‘It’s beautiful here,’ says Ed, taking a deep breath. He grabs her hand and she smiles up at him. Her lovely, dependable, affable Ed. In some ways he reminds her of Huw. Maybe that was why she fell for him when they first met. Huw had made her feel safe, and Ed does too. They are now in a new stage of their marriage, almost like they’re falling in love all over again. After she came back from Weston-super-Mare that evening, she sat Ed down and told him everything – well, nearly everything. About Arlo and Willow, and the part she had played in Viola’s disappearance. She admitted how she’s been feeling overwhelmed by her job and her role as the dutiful daughter. She told Ed that she needed him to step up and stop taking her for granted. He’d been shocked to hear she felt that way, and the next day, after coming home late from work, she noticed he’d cleaned the kitchen and put the dishwasher on. Little things.
She also knows her new-found happiness is because she’s finally let go of her insecurities. She no longer has to feel solely responsible for her mother now that Willow’s on the scene. And she doesn’t have to feel that her inheritance is threatened – even though, ironically, it is, more so now than it ever was with the other girls. After all, Elspeth has a new granddaughter to dote on so she’ll be well cared for after Elspeth dies. But it no longer seems to matter to Kathryn in quite the same way. Maybe because she’s finally grasped that there’s more to life than money. There’s family: Ed and the boys are hers. She was in danger of losing all of that because of her obsession with wealth, always second-guessing what her mother would do with the money. Plus the guilt of thinking she was running the art gallery into the ground, when the drop in profits was down to Arlo and Daisy. Elspeth is a law unto herself. She uses money to control the people around her but Kathryn refuses to play that game. From now on, Ed and the boys come first.
Things have taken an unexpected turn with Willow. Kathryn had always been so fearful that Viola would return and claim her share of the house, or the girls her mother became infatuated with would be left everything after Elspeth died. But with Willow she’s found the opposite is true. She has an ally. Willow is clever, more savvy than she’d thought. She knows exactly what Elspeth is like, and the two of them have decided to stick together against Elspeth’s ludicrous demands. So far it seems to have worked. Willow is her niece but she is everything that Kathryn has always wanted in a sister.
For the first time in years, Kathryn can truly relax. Well, almost.
There’s still one cloud she’s living under. She’ll never be able to tell anyone the truth about that, even Ed.
And that’s about the night Matilde died.
It had been a rainy night in August and Ed was away on a stag do. It was in the midst of all the problems they’d been having with Jacob. The constant running away and the drug-taking. She’d let Jacob go to his friend Wilf’s house, a boy she trusted from school, because they were supposed to be working on a project together. Except when he wasn’t home by eleven – long past his curfew of ten – she began to worry. She rang Wilf’s home, only to be told Jacob had left around nine. Two hours unaccounted for. She was desperate, knowing he must have gone down to the estate to meet up with those druggy mates of his. She didn’t want to wake Harry so she’d slipped out of the house, grabbing her car keys from the dish on the side table in the hall. But when she opened the front door she was puzzled to see the driveway empty. Ed had taken his car to Manchester for the stag do, but where was her Golf? It was at least fifteen years old so she doubted anyone would want to steal it. And then the thought hit her. Had Jacob taken it? She tried ringing his mobile but it went straight to voicemail. And just as she was contemplating calling the police, he rang her. She couldn’t understand what he was saying at first he was crying so much, she only caught bits of the conversation – ‘I hit someone’ … ‘They just walked out into the road’ … ‘What am I going to do?’
And it suddenly dawned on her what he was saying, and she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She told him to stay where he was. He’d driven to the Downs, where he’d stopped in the middle of nowhere. Then she called a taxi to drop her off just around the corner. When she eventually reached him, panting and soaked through by the rain, he was sobbing hysterically onto the steering wheel.
She got into the passenger seat. He reeked of alcohol. ‘What the fuck have you done?’ she snapped.
He told her, through sobs, that he’d taken her car for a spin. That one of his new ‘mates’ wanted a ride to score some drugs – she was amazed by how honest he was being about it – and he’d wanted to look ‘hard’ in front of this mate. So he’d stolen her car, thinking he could return it before she even noticed.
‘You stupid, stupid boy,’ she’d cried. ‘You don’t even know how to drive.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was raining. And I couldn’t see, and I’d had a few drinks. Then suddenly there was something in the road and I hit it. I –’
‘It was probably an animal,’ she said, hoping she was right.
That made him cry even harder as though that was the worst prospect.
He had to get out of the car to be sick then, and she waited for him, unable to work out if she felt more fury or pity. What if he had knocked someone over and left them for dead? When he eventually stopped throwing up, she made him lie down in the back seat while she drove slowly home. The roads were quiet, no sign of any accident. Maybe he was confused. She put him to bed with a bucket on the floor and prayed that nobody had been hurt. Then she’d gone back outside and checked over her car. It was hardly damaged, just a little dent to the front bumper. Surely there would have been more damage if he’d knocked over a person.
But just a few hours later she received the phone call from her mother to say that Matilde had been found dead in the middle of the road outside their house and that the police suspected a hit-and-run. And she knew. She knew Jacob had killed her.
She had two choices. To ring the police and confess all. Or cover it up. If she shopped Jacob to the police it would ruin his life. He’d go to a young offenders’ institute and, with his tendency towards drugs and crime, he might never recover. She had to protect her son.
So, Kathryn left the boys in their beds and drove the car to the compound they sometimes used to store paintings. When things died down she’d sell it. But until then, she’d keep it locked away. Out of sight. She’d invent some story for Ed about how it had broken down and she’d had to get rid of it.