“I know,” she says, grinning back. She puts an arm around him, squeezing him so tight that he almost stumbles, their legs banging against each other, and she feels her heart swell with love for him. And the strangeness, the uncertainty she felt all the way up to Edinburgh is gone, completely gone. How could she have doubted him? How could she have doubted herself, her own judgment? This is Will. The man she loves—has loved for more than ten years. The man she knows like she knows her own skin.
“I love you,” she says, at the same time as he says, “Curry for supper?” and they both laugh, and suddenly everything is all right again. He is her Will. And Oxford is a long way away.
“Curry for supper,” she agrees. “And I’ll even let you have a beer.”
“I’m drinking for three now,” he says with a grin, and then he squeezes her back, and she feels her heart overflow.
AFTER
That night Hannah sleeps well—better than she has for ages. She doesn’t wake up with the baby pressing on her bladder and then toss and turn for hours with a mixture of leg cramps and heartburn. Instead she goes to bed at ten, falls asleep, and stays that way for eight solid hours.
At 6:00 a.m., something wakes her. She’s not sure what—perhaps the central heating coming on. Their boiler is old and often makes strange banging sounds when starting up from cold. Or maybe the milkman in the mews outside, the bottles jingling as his wheels rumble over the cobbles.
Whatever it is, it jolts her fully awake, and she can’t get back to sleep.
After a quarter of an hour of lying there, trying to ignore her increasingly pressing need to pee, she gives up and swings her legs out of bed. It’s a chilly morning, still dark outside, and she can almost feel the coming of winter in the air as she pads through to the bathroom, her bare feet shrinking from the cold tiles.
After, she makes a cup of tea and brings it back to bed, scootching her cold feet down under the duvet to warm up beside Will’s body. He is still asleep, and looking at him now, at his face, unguarded and heartbreakingly vulnerable, she can’t believe that she seriously considered Hugh’s implication last night. There has got to be some misunderstanding, some innocent explanation. Cloade’s was modern, well insulated, not like the old buildings in the rest of the college. A faint, muffled sound, traveling through the concrete… what does that prove? It’s not like Hugh actually saw Will.
And yet… Hugh is Will’s best friend, and the memory of the anguish in his voice makes Hannah shiver for a moment, in spite of the warmth of the bed. Would he really have said what he did if he wasn’t sure?
She needs someone who can back up Will’s story, reassure her that he left Somerset when he said he did. But who? Will’s sister wasn’t there that weekend, as far as she knows; his mother is undergoing chemotherapy for the third time, and his father’s memory is increasingly shaky. She can hardly ring up this frail, aging couple and demand to know what time their son left their house one weekend more than a decade ago. Even if one of them remembered, she would never know for sure if they were telling the truth or protecting Will.
The coldness settles around her heart as she realizes—the only person who will ever truly be able to tell her the truth… is Will.
For a moment she fantasizes about waking him up and asking him—his voice saying firmly, This is ridiculous. I came back Sunday afternoon, you know I did.
November’s words come back to her, filled with concern: Please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.
But that was what Hugh was trying to tell her. He was trying to warn her that once she spoke to the police, she would be opening a can of worms she’d be unable to shut.
Fuck. Fuck.
She puts the cup down on the bedside table, harder than she meant, so that the tea slops over and the wood makes a loud thunk.
And beside her, Will stirs.
“What time is it?”
His voice is sleepy, loving, and she feels her muscles instantly uncoil, as if his very presence is all she needed to chase away the doubts. Her fears, so real in the silence of a few minutes ago, disappear, like she’s a child turning on the light after a nightmare.
“Six thirty,” she whispers, and he groans and slides his arm over what used to be her waist, cradling her bump.
“Six thirty? You’re shitting me. On a weekend? Couldn’t you sleep?”
“It’s good practice,” she says, laughing. “For when the baby comes.”
She doesn’t want to say, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep because I was spiraling into a stupid, dark fantasy that you were April’s killer. Now, with Will’s arm around her, the words seem absurd.