She thought about this. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said simply. ‘Mac told me it went on for a while.’
Luke shook his head, his face desperate. ‘But that’s not true, I don’t know why he would say that. I told him it was only once and that’s the truth!’
But she had pulled her hand away. ‘And then there’s Amy, Jade, Ellen – the way you treated them.’
His eyes widened. ‘I admit I behaved terribly to Amy. I was so scared of letting my parents down, they were still so devastated over Emily. But Ellen was a complete nutcase. She lied, Clara, she fucking lied! I kissed her once, when I was drunk, when Jade and I were going through a rough patch. She wanted more, she wanted me to stay the night with her, and when I said no, she just … I don’t know, she started this vendetta. She made the whole thing up.’ His face was pleading. ‘For God’s sake, Clara, I’m telling the truth!’
Clara looked at him sadly. ‘But that’s the thing, I have no idea whether to believe you, and I don’t want to live like that, wondering whether I can trust you or not. I just can’t.’
A miserable silence fell between them. At last Luke spoke. ‘Do you think I’m like him?’ he asked quietly. ‘Because of what happened with Sadie. Do you think I’m as bad as my father?’
‘I don’t think your father has anything to do with the mistakes you made, Luke,’ she replied. ‘But I do think you can change, I think you can learn from this. I hope you can.’
After a while they got up and continued walking, and by the time they started to make their way back towards The Willows, they had both known it was over.
When they got to her car, they stopped and faced each other.
‘I have something to tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a letter from my sister, from Emily.’
Clara gasped, shock rendering her speechless. ‘Seriously?’ she said at last. ‘I mean, my God! Are you sure it’s her?’
He nodded and smiled properly for the first time. ‘She sent a photo. She’s got a kid, a girl aged twelve. She’d seen the trial on TV and now everything’s out in the open, she wants me and Tom to meet her.’
‘And your parents?’
He looked down and shook his head.
So Hannah had been lying about Emily after all.
The sun slid lower, a throbbing red orb on the horizon now, and around them the late summer evening was heavy with the sound of crickets, the scent of scorched grass. She drank in the beautiful view she knew she would never see again. ‘I’m happy for you, Luke,’ Clara said quietly. ‘I really am. I’m glad that something good has come from all of this.’
At last they’d hugged goodbye, and she’d seen that he was trying to be brave, that he was doing his best to let her go. She’d taken one last long look at The Willows before she got back in her car and drove away.
Now, five months later as she stood outside the courts, she put her phone back in her bag. The future stretched out before her and for the first time in a long while she felt an undeniable feeling of hope. Everything had changed. She’d found a new, better-paid job and moved into a shared house with some friends in Greenwich not too far from where Zoe lived. She’d even, in the odd snatched moments after work and at weekends, begun jotting down the beginning of the novel she’d always wanted to write. She would be thirty later this month, and it felt as though her life was starting anew. It was a good feeling.
Suddenly the traffic cleared and she saw, on the other side of the road, a familiar figure standing by his car, talking on his phone. Mac. He looked up and smiled, and she raised her hand and waved, stepping towards him, to where he was waiting for her, her heart lifting at the sight of her friend.
34
London, 2017
As Clara began to cross the road towards him, Mac hastily hung up his phone, put it in his pocket and, despite the dead weight of panic bearing down upon him, forced himself to smile. It was the fifth time Hannah had contacted him from her remand centre and every time she did so his fear of her, of how she might punish him, deepened.
When they’d met six months before it had been the start of a brief but intense affair, appearing as she had out of the blue, a welcome distraction from the futile misery of his growing infatuation with Clara. It had been at the opening night of a friend’s photography exhibition, and the attraction he’d felt for the pretty brunette serving behind the bar had been instant and intoxicating.
Soon they were meeting once a week. The sex had been, frankly, the best of his life, but he’d sensed with some relief that she didn’t want the relationship to develop into anything more. At first he’d been hesitant to confide in her about his misery over Clara, but she had been so sweetly sympathetic, so gently encouraging that bit by bit he’d told her of the hopelessness of it all, including his anger at Luke’s one-night stand with Sadie. He’d quickly grown to rely on her steady support, her wise advice.
He noticed that she didn’t like to talk about herself, the questions he asked of her when they first began to meet always gently batted away. She was older than he was and he sensed she had a private life beyond their weekly meet-ups, so he got used to not prying. And anyway, she was such a good listener, there was so much he wanted to tell her about his own unhappiness. ‘Poor Mac,’ she’d say, stroking his hair, kissing his face, pulling him into bed. ‘Poor lovely Mac.’
And then, a revelation, a shock so great, so unexpected, it had knocked the breath from him. They’d been in bed, their naked limbs entwined, and he had just begun drifting into sleep. ‘I have something to tell you,’ she had said. She sat up, her long brown hair spilling over her breasts, her lovely eyes fastened on his face, her shadow thrown huge across the wall behind her.
‘What?’ he’d said sleepily, then smiled. ‘Sounds serious.’
‘It’s about your friend, Luke.’
‘Luke?’ A jolt of surprise. ‘What about him?’ And he’d recall later how he’d felt the first stirrings of unease, like a gust of cold air ruffling his hair, making his scalp prickle.
‘He’s my half-brother,’ she said. ‘Oliver is my father too.’
He’d given a short startled bark of laughter. Because surely it had to be a joke. And then he’d looked into her eyes and realized that it wasn’t. His first thoughts, of course, were that she was quite mad, and he’d felt a pull of disappointment that this lovely woman who’d seemed to understand him so well, who had been such a comfort, was in fact completely insane. And how was he going to disentangle himself from this? What sort of scene would there be? ‘Erm, listen, Hannah, I …’
‘When I was seven years old,’ she went on calmly as though he hadn’t spoken, ‘I found out that Oliver Lawson was my real father, that he’d had an affair with my mother. She died when I was a few weeks old and he gave me away to the people who I would grow up believing were my real parents.’
He’d sat up then. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve known Luke’s family for years. I would know, I would – fuck, you’re not joking, are you?’
‘No,’ she’d said. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Christ! I don’t … wait. You knew I was a friend of Luke’s when we met … that’s why you approached me?’
She leant forward and took his hand and he saw now that tears were spilling from her eyes. ‘Oh Mac, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for lying to you. I never thought I’d grow to have such deep feelings for you, that I’d start to fall for you the way I have. I just wanted some help, I thought you could help me and I understand that you might hate me now but …’ Overcome, she’d buried her face in her hands, weeping quietly.