She will be angry soon. She can feel it underneath, the searing, white-hot rage that will envelop her when this is done. How could you. She wants to shake Will, spit at him, slap him around the face.
And maybe that is what will save her from the despair.
As she lies in the bath she can picture it so clearly.
Will, coming back early from the weekend—climbing the wall behind Cloade’s to avoid having to go around the long way, through the main gate. And then, maybe preplanned, maybe just on a whim, he didn’t go back to his own room, but up to April’s.
Maybe it was open. She thinks she locked it on her way down to the bar, but a decade on, she can’t be sure. Or maybe April was already back, maybe she welcomed Will inside. See, I came back for you—you are more important to me than my mother.
And then… what? An argument? No, not an argument, or the boys below would have heard it. A hissed disagreement, maybe.
Or perhaps if Will was already in the room before April came back from the bar, he saw something. Another pregnancy test. A note from Ryan.
Perhaps he opened the door, smiling, pulled her in for a hug. Let me take off my makeup, she would have said. And so he let her wipe off the terra-cotta foundation. Perhaps it was then, as she bent over her dressing table, cotton wool in hand, that he came towards her, hands outstretched—
And then there was a knock on the door.
April would have known nothing, suspected nothing.
She would have pecked Will on the cheek and then gone to answer it.
From inside April’s room, Will would have heard the conversation. Neville handing over the parcel, April trying to hurry him away, Neville’s footsteps as he retreated down the stairs.
And then April, coming back into her room, all smiles.
“Got rid of him.”
And Will would have walked towards her, arms outstretched, but instead of cradling her face in his hands, as he has done so often to Hannah—and her heart cracks a little further as she thinks of it—he would have slid his hands down to her neck, and squeezed…
No, no, no! The revulsion is so strong that she has to sit up, holding on to the sides of the bath as the water sloshes back and forth. It doesn’t make sense, Will is not that person!
But then she thinks of all the articles she has read over the years, all of the it’s always the partner pieces, all of the statistics about women killed by the person they’re sleeping with. She thinks of Geraint’s euphemistic hints about a domestic murder, all the whispers she’s ignored for more than a decade. I never liked the boyfriend… They said she was sleeping around… He was never even a suspect. She has always ignored them, always clung to what she knows to be true—that Will is not that person.
But now, with the knowledge that he has spent their entire marriage lying to her about that night, she is not so sure.
The sudden movement of sitting up has made her head swim; there are little flashes of light, like paparazzi bulbs, flickering at the edges of her vision, the flashes the midwife warned her about. Was the bath too hot?
Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint…
She is whispering the words aloud, and then the moment has passed, and she is okay.
Except she’s not. Her legs are weak as jelly, and when she tries to stand, she’s not sure if they will hold her.
Fuck. Fuck. Don’t do this, she wants to beg her body. Not now… please not now.
She holds her bump, feeling the baby move. It’s reassuring. However much her body is letting her down, it’s taking care of their child.
Their child. The word strikes to her heart. Because if this is true, if this is true, this baby will no longer be born to a father and a mother. It will be the child of a murderer. With a father in prison.
The faintness comes again, and this time it’s accompanied by a wash of nausea. She crouches, naked in the bath. Is it going to be okay?
And then suddenly it’s not, and she needs to get to the toilet right now. Trembling, she hauls herself out of the bath, wet and dripping, her legs shaking, and scrambles over the side, slipping on the wet tiles, to fall to her knees in front of the toilet, shivering with a mix of cold and shock.
She heaves, but nothing comes up.
For a few minutes she kneels there, shaking and dripping foamy water onto the beautiful geometric tiles, and then slowly, very slowly, she gets up and gropes her way to the towel rail. She has to hold on to the sink as she goes. She cannot slip and fall, not now. She is all this baby has.
She wraps herself in a towel and then slides down to the floor, her back to the heated rail, her gaze unfixed in front of her, waiting for the shivering to subside.