‘I’ve seen you out there before,’ said Rowan, ‘haven’t I?’
‘Yeah.’ Bryony’s expression was a mixture of sheepishness and irritation.
‘So . . . ?’ coaxed Adam.
‘I just miss her, that’s all.’ Her voice was belligerent, as if she resented being put on the spot. ‘I feel close to her here.’
‘You can knock on the door any time,’ said Rowan.
Bryony shot her a look that said she couldn’t possibly understand. ‘It’s not like that. It’s . . . private. I don’t want to talk.’ She bit her lower lip as Adam extracted another chip of gravel. ‘Marianne was my friend,’ she said, fixing her eyes on the floor.
Adam nodded but said nothing, leaving a vacuum for her to fill. Rowan remembered what Turk had told her about Marianne and Bryony, how close they were. Best buds, he’d called them; they’d shared clothes and shopped together, gone to gigs and shows.
‘Marianne knew what it was like,’ Bryony said after a while, ‘when your parents split up. Everything turning upside down.’
Rowan frowned. ‘But wasn’t she . . .’ Adam glanced up and she gave him a look of apology, ‘. . . sort of . . . involved?’
Bryony shook her head. ‘Not really. Not so it made a difference. The papers loved all that, didn’t they, the scandal?’ She pronounced the word with heavy irony, and for a second, Rowan had the impression she was hearing not Bryony’s voice but Marianne’s.
‘Mum and Dad were on the rocks anyway,’ she said. ‘They’d been talking about divorce for months before Mazz came on the scene, whatever Grandpa likes to think.’
It was nearly midnight by the time the first aid was finished and, standing up from the table, Adam told Bryony they would take her home. ‘I can walk,’ she said. ‘It’s ten minutes.’
‘No way, José.’
‘I’ve only had a glass, Ad,’ Rowan said. ‘I can drive.’
The Greenwoods lived in Southmoor Road, it turned out. As they crossed north Oxford, Bryony, simultaneously irritated at being treated like a child and patently glad that she hadn’t had to walk, answered Adam’s questions about what she was going to do when she left school. She wasn’t going to take a gap year, apparently; she was going straight to Edinburgh in the autumn to do English. ‘I’m ready to get away from Oxford,’ she said. ‘I don’t love it. Especially now.’
The houses in Walton Manor were significantly smaller than those in Park Town, though still large by most standards. Years ago, when they’d been growing up, the area had had the lovely academic shabbiness of so much of Oxford then but even in the dark, it was obvious from the up-lights and potted trees that money and interior designers had landed here, too.
They waited while Bryony found her keys and let herself into the house. Outlined by the light in the hall, she gave them a brief wave then shut the door.
As they cruised carefully away between the cars parked nose to tail along both kerbs, Adam reached over the gearstick and let his hand rest on Rowan’s knee.
‘Apart from nearly having crushed her,’ he said, ‘I’m relieved.’
She glanced at him. ‘How so?’
A pause. ‘I promised Mazz I wouldn’t say anything to anyone but a few days before she died, she told me she’d been thinking about her relationship with James.’
Rowan’s antennae went up. ‘Really?’
‘She loved Bryony, too, and that complicated things even more, but she was beginning to feel like the age gap was just too big. She wanted to have children and James’ daughter was about to leave home – Mazz worried that he was finished with that stage of his life while she hadn’t even started. That was part of it.’
He turned to look out of the window, deliberately, Rowan thought. The seconds stretched. ‘Part?’ she said.
He hesitated. ‘She didn’t say anything but knowing her so well . . . She’d started to talk a lot about Michael Cory. I think she liked him. No, more than liked: she was falling in love with him.’
Rowan’s mind started to whirr, the potential implications running like lines of code. ‘Why are you relieved?’ she asked.
‘Because the only microscopically small good thing in all this – apart from this, you and me – is that the Greenwoods never had to know.’
Lowering the blankets gently back over him, Rowan eased herself out of bed. Adam stirred. ‘Are you all right? Can’t you sleep?’
‘I’m okay, just a bit of a headache. I’ve got some aspirin downstairs – I’ll be back in a minute.’