As they leave, coats slung on arms in the now very, very early autumn, it’s so nice to be back here, at work, where people spend some of the most intimate hours of their lives. She’s worked with Rakesh for over a decade. She knows he eats potatoes most lunchtimes and gets bogged down in the Daily Mail website during his three o’clock slump. She knows he mouths Fuck off whenever his phone rings and that he once sweated through his own trousers during a particularly tricky hearing, says he left a mark on the chair.
And so it’s nice, too, tonight, to step out of the detritus of her family life. To leave the mystery, and to innocently anticipate a glass of wine with her old friend, to discuss their clients warring over who fucked someone else first, to drink two glasses – no, three – to smoke cigarettes out in the beer garden and laugh about it. It’s so, so very nice to pretend.
Jen has had too much wine to drive and so she walks home. It’s just after nine o’clock. She is weaving along the pavement, looking up at her lit-up house just ahead, and thinking about her husband, who she has told she is working late.
She’s a divorce lawyer, she is thinking morosely, and yet she missed her own betrayal. Didn’t see it coming whatsoever. Not a bit.
She tries to re-jig the events into shape, knowing what she knows now. The wine has helped to loosen her mind. It feels elastic and free in the chilly night. For once, she feels broad-minded and open, not neurotic and closed.
The burner phone belongs to Kelly. So the missing baby poster and the police ID must belong to him, too. But why were they in Todd’s room?
She hears voices as she approaches her house. They’re coming from outside, somewhere in the open air. They’re too loud to be inside. She stops by Kelly’s car. It gives off some heat. She places a hand on the bonnet: just been driven.
The voices belong to her husband and son, the very subject of her thoughts, and they’re yelling, urgent.
They’re in the back garden. Jen hurries as quietly as she can to the gate. She stops there, a finger on the cool black latch, immediately absolutely stone-cold sober.
‘Why have you told me this?’ Todd says. Jen is disturbed to hear that his voice is laced with panicked tears.
‘Because I have to ask something of you,’ Kelly says. ‘All right? I wouldn’t tell you otherwise.’
‘What?’
‘You have to break up with Clio.’
‘What?’
‘You have to,’ Kelly says. ‘I can ask Nicola for help, but you cannot continue to see Clio. Given everything.’
Jen’s stomach rolls over. She is suddenly nauseous, and it has nothing to do with the drink.
‘That will arouse even more suspicion,’ Todd says. ‘Let alone fucking break my fucking heart.’
Jen feels like her knees are going to give way. The pain, the pain, the pain in her baby boy’s voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kelly says. ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry. I’m sorry. How many times can I say it?’
‘This is the most fucked-up thing that has ever happened to me,’ Todd says. Only he doesn’t merely say it: it’s a scream. A scream of anguish.
Something thumps, a fist on a table, maybe. ‘I tried!’ Kelly says. His voice is hoarse, ragged at the edges with emotion. Jen has heard this side of him only a handful of times. Once in the station, after Todd’s arrest. No wonder. He’s trying to stop it. And – clearly – doesn’t manage. ‘I tried so hard. Joseph either knows or is about to find out, Todd, and we’ve got to extract ourselves from him. Without him knowing why.’
‘Collateral be damned, right?’ Todd says. ‘Me.’ Jen thinks of how Clio wouldn’t discuss the break-up with her, and wonders if, somehow, Todd has told Clio something about this conversation. Something he shouldn’t have.
‘Right,’ Kelly says softly, and Jen wants to step away from her position at the gate, cold and alone, and go and shake her husband. That was rhetorical, she’d say. Todd was not offering that up to you, you complete idiot.
‘There is no indication that he knows,’ Todd says.
‘The second he does, he will come here, and he will …’
‘That’s a hypothetical. I can’t believe you have involved me in this. Lies? Kidnapped kids?’
Jen’s entire body goes still, covered in goosebumps. The baby.
‘It’s this or much, much worse,’ Kelly says, an inky-black note to his voice.
‘Oh yeah, keep it secret at all costs. Sail me and my first love up the river!’ Todd shouts. The back door slams. Feet on stairs inside.
Jen stays at the gate, trying to breathe.
It’s pointless asking them. Clearly, they will lie. And clearly, too, there is a secret at the heart of their relationship that they will do anything to keep. They will do anything, except tell Jen.
In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter, like a wounded animal slowly dying.
Day Minus Forty-Seven, 08:30
A lot can happen in three weeks. It is the biggest jump back so far.
Eight thirty in the morning, Day Minus Forty-Seven. Nearly seven weeks back in total.
Jen stops at the picture window on her way downstairs. The street looks completely different. The sepia-brown of late summer, grasses parched from lack of rain. The breeze against her arms is warm. She wonders what Andy would make of it.
She went to bed last night with Kelly. He did an admirable job of acting normally. You wouldn’t know anything had happened unless you’d overheard it.
He’d been lying on their bed, hands behind his head, elbows out to the side. A caricature of a relaxed husband. ‘Work good?’ he’d said.
‘Full of documents. What’d you do?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he had said. ‘Showered, dinner, scintillating stuff.’
She remembers this line from last time. She had thought Kelly was just being dry, but sitting underneath his words last night was a kind of quivering fury. A man who had lost control of a situation.
She’d gone to sleep next to him, her husband the betrayer, because she didn’t know what else to do. He’d spooned her as he always did, his body warm. Once he was asleep, she’d looked at the skin on his arms. His – like hers – didn’t look any different, but he was made of different stuff to what she had thought.
And now it is forty-seven days back. She feels utterly alienated again, like she did in those first few days. She has pink nail polish on her toes that she remembers getting done halfway through August, to see her through the final, warm, flip-flop days.
It’s mid-September. And what does she know? Kelly thinks Joseph is going to find something out, so he asked Todd to stop seeing Clio. He does, but then gets back together with her. Kelly asks Nicola Williams for help. Nicola is injured, and then Joseph shows up and Todd kills him.
Jen knows more than she did but, in many ways, it feels like less, it’s so confusing. The doorbell goes, interrupting her thoughts.
She checks the date again. Right – it’s the first day back at school, Todd’s first in Year Thirteen. She tries to spring herself back into action.
‘Who’s that?’ she calls.
‘Clio!’ Todd says. Jen leaps back from the window and into her bedroom. Did this happen the last time? Eight thirty … she’d have left already. Suited, booted, a typical weekday, latte in hand, divorces at the ready. But here, in the hub of family life, lies the secret. If he finds out, he’ll come here. That’s what Kelly said.
‘I’ll get it!’ Jen calls. Even though she’s in a tatty and ancient pair of maternity shorts – fucking hell, couldn’t she have worn something nicer to bed back in September? – and a T-shirt through which you can definitely see her boobs, she is going to answer that door. She pulls on a dressing gown and takes the stairs two at a time.
‘Hi,’ Clio says. And there she is. The woman her son has fallen in love with, breaks up with, gets back together with. Is forced to leave by his father. The woman – surely – at the heart of it.
Jen doesn’t know what to ask first.
‘Jen, right?’ Clio says. She – charmingly – reaches out to shake Jen’s hand. Her fingers are long and tanned from the summer, her grip loose, her skin dry, but soft, still child-like. She looks, otherwise, the same as in October. That fringe, those huge eyes, the whites of them shining healthily.
‘Yes, nice to meet you,’ Jen says.