Libby answers: I can’t wait to see you either. Love you.
Love you too, she finishes, then adds a long row of kisses and switches off her phone.
Her girl is glorious: a gentle, caring soul, a blend of Stella and Marco in many ways but also so very much her father’s child in the way that she walks her own path and makes her own rules, that she is so entirely and utterly herself. And she is growing and changing so much, leaving behind some of the tics and compulsions that held her back, letting life show her her journey rather than imposing a journey on to her life. She has been worth every bad moment between leaving her in her cot and finding her again. She is an angel.
Lucy picks up her phone again and she scrolls through her contacts until she gets to the Gs. She composes a message:
Darling Giuseppe. This is your Lucy. I am missing you so much. I just wanted you to know that I am happy and healthy and well and so are the children and so is Fitz. I won’t be coming back to France. I have a wonderful new life now and want to put down roots. But I will think of you always and forever be so grateful to you for being there for me when my life was out of control. I’d be lost without you. My love, always, Lucy.
68
In the restaurant in Marylebone that evening Libby’s family awaits her.
Lucy, Marco, Stella and Henry.
Marco greets her with an awkwardly dramatic half-hug, his head knocking against her collarbone. ‘Happy birthday, Libby,’ he says.
Stella hugs her gently and says, ‘Happy birthday, Libby. I love you.’
These two children, her brother and sister, have been the greatest gifts of all.
They are wonderful children and Libby puts that down entirely to the woman who raised them. She and Lucy have become very close, very quickly. The small age gap means that often Lucy feels a like great new friend, rather than the woman who gave birth to her.
Lucy gets to her feet. She circles Libby’s neck with her arms and kisses her loudly in the vicinity of her ear. ‘Happy birthday,’ she says. ‘Proper happy birthday. This time twenty-six years ago. God. I thought I was going to split in half.’
‘Yes,’ agrees Henry. ‘She was mooing like a cow. For hours. We had our hands over our ears.’ Then he gives her one of his cautious embraces.
Libby still can’t work Henry out. Sometimes she thinks about Clemency saying that she thought he had a streak of pure evil, and a shiver runs across her flesh. She thinks of what he did, the execution of four people, the mummification of a young woman’s body, the mutilation of a cat. But killing had never been his intention and Libby still believes that if the four children had turned themselves in to the local police that night and explained what had happened, how they’d been so mistreated, imprisoned, that it had been a terrible accident, that they would have been believed and rehabilitated. But that’s not how it had been and they had all made fugitives of themselves and taken their lives off on unimaginable tangents.
Henry is odd, but then he is very open about the fact that he is odd. He still maintains that he did not intentionally lock them into the spare bedroom of his Airbnb rental that night, that he did not take their phones and delete Miller’s recording. He said, ‘Well, if I did I must have been even drunker than I thought.’ And Libby never did find a tracking or listening device on her phone. But then she never changed the passcode on her phone either.
He also denies that he has had cosmetic procedures to make him look like Phin. He says, ‘Why would I want to look like Phin? I’m so much better looking than he ever was.’ He is impatient with the children and slightly flustered by the sudden influx of people into his tightly controlled little world, often grumpy but occasionally hilarious. He has a vague grasp of the truth and seems to live very slightly on the edges of reality. And how can Libby blame him? After everything he’s been through? She would probably live on the edges of reality too if her childhood had been as traumatic as his.