“You know I don’t want you to go, right?”
“I know,” Hannah says gently. “But I need to do this, Will. I’ve spoken to Emily. I’m traveling down Thursday, and we’re going to do a tour of Pelham Friday afternoon. Emily’s going to set up a meeting with Dr. Myers.”
“On Friday?” Will looks, if anything, even more dismayed. “But I’m working. I won’t be able to get the time off at such short notice.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to come. You said yourself you didn’t want to dig all this up.”
“I don’t, but I don’t want you down there by yourself, meeting up with strange men—”
“Hardly strange, Will.”
“Possibly very, very strange, if your suspicions are correct.”
“And I won’t be by myself, I’ll be with Emily and November in a very public place. I mean, what do you think—he’s going to come lurching out of his study with an ax?”
“I have no idea!” Will says. He stands up now, as if his constrained emotions are too great to allow him to continue sitting placidly at the table, and begins to pace the living room. “All I know is, I don’t want my pregnant wife going to talk to a potential killer.”
“I have to do this!” Hannah stands too. She knows her voice is rising and her face is flushed. “Don’t you understand, Will?”
“No!” Will shouts back. “No, I don’t understand, I don’t understand at all!”
There is a moment’s silence as they both stand, glaring at each other, and then into the silence comes a resounding bang! bang! bang! that makes them both jump. Their downstairs neighbor is pounding on the ceiling with a broom handle, telling them to keep the noise down.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah says, at the same time that Will says, “Oh, Hannah, love,” and then somehow she’s in his arms, and he’s pressing his lips to the top of her head, and she can feel the tightness in her throat and the tears prickling at the backs of her eyes.
“Please,” he whispers into her hair. “Please.”
And she knows what he wants to say. Please don’t go. She knows him so well, she can hear the words straining at his lips, knows that he wants to fall on his knees and kiss her bump and beg her not to do this.
But instead he says, “Please, be careful, Hannah. I love you so much. If anything happened—”
“It won’t,” she says. She kisses him, gently, carefully, and then more urgently, feeling that familiar unfurling inside her, that longing for him that is never quite quenched, that ten years of him has not been enough to satisfy. “I love you,” she says, and he is saying the words back, speaking them against her cheekbone, her throat, the curve of her neck.
Now he sits, drawing her onto his lap, and she folds into him, thinking that they won’t be able to do this much longer, that soon her bump will be too ungainly.
“I love you,” she whispers again, and he looks up at her and smiles. And though he is older and his face has lines of weariness, it is the same smile that first caught her heart that day in the hall at Pelham. She wonders how many times she has traced his features in her mind’s eye since then—the crinkles at the corners of his mouth, the crooked bump of his long-healed broken nose. A hundred? A thousand? As she lay in bed in New Quad thinking about collections; as she paced the streets of Dodsworth, trying not to think about the upcoming trial; as she tried to sleep in her first rented flat in Edinburgh, reading his letters with her heart aching for everything she had left behind. Now she reaches out and touches his face—running her finger down the ridge of his brow and the crook of his nose.
And she thinks, You are mine. You were always mine.
“I’ll be careful,” she says now. “I swear. But I have to do this.”
And Will simply nods, defeated.
AFTER
The train journey is long, but she’s booked a first-class ticket, which means a free lunch at her seat. It’s on the left-hand side of the train, and as they leave Edinburgh, the line runs alongside the coast for a brief, glorious half hour, and there is nothing between her and the water but a thin sheet of glass.
She sits there, her head resting against the windowpane, watching the coastline rise and fall, and the waves beyond, sparkling in the autumn sun, and she thinks back to when Will first came to find her, the September after his degree ended.
She had been living in Edinburgh for just over a year then, but the city was still strange to her, and she had not explored the countryside around it at all. Let’s go for a picnic, Will had said. Get out of the city. I hear Tantallon Castle is beautiful. Will didn’t have the bike back then, and they went by train, the same line she is traveling now.
She remembers the way he spread the rug out over the short sheep-cropped turf, the carefully packed sandwiches, the homemade lemon drizzle cake, the silhouette of the castle dark against the pale blue sky. Are you happy? he had asked, and her heart had contracted with a love so intense she had been almost afraid of it. Afterwards they had climbed down a narrow rocky path to a deserted beach and swum, just the two of them, in the icy water of the North Sea, and then they had made love on the fine-grained sand in the Scottish sunshine and after, as she lay there in Will’s arms, feeling his racing heart slow beneath her cheek, she had thought, I am happy. For the first time in years, maybe for the first time since April died, I’m happy.
If only she could hold on to that feeling—to her love of Will, to that brief moment of perfect connection and peace. But as the train picks up speed and the line swings inland, the memory slips through her fingers like the fine white sand, faster and faster the more she tries to hold on to it.
She changes trains in London, and finds a seat on the Oxford service, staring out the window as the train snakes through west London. She had been half expecting a sense of familiarity or déjà vu, but of course the truth is that she only made this journey a handful of times as a student. Once for the open day, a second time for her interview at Pelham, and then again after she came back from Christmas—the time she met Ryan at the station. She doesn’t remember staring out the window then, but she must have done, and it’s strange to think that the last time she saw these buildings and bushes and fields was one of the last times she was truly carefree. It was before. Before everything changed.
When she arrives in Oxford she waits for everyone else to get off the train so that she can manhandle her suitcase down the steps in peace, but she’s surprised when she reaches the carriage door to find a young man waiting there for her, his hand held out.
“Here, let me take your case.”
“Oh, no, seriously, I’m fine,” Hannah says. She’s momentarily confused—why is he acting like she’s an old lady? Then she looks down and realizes. He has seen her bump. The knowledge gives her a strange jolt—she is now visibly, undeniably pregnant in a way even strangers can’t miss.
“Thanks,” she says at last and holds out the handle of her case. “Thank you very much.”
He takes it, swings it easily to the ground, and then extends his hand politely to assist her too.
Hannah wants to laugh as she puts one hand on his arm. How do you think I get up a whole flight to my flat without your assistance? she wants to ask him, but at the same time she’s touched. He’s seen something vulnerable in her, and he wants to take care of her, and that’s both reassuring and, at the same time, a little unnerving.
* * *
THE TAXI DROPS HER OUTSIDE an imposing stone building and Hannah walks in, looking around her as she does.
“Can I help you, madam?” a woman behind the check-in desk asks, and Hannah nods.
“Um, yes. I have a room. Hannah de Chastaigne. That’s C-H-A-S-T—”
“Ah, yes, I have it,” the woman breaks in with a smile. “A suite for two nights, is that correct?”
“A suite?” Hannah says, momentarily taken aback. “I booked a classic double.”