What does it do to someone, to be repeatedly told that what you know to be true is a lie? How does it change the way you relate to the world, to other people? How you process your grief, how you carry your anger. All that pain, all that rage – she could literally feel it, like a weight pressing down on her heart, her lungs.
Jess had been maybe eight years old, the very first time she saw a picture of Jackson and Georgia Crane together, in their wedding photos, on the cover of an ancient, well-thumbed copy of Hello! at the hairdresser. She had known without a doubt that the slender woman in the ivory satin dress, gossamer-fine veil resting lightly on her sharp cheekbones, was the one who had been in the car that night. She had wanted to go to the police and her uncle had promised her he would write to them. One of Jess’s fantasies had been that she managed to get a letter to Georgia herself, that it snagged her conscience and she went to the police and confessed. And the older Jess got, the stronger and more compelling the fantasy became, in some ways. Because surely she had a guilty conscience, this woman who was always turning up as an ambassador for worthy causes, talking in interviews in magazines and on TV about trying to use her platform for good, to highlight injustice or oppression or inequality. But if she had a conscience, then why had she not done something already? Why had she not done anything at the time? That hypocrite. That nasty hypocrite. When she allowed herself to dwell on it, Jess’s anger at Georgia Crane had burned almost as fiercely as the anger she felt towards Jackson Crane himself.
She was ten when they first got internet at home, dial-up, and the very first thing she did was to go on all the Jackson Crane fan sites and cross-reference the dates and try to work out where he had been at the time of the accident. It had taken a long time. And her uncle and aunt had kept calling up to see what she was doing and she kept calling back: ‘It’s homework.’ The dates did work, though. That was what it took a ten-year-old girl one evening to discover; something that the police had clearly never bothered to check. That Jackson Crane had been in England at the time of the accident, filming that awful Christmas movie.
She’d run down the stairs so fast she had literally bounced off the wall coming around the bend halfway between floors, skidded into the kitchen so fast her aunt and uncle both jumped in their chairs. She was panting so hard she could hardly get the words out to tell them. And in her head, at the time, even though it was all so real and still so painful, maybe one of the ways she dealt with it was by thinking of herself as some kind of detective – Nancy Drew, solving the mystery of her parents’ murder, like in one of her books – and now that fantasy seemed to be coming true. Except that they didn’t seem excited, her aunt or uncle. Neither of them had immediately pushed their dining chair back and strode to the phone on the wall to call the police. Instead they’d exchanged a look as eloquent as a sigh, and her uncle had gone into the other room without a word, and her aunt had sat her down for a serious conversation about how much this was upsetting everyone, and how she was too old for it now. And her aunt had rested a hand on the back of Jess’s hand, and looked her in the eyes, seriously, worriedly, and said, ‘Do you understand me, Jess? This has to stop now. It’s not good for him, your uncle, all this stress, on his heart. For any of us. It’s not healthy for you, love.’ And after that, every time she went online, within about five minutes one or the other of them would remember something they needed from the airing cupboard in the upstairs room where the computer was, or pop in to see if she wanted a squash or a biscuit.
By the time Jess started secondary school she had got used to the way people’s faces changed when she started talking about ‘all that’， the way their expressions stiffened, the absolute certainty with which she could guess what they were thinking; she’d heard all the reasons someone might give as to why it could not have been Jackson Crane driving, why it could not have been Georgia in the car. Because she had been shooting something else on the other side of the planet at the time. Because why, if he had been filming down at Pinewood, which was near London, would Jackson Crane have been zooming down some country lane in Northamptonshire? Because what happened to the car he’d been driving? Because how on earth would someone as famous as Jackson Crane have got away with something like that without the press finding out, the whole world knowing?