Hana can’t stop looking at the image of the two of them. Jo and Liam, Jo and Liam.
She’s never put their names together before. It seems alien.
“Tell me what, exactly?” Hope creeps in. She might have misinterpreted this. A project for Maya maybe—she’d asked them to sit for her. A joke. Some kind of horseplay.
Maya’s now pressing so hard on the calloused skin on her palm that the flesh has turned white. Hana already knows that whatever she’s about to say next is going to be bad, will reaffirm her initial assumption. She can tell from how Maya’s face is crumpling, how she’s already reaching out a hand to steady Hana. “Jo and Liam—they had something, Han.” Her mouth seems to be moving in slow motion.
A vacuum opens up inside her.
She’d guessed right. Had something. Had something. Only one way to interpret that. “An affair?” The word sits in her mouth, already souring.
“Yes. But I didn’t know, not until a few weeks ago.” Hana feels her stomach turn at the robotic way Maya is talking.
“How did you find out?” She’s not sure how she forces out the words, but she needs to have the truth. To hear it all.
“Bea saw a photo on Jo’s phone, Han, of the two of them together, when they were out one night. She airdropped it to her phone, was going to speak to you about it, but then Liam had his fall and the last thing she wanted to do was upset you even more. A couple of weeks ago, Bea told me about it, said she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. She sent me the photo, wanted my opinion. I think she was hoping she’d misjudged it, wanted me to interpret it differently, but I couldn’t. It was obvious . . . Jo had taken a selfie of the two of them, you could see her arm.” She falters. “I told Bea to confront Jo. A few days later, she did. Said Jo had promised she’d tell you.”
“But she never did,” Hana finishes. Those words are still there in her head. Jo and Liam. Jo and Liam. She turns, focusing not on Maya but on the sudden rain splatter on the window, fine snail trails of wet on the move.
“Do you know how long it went on for?”
Maya’s eyes are wet with tears. “A while, I think. From what Bea said, it started a few months before he died.”
Hana’s mind leaps, trying to piece it together. It can’t be true: Liam didn’t lie to her, never had. When would they have gotten together? Seen each other?
But as she’s thinking, Hana sees, with a strange, sickening clarity, how it might fit together: little parts start slotting into place. Things she’d never thought important before—the growing distance between her and Jo, the phone calls, already irregular, that trailed off entirely after she and Liam got together. Liam’s dislike of Jo, never explicitly voiced, but obvious in how he cut conversations with her short at family gatherings, made gibes about her in their post-meetup debriefings in bed.
Then how all-consuming work had been for her last year. How emotionally absorbed she’d been, not only in mentoring a newly qualified teacher, but also in two of the children in her class who had taken hours of her time. Had she, without meaning to, pushed Liam away?
Was it then that it started?
Hana can see the lens through which Jo would have appeared—outdoorsy, fun, effortlessly easy-breezy—while Hana was chewing over meetings with parents, how best to advise the nervous new teacher on her lesson plans.
Perhaps Liam would have been flattered, unused to someone like Jo paying him attention. He’d have admired the way she could ignite, make even banal things more exciting.
“So when Jo didn’t tell me, Bea confronted her?” Hana joins the dots. That was what the argument Caleb had overheard was about. The affair.
“Yes. Bea said Jo was planning to speak to you but bailed at the last minute. Bea said to write to you, I think, if she couldn’t say it to your face.”
So that was what the letter was really about.
The coward’s way of confessing. Hana can picture it: Jo starting the letter and then not even having the courage to put pen to page and form the rest of the sentences.
“And when she couldn’t even do that, she arranged the holiday instead.”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps she thought that if you spent some time together it would be—”
“What? Easier to break it to me? That I’d be happily sipping sundowners and suddenly be okay with it?” In part, she knows this is what Jo would think—that sensible, reliable Hana would take the hit and that Maya and Bea would be there to act as shock absorbers so she could distance herself from the inevitable fallout.