“Hugh?” she manages. She takes a step forward, away from the cliff. The movement seems to tear at the muscles of her womb and a fresh wash of pain ripples across her stomach, radiating out from where Hugh hit her.
“You absolute imbecile,” Hugh says now. He wipes what could be tears of laughter from beneath his glasses, but might be rain, or just plain tears. “You idiot, Will. You could have lived, don’t you realize that? And instead, you’ve solved everything.”
“What the fuck do you mean?” Will says. He takes a step closer and Hugh turns swiftly, pointing the gun at Hannah’s stomach.
“Don’t come any closer unless you want to see your baby right now,” he says, and his voice is suddenly cold.
“Okay, okay,” Will says, and he puts up his hands. Hannah is trembling. Her eyes meet Will’s. I’m so sorry, she tries to say. Will closes his eyes, shakes his head very slightly. It doesn’t matter, it’s okay.
Then he turns back to Hugh.
“What do you mean? Solved everything?” He’s trying to sound calm, hopeful, but there’s a tremor in his voice. But Hugh is shaking his head.
“It doesn’t have to be a suicide anymore,” Hugh says wearily. “Don’t you get it? I mean I could have just shot her, but if the body washed up, a gunshot would have been hard to explain. But this—this is much better. You killed your first girlfriend, and then when your wife got suspicious…” He shrugs. “You shot her, and then you killed yourself. It’s almost too perfect.”
He raises the gun. Now it is pointing at Hannah’s chest.
“Hugh, no,” Will says. His voice is full of an agony so raw it makes Hannah’s heart hurt. “Hugh, you were my friend.”
“I’m sorry,” Hugh says. “But you just made it too easy.” He clicks off the safety.
Hannah closes her eyes. For a fleeting minute she wonders if dying this way will hurt, and how quickly her baby will die too.
And then she hears Will’s anguished roar as he tackles Hugh. The gun goes off, a bullet whipping past Hannah’s shoulder, and she ducks instinctively, even though the bullet is long gone, splashing into the sea.
Hugh and Will are rolling on the muddy ground, grappling each other, the gun sandwiched somewhere between them, Hugh’s finger still on the trigger.
“Will!” she screams, as the two men wrestle wordlessly in the rainy darkness. She has no idea what to do. She wants to run to help Will, pull Hugh off him, but she can’t risk another blow to her stomach. The side of her bump where Hugh hit her is throbbing now with a dull red heat and she is feeling an ominous tightening deep in her pelvis. “Will!” she screams again, his name tearing at her throat.
Hugh is below, and then on top, and then suddenly she sees the gun—he has dropped the gun, or Will has forced him to drop it, she’s not sure. It is lying on the wet grass as the two men roll away from it towards the cliff edge.
Hannah knows what she has to do.
She runs for it, her bare feet slipping in the slick muddy grass, her belly griping with every unwary movement. But Hugh has realized what has happened, and he scrambles for it too, reaching it, grabbing it—the gun comes up, pointing towards Hannah. Will tackles him again, with the desperate strength of a man with nothing left to lose, throwing himself between Hugh and Hannah with a terrible reckless abandon—and then she hears it—the second gunshot, and then a third. Far louder this time, two tearing bangs that leave her ears screaming with shock.
Will goes limp.
And the blood begins to pool.
THE END
In the car, on the way to the crematorium, it starts raining. Hannah is glad. She sits there, staring out the window at the weeping world, and feels the tears slide down her own cheeks, soaking into the collar of her black coat.
“Are you okay?” Emily whispers from the seat beside her, and then shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Stupid question. How could you be okay?”
The driver of the funeral car says nothing. He is used to people weeping in the back of his limousine. The box of tissues between the seats is testament to that. Hannah isn’t sure what he’s been told—but he must know something about the circumstances of what’s brought them here. The fact that this isn’t a normal funeral—someone weary from old age, or taken early by cancer or heart disease or a thousand and one other inevitabilities of life.
No, this is a tragedy, nothing more, nothing less. And suddenly the unfairness of it all washes over her—the fact that Will should be here, with her, holding her hand, but he’s not—and she has to go through this alone. And all because of Hugh, and her own unbearable, inexcusable stupidity.
It’s like a bolt of anger tearing through her, and as the car draws up outside the crematorium, it’s that more than anything that gives her the strength to stand up and make her unsteady, top-heavy way across the gravel to where the others are waiting—Ryan in his wheelchair, Bella with a sympathetic hug.
She can get through this. She will get through this.
And then the baby inside her gives a long slow kick, more of a press, pushing outwards against the wall of her womb so that she can actually see the tight-stretched black fabric ripple and move against the pressure, and she corrects herself.
They will get through this. Together.
“Are you ready?” Emily says, and Hannah nods.
“As I’ll ever be.”
“We’ve got you,” Ryan says. And she nods again, and even manages a smile.
“His parents are already inside,” Bella says. “We should head in. Are you ready, Ry?”
Ryan nods, clicks the controller on his wheelchair, and they begin to move slowly up the ramp, towards the chapel of the crematorium.
Hannah is not sure what to expect when they enter the chapel. There are only two other people there in the cool dark, heads bowed, and they are the two people she has been dreading seeing. Because what can she say? What is there to say when the worst thing that can happen to a parent has happened to them?
But in the end, she doesn’t need to say anything.
His mother simply comes to her and holds her in a wordless hug. And they stand there, the two of them, bathed in the light from the memorial window, the stained glass surrounding them both with a sea of blue and green. And then the organ music starts, Hannah wipes her eyes, and they turn to face the front, as the vicar intones, “We are here to commemorate the passing of Hugh Anthony Bland.”
And Hannah knows it is really over.
THE BEGINNING
“Maternity’s the other way!” the lady at the desk calls to Hannah as she passes through the front entrance and walks up the corridor towards the lift.
“Oh, I know,” she shouts back over her shoulder. “I’m not here for me, I’m visiting my husband.”
In the lift she stands, feeling the slow heave and shift of the baby inside her. Its movements have changed over the last week or so—not slowed down, as the midwives keep stressing. But instead of the frantic flurrying activity she has become used to, the movements are becoming more deliberate. Her child is growing into its limbs, and growing out of space to shift and turn. It’s flipped head down, the midwife said at their last appointment. I can’t promise it’ll stay like that, but… fingers crossed.
She puts her hand on the hard round bump jutting out just below her ribs. Its buttocks, the midwife had said, tracing the long rounded curve of her belly. And there’s its spine.
The lift pings and she heaves herself into action, out of the doors and up the corridor to the right, where Will’s ward is situated.
He is sitting up in bed, talking to a doctor, nodding.
Hannah hangs back for a moment, unsure whether to interrupt, but Will sees her and his face lights up.
“Han, come and sit down. Dr. James, this is my wife, Hannah.”
“Ah, so you’re the lucky woman,” the doctor says. “Fingers crossed we can have him up and about for the big day.” He nods at her stomach.
“Dr. James was just saying I could probably get a discharge tomorrow,” Will says, grinning.