‘Daddy,’ she says, a word she hasn’t uttered for decades.
‘Jen – call 999, please,’ he says. His eyes are brown, just like hers, imploring her. She gets her phone out. There is no question. There is absolutely no question. She has only the illusion of choice.
Day Minus Seven Hundred and Eighty-Three, 08:00
Jen is in September, the previous year. She orients herself, thinking of last night, of her father, of the way he looked at her in the hospital bed. Warm and alive. And now it’s before that again, and he’s alive again now, too, but not because she saved him. She wonders if, somehow, when she goes forward again, she will have still saved him, and he will be there, in the future, alive.
A pile of blue-and-white-striped presents sits in the corner of their bedroom. Oh. It must be Todd’s birthday, his sixteenth. What could be hidden on his birthday that might explain why he commits a crime? She thinks about what Andy said, about how maybe it isn’t about stopping it, but about defending it instead.
She stares at the pile of presents, wrapped last night somewhere in the past; in a yesterday she might never get to. The gifts are PlayStation games and an Apple watch. Too expensive, but she’d wanted to get the watch for him, couldn’t wait to see his face. They will go out for dinner, just to Wagamama’s, nowhere special. It’s cold. The weather turned early that year, becoming autumn almost overnight.
She begins sorting through Todd’s presents, on her hands and knees on the floor. These two squishy presents are socks. This rectangle is the Apple watch … she sets the others out on the wooden floor, looking at them, mystified. That little round one looks like lip balm. Surely not. She has no idea. She can’t remember.
She hopes he will like them, nevertheless.
She stacks up the presents and walks down the stairs to knock on Todd’s door. ‘Er, come in?’ he says in a baffled voice. Right. Of course. Jen only started knocking last year. Next year. Whatever.
‘Happy birthday!’ she says, nudging the door handle down with the stack of presents.
‘Wait, wait, wait for me,’ Kelly says, rushing up the stairs with two coffees and a squash on a tray. At the picture window, beyond him, the sky is a perfect, high autumn blue. Like nothing untoward has ever happened, will ever happen.
When she walks into Todd’s bedroom, he’s in pale green pyjamas, sitting up in bed, hair mussed up just like Kelly’s. Jen pauses at the door, gazing at him. Sixteen. A kid, really, nothing more. So perfectly, perfectly innocent, it hurts her heart to look at him.
Despite his birthday, Todd has to go to school and, while he’s getting ready, Jen sees that she has a trial today; a rare event in any divorce lawyer’s calendar is a full-scale trial. It’s Addenbrokes vs Addenbrokes, a case that took over her life for the past year. A couple who’d been married for over forty years, who still laughed at each other’s jokes; but the wife couldn’t get past Jen’s client’s infidelity. Andrew regretted it so much it was painful. If he was in Jen’s position, it would be the first and only thing he would change about the past.
She heads downstairs, the house empty again, thinking that she can’t attend a trial. It won’t matter. She won’t wake up on tomorrow, anyway. What are the odds?
Just as she’s thinking this, her phone rings. Andrew.
‘You on your way?’ he says to her. Her chest tingles. It isn’t that, in line with Andy’s theory, she is living without consequences, but rather that she isn’t directly witnessing the effects of her actions. Not today, at least.
‘I …’ she starts to say. She can’t bear to do it to him.
‘It’s – I mean, it’s the day?’ he says. And it isn’t that she might get sacked, in the future somewhere, if she misses today. It isn’t that she knows the outcome – Andrew loses. It is that she knows him to be heartbroken, and that he sounds so flat and sad, like all her clients, like her. And so Jen, as she has a thousand times before with a thousand other clients, tells him she will be there in ten minutes.
Liverpool county court is municipal-looking but nevertheless imposing. Jen hardly ever comes here – like most solicitors, she tries to settle early, and settle often, before acrimony and court fees set in. But Andrew and his wife wouldn’t. Their primary argument was about a substantial pension fund, due to reach maturity next year. Jen remembers being surprised Andrew wouldn’t give it up, but most people who have betrayed or have been betrayed are irrational. It’s the single most important lesson she’s learned in her career.
‘Look,’ she says to Andrew, after she’s greeted the barrister – thank God, somebody who can remember the case is conducting the hearing. ‘We’re going to lose this.’
She would never usually say something like this. So bold, so pessimistic. But they are: of course, she knows they are. ‘If I were the judge, I would find in favour of your wife,’ she tells him.
‘Oh, well, great, nice to know now that you’re on my side,’ Andrew says acidly. He’s approaching sixty-five but still young with it, plays squash three times a week, tennis on the other nights. He’s most certainly lonely, hasn’t seen the other woman since it happened, after which he issued a full confession to his wife. Jen sometimes wonders, if she were Dorothy, whether she would have forgiven Andrew. Probably, but it’s easy for Jen to say, having been so privy to her client’s heartbreak, his dysfunction, the way he’s left all the photographs of Dorothy up all around his house.
She guides Andrew into one of the meeting rooms that flanks the corridor into the court. It’s dusty and cold, feels like it hasn’t been opened for at least a few weeks. The lights hum as she flicks them on. ‘I think you should offer something up,’ she says to Andrew.
He takes some convincing but, finally, after Jen’s insistent, dispassionate arguments that he is going to spend more on barrister’s fees than he’s trying to save, he offers up seventy-five per cent of the pension fund. Jen takes the offer to the meeting room, where his wife is sitting. She thinks it’ll be enough.
Dorothy is with her lawyers. She’s a diminutive-looking woman, good posture and even better make-up, her physique hinting at a kind of wiry strength, the kind of sixty-five-year-old who walks ten miles on a bank holiday.
‘Seventy-five per cent of the Aviva,’ Jen says to the solicitor, a man called Jacob who Jen went to law school with. Back then, he ate the same lunch every single day – chicken nuggets and chips – and got forty-nine per cent in the family law exam. Jen wouldn’t want him representing her, and it strikes her that most professions are probably full of these people.
Jacob raises his eyebrows at Dorothy. Evidently, a threshold of acceptability has already been agreed, because Dorothy nods, her hands clasped together. She signs the consent order Jen drafts carefully, feeling pretty pleased with how much easier she has made this day for everybody. When she brings it back into their meeting room, at not even ten in the morning, she sees that, next to her signature, Dorothy has written a small note. Andrew looks at it, the paper conducting the trembling of his hands as he holds it. Jen tries not to look like she’s reading it, too, but she does. It says only: Thank you x.