“Hugh,” he says, holding out his hands. “Hugh—listen to me—you don’t have to do this.”
But Hugh—Hugh’s shoulders are shaking.
For a minute Hannah doesn’t understand. She looks from Will, hands outstretched, pleading, and then back to Hugh. Is he crying? He shakes his head helplessly, and then she sees—he is not crying but laughing.
“Hugh?” she manages. She takes a step forward, away from the cliff. The movement seems to tear at the muscles of her womb and a fresh wash of pain ripples across her stomach, radiating out from where Hugh hit her.
“You absolute imbecile,” Hugh says now. He wipes what could be tears of laughter from beneath his glasses, but might be rain, or just plain tears. “You idiot, Will. You could have lived, don’t you realize that? And instead, you’ve solved everything.”
“What the fuck do you mean?” Will says. He takes a step closer and Hugh turns swiftly, pointing the gun at Hannah’s stomach.
“Don’t come any closer unless you want to see your baby right now,” he says, and his voice is suddenly cold.
“Okay, okay,” Will says, and he puts up his hands. Hannah is trembling. Her eyes meet Will’s. I’m so sorry, she tries to say. Will closes his eyes, shakes his head very slightly. It doesn’t matter, it’s okay.
Then he turns back to Hugh.
“What do you mean? Solved everything?” He’s trying to sound calm, hopeful, but there’s a tremor in his voice. But Hugh is shaking his head.
“It doesn’t have to be a suicide anymore,” Hugh says wearily. “Don’t you get it? I mean I could have just shot her, but if the body washed up, a gunshot would have been hard to explain. But this—this is much better. You killed your first girlfriend, and then when your wife got suspicious…” He shrugs. “You shot her, and then you killed yourself. It’s almost too perfect.”
He raises the gun. Now it is pointing at Hannah’s chest.
“Hugh, no,” Will says. His voice is full of an agony so raw it makes Hannah’s heart hurt. “Hugh, you were my friend.”
“I’m sorry,” Hugh says. “But you just made it too easy.” He clicks off the safety.
Hannah closes her eyes. For a fleeting minute she wonders if dying this way will hurt, and how quickly her baby will die too.
And then she hears Will’s anguished roar as he tackles Hugh. The gun goes off, a bullet whipping past Hannah’s shoulder, and she ducks instinctively, even though the bullet is long gone, splashing into the sea.
Hugh and Will are rolling on the muddy ground, grappling each other, the gun sandwiched somewhere between them, Hugh’s finger still on the trigger.
“Will!” she screams, as the two men wrestle wordlessly in the rainy darkness. She has no idea what to do. She wants to run to help Will, pull Hugh off him, but she can’t risk another blow to her stomach. The side of her bump where Hugh hit her is throbbing now with a dull red heat and she is feeling an ominous tightening deep in her pelvis. “Will!” she screams again, his name tearing at her throat.
Hugh is below, and then on top, and then suddenly she sees the gun—he has dropped the gun, or Will has forced him to drop it, she’s not sure. It is lying on the wet grass as the two men roll away from it towards the cliff edge.
Hannah knows what she has to do.
She runs for it, her bare feet slipping in the slick muddy grass, her belly griping with every unwary movement. But Hugh has realized what has happened, and he scrambles for it too, reaching it, grabbing it—the gun comes up, pointing towards Hannah. Will tackles him again, with the desperate strength of a man with nothing left to lose, throwing himself between Hugh and Hannah with a terrible reckless abandon—and then she hears it—the second gunshot, and then a third. Far louder this time, two tearing bangs that leave her ears screaming with shock.
Will goes limp.
And the blood begins to pool.
THE END
In the car, on the way to the crematorium, it starts raining. Hannah is glad. She sits there, staring out the window at the weeping world, and feels the tears slide down her own cheeks, soaking into the collar of her black coat.
“Are you okay?” Emily whispers from the seat beside her, and then shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Stupid question. How could you be okay?”
The driver of the funeral car says nothing. He is used to people weeping in the back of his limousine. The box of tissues between the seats is testament to that. Hannah isn’t sure what he’s been told—but he must know something about the circumstances of what’s brought them here. The fact that this isn’t a normal funeral—someone weary from old age, or taken early by cancer or heart disease or a thousand and one other inevitabilities of life.