reasons to want to hurt Grace, her girls too had felt the impact of Grace’s presence in the park. And even though Tyler wasn’t their sister, they’d grown up with her as though she was. And hadn’t it been her choice to keep her daughters at home, forcing them to forge stronger-than-average attachments to the friends they lived among? Hadn’t that probably warped their perspective on the nature of friendships, of loyalty, on how far you would reasonably go to support a friend?
So they’d decided, she and Leo, decided to leave it. They’d deleted the browsing history. They’d burned the hypodermic wrapping. They’d never had that conversation. Never asked those questions. They were sure, they thought, sure that whatever the truth of it, whatever their daughters’ real involvement, they had learned from it. That they would never again allow themselves to be caught up in someone else’s madness. They were sure. They really were.
And there was Tyler, emerging suddenly into the blue sunshine from the gallery. She stopped when she saw Clare and her face fell. Adele saw her hands curl into anxious fists. She smiled at her encouragingly.
“Look who it is!” she said.
Tyler unfurled her fists, raised one hand to Clare, then ran to the river wall to join the others.
“I’m schooling Tyler now too,” she explained. “In fact, Tyler has all but moved in with us.”
“How come?”
“Oh, you know, the old benign neglect getting a bit too close to plain old-fashioned neglect. Her mum’s got a new boyfriend. Turned out she was barely coming home. So the minute Gordon moved out we made up the spare room for her. Told her it was hers whenever she needed it. Which seems to be all the time. So . . .”
Making amends. Paying back the universe for the sins of her children. For the sins of her husband. And for the sins of herself. After all, had she not lost faith for moments during that terrible time, faith in her husband, faith in her neighbors? Had Leo not encouraged the confidences of vulnerable people, made himself a crutch for others to lean on when he should have been paying attention to his own children? And had they not seen what was happening to Tyler, seen the physical, the emotional deterioration and not done a thing about it? Had they not both made their own terrible mistakes?
“Wow,” said Clare, “that’s amazing. What a beautiful thing to do.”
Adele shrugged. “I always wanted four,” she said, not for the first time and not entirely truthfully.
“You see,” said Clare, understanding blooming across her face, “that’s the difference between you and me. And that’s why Virginia Park is the right place for you to live. Because you’re not scared of other people’s problems. Because you’re happy to leave the door open and let those problems just walk straight in. I remember, Adele, I was very rude to you that night of the party. I was drunk and out of my comfort zone. I felt judged and on show. And you were so hospitable, just like you always were, and I threw that back in your face and I’ve been wanting to say sorry, all these months. To say sorry and to tell you: Leo is a very lucky man.”
Adele touched Clare’s hand. No! she wanted to say. Please don’t say sorry. Please don’t say sorry! But then Willow appeared, whirlwind in girl form, long hair spread all about her, words tumbling from her, eyes shining, and Adele didn’t know what she was saying, what she was talking about. She wasn’t really listening, but she knew that her conversation with Clare was over.
They said good-bye, and then they walked away from each other, a small, blond woman in cream, a tall, dark-haired woman in black; they walked between the sugar-spun cherry blossoms and the sluggish river, in opposite directions, toward different lives, all their secrets buried safe and sound.
Acknowledgments
Behind every book there lies a sea of wonderful, talented, and loving people. But I think it’s fair to say that the people behind mine are by far the best! I’ve been feeling a bit paranoid lately that maybe the people who do all the work behind the scenes on my books don’t really know how much I appreciate them and everything they do, day in, day out. Worried that maybe they think I take them for granted. And I want them all to know that this is so far from the truth. I may not be one for grand gestures, for gifts or for thank-you cards, but trust me, I am aware from the tiniest e-mail interaction to the grandest marketing campaign how lucky I am to have you all and what an amazing job you all do. Not to mention what thoroughly lovely people you all are!
So thank you writ large to:
Selina Walker, Kate Raybould, Beth Kruszynskyj, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, Najma Finlay, Jen Doyle, Jenny Geras, Richard Ogle, Aslan Byrne, Andrew Sauerwine, Susan Sandon, Rose Tremlett, Chloe Healy, and everyone at Arrow.
Jonny Geller, Kirsten Foster, Lisa Babalis, Melissa Pimentel, Camilla Young, Mairi Friessen Escandell, and everyone at Curtis Brown.
Richenda Todd for copyediting.
Jenny Colgan for early reading and reassurance.
Darren Bennett at DKB Creative for the beautiful map.
Further afield and equally amazing, I would like to thank:
Deborah Schneider at Gelfman Schneider in the US.
Judith Curr, Sarah Branham, Haley Weaver, Ariele Fredman, Kitt Reckord-Mabicka, and everyone at Atria in the US.
Pia Printz and Anna at Printz Publishing in Sweden.
Everyone at Ucila International in Slovenia, Novo Conceito in Brazil, Wydawnictwo Zysk i S-ka in Poland, Cappelen Damm in Norway, Mondadori Arnoldo in Italy, Blanvalet Verlag in Germany, Presses de la Cité in France, and Otava in Finland.
Thank you to the booksellers and librarians I meet every year who are too numerous to mention here but who I know I could not possibly do without. And of course to my readers. God, yes, my lovely readers. All the people in the list above would be wasting their time if it wasn’t for you lot. Thank you so much for buying and for reading and for turning up to events and writing me lovely messages on Facebook and Twitter. What would I do without you?
The character name of Adele Howes in this book was a winner of the Get in Character charity auction raising funds for CLIC Sargent. The “real” Adele Howes has been a loyal reader of mine for many years and has an adoring and very generous husband called Dan who bought her the name as a birthday gift. CLIC Sargent is the UK’s leading cancer charity for children and young people, and their families. They provide clinical, practical, financial, and emotional support to help them cope with cancer and get the most out of life. They are there from diagnosis onward and aim to help the whole family deal with the impact of cancer and its treatment, life after treatment, and, in some cases, bereavement. Visit www.clicsargent.org.uk to learn more about them.
Away from the business end of things, my thanks go, as ever, to my family and friends, those on the Internet, those In Real Life, and of course those on the Board. And also in this case to the friends who share my own version of Virginia Park in the real world. So thank you to Helen, Chris, Joe, Jo, Sian, Bernard, Erica, Cassie, Patrice, and all the other lovely people I live among who are the nicest neighbors a girl could possibly ask for.
For more from New York Times bestseller Lisa Jewell . . .
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Before I Met You
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A captivating New York Times bestselling novel about the tragedies that tear families apart, and the persistent desire to regain the peace of the past.
The House We Grew Up In
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A gripping suspense that unravels the complexities of one family's dynamics following the sudden death of a successful architect's third wife.
The Third Wife
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LISA JEWELL was born and raised in north London, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of thirteen novels, including The House We Grew Up In and The Third Wife. To find out more, visit Facebook.com/LisaJewellOfficial, or follow her on Twitter @LisaJewellUK.