“My natural charm, I suppose,” April said, and she smiled, the deep, soft dimples showing in her golden cheeks. “Or maybe my dad’s money.”
There was a long silence, as if no one quite knew how to take this. Then Ryan gave a short, barking laugh as if April had told a joke.
“Well, good for you,” Emily said. “On both counts.” She shoved the last forkful of pasta into her mouth and stood up, brushing herself down. “Now. What the fuck does a woman have to do to get a drink around here?”
“We could go to that common room place,” Ryan said. He stood too. Hannah saw that he was much taller than she had realized. “What did they call it, the JCB?”
“JCR,” April said. Her lips curled in a smile that Hannah was beginning to recognize as quintessentially April—beguiling, and at the same time, just a little bit wicked. “Junior Common Room if you read the handbook, which you clearly didn’t. And there’s also a bar next to the Great Hall. But sod that. We’re hardly commoners. And who needs a bar when you’ve got a totally majestic suite and a fridge full of champagne?”
She pushed her still-full plate of tortellini away, looked around the group of faces, and then pulled a room key out of her pocket, dangling it from one finger as she raised a fine dark eyebrow.
“Am I right?”
AFTER
The past hangs between them as Will makes supper, chopping aubergine and chorizo in a silence made somehow more oppressive by the chatter of the Radio 4 announcer. Hannah tries and fails to think of what to say, and in the end she retreats to the living room, where she pulls out her laptop and opens her emails.
She deleted the Gmail app from her phone in a panic after her mother’s call came through, not wanting to be ambushed by notification pings on her walk home, and now she’s more than a little afraid of what will be waiting for her, but she knows that leaving it would be worse. At bedtime, with nothing else to distract her, she will lie there wondering what’s lurking in her inbox, until eventually she’ll crack and log back in on her phone. And then whatever she finds—whatever new revelation, dangled lead, or fresh attempt to manipulate her into responding—will set her pulse spiking and her adrenaline pumping, driving the possibility of sleep so far away that she will be awake all night, nauseous with apprehension, refreshing and refreshing and googling April’s name in a kind of sick terror.
She knows that’s how it will go down, because it’s what happened before. Daily, more than daily messages in the first few months and years after April’s death. A constant, numbing flood of beseeching, badgering, beleaguering requests that left her shocked and bruised by the national obsession that April’s death had triggered.
As the court case concluded, the requests slowed. First they came weekly, and then, as she and Will managed to slip beneath the surface of everyday life, camouflaging themselves in the reassuringly boring minutiae of accountancy courses, house buying, money worries, and all the other mundane clutter of daily existence, they became more and more sporadic.
Now she is contacted only rarely and almost never by phone, not since they got rid of the landline and Hannah changed her mobile number. It still happens, though—every time John Neville’s name rears up in the press—every time there’s an appeal by Neville’s legal team, or someone publishes a book, or a new podcast is launched. And it’s taken this long for her to learn avoidance is not the way to deal with it.
No, it’s better to do it now, get it out of the way, allow herself to calm down before bed.
But to her surprise and relief, there are only three unread emails. One is from her mum, sent earlier this afternoon, with the subject line Call me. It precedes their phone call, so she deletes it.
The second is just an overdue notice from the library, and she marks it unread.
The third is from an email address she doesn’t recognize, with the subject header A question.
Her heart rate is already accelerating even before she has clicked it, and the first line confirms her fears.
Dear Hannah, we’ve never met, but allow me to introduce myself. My name is Geraint Williams, and I’m a reporter with the Daily—
It’s enough. She doesn’t need to read any more. She takes off her glasses, letting the screen go fuzzy and unreadable, then clicks “Move to Requests” and watches the email disappear.
Afterwards, she sits there holding her glasses in one hand and her phone in the other, staring at the blank screen. Her fingers are suddenly ice-cold, and she pulls her jumper down over her hands to try to warm them. She can feel her pulse running sickeningly fast and shallow, and she wonders, in a kind of detached way, what the stress is doing to the baby. They’re very tough. She hears her mother’s voice in her head, reassuringly robust. Women give birth in war zones, for goodness’ sake.