* * *
SOME FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER HANNAH is sitting in a padded chair in the maternity unit of the Royal Infirmary, a monitor strapped to her stomach, a blood pressure cuff around her arm, and November, slightly uncomfortable with all this, perched on the edge of a plastic stool beside her. She’s had a pee test and given what felt like about a pint of blood in little vials, and now part of her wants to be left alone with her thoughts, but a larger part of her wants anything but.
Mostly she wants Will, but his phone is ringing out. Where is he?
“Do you want me to try him again?” November asks, as if reading her mind. She has been allowed to stay as Hannah’s “companion,” which feels a little strange given Hannah has known her all of ninety minutes. But there is something about her, something so close to April that she feels as if it’s been much longer.
“No, I’ll do it,” Hannah says, knowing that Will shouldn’t hear this from November. She rubs her arm where the bruise from the needle is beginning to bloom, and then dials his number for what her phone says is the ninth time. It rings… and rings. She hangs up. Call me, she texts. It’s kind of urgent.
She puts the phone down in her lap, fighting the tears. It’s not just the fact that Will is unreachable—it’s everything. The idea that she has somehow caused this with her own actions, put her baby at risk by investigating April’s death. But the alternative feels equally unbearable—for how can she spend the next sixteen weeks in this state of agonizing uncertainty, obsessing over what she saw and thought and said? She just wants to know, to prove Geraint’s fears wrong and move on with her life. The baby flutters inside her stomach, and the monitor whooshes, speeding up with her heart.
“Is there anyone else?” November asks now. “Anyone else you can call, I mean?”
Hannah shakes her head. “Not really. My mum lives miles away. But if you need to go…”
“I’m not going,” November says firmly. “Not until you’re discharged. But I’m happy to wait in the car if you don’t want me here. I get that this is weird—I mean, we hardly know each other.”
“No, I’m happy for you to stay. It’s nice to—to talk.”
“Okay then,” November says. She folds her arms. “I’ll stay.”
There is a silence, punctuated only by the whoosh and click of machines and the faint conversation of the women in the next bay.
“It could have been Dr. Myers,” Hannah says. It’s what’s been preying on her mind ever since that moment in the hotel, and now it’s a relief to say the words out loud, but there’s also a different quality—it is as if saying them makes the possibility real. “He was already on the staircase. He could have got access to the room between Neville leaving and Hugh and me arriving. Geraint’s right—if he was sleeping with April, if he had got a student pregnant—well, that would give him motive and opportunity. Neville was convicted because he was the only person who had the opportunity to kill April. He never had a motive. But Myers—he’s the one person who could have slipped in there without anyone noticing.”
“I wonder if he was ever interviewed,” November says. Her expression is sober. “I mean, the police must have asked him whether he heard anything. But was he ever seriously a suspect?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah says. “I never saw him in court, but I wasn’t allowed to see the other—”
She breaks off. Her phone is buzzing in her lap. She turned the ringer off, in semi-deference to the hospital’s NO MOBILE PHONES sign, but now it’s vibrating with an incoming call. It’s Will. Thank God.
“Will!”
“Hannah.” He sounds out of breath. “I just got your message—I was swimming. What happened? Are you okay?”
She swallows. Will is not going to like this.
“I—I fainted,” she says at last. “I’ve gone into the maternity unit for some monitoring.”
There is a long pause. Hannah can tell he is trying to keep himself in check, not overreact, make her more upset, particularly after their recent argument. She hears him swallow on the other end of the phone.
“How—is everything all right?” he says carefully. “Is the baby okay?”
“I think so,” she says. “I haven’t been signed off yet, but they keep coming in and looking at the baby’s heartbeat chart and they don’t seem too worried.”