The picture that Tom showed me that night on the pier slowly downloads on to the screen of my phone.
It’s of me lying on a double bed stark naked. The photo is taken from the foot of the bed and I’m on my back, looking at the camera with half-opened eyes. I have one hand curled up, holding my hair away from my neck and the other resting on the inside of my thigh. It was taken the night Tom and I went drinking at The Crow’s Nest.
All these years, I had no idea that he had taken these photos. I wonder now if it was more than just alcohol that had rendered me so useless.
I read the message.
There’s a date, a week before I met Luke at the pub, the night Tom took me out drinking, with the words Who’s the daddy? Underneath is Hannah’s name and date of birth. It doesn’t take a genius to work it out.
‘That’s odd,’ says Luke, his voice somehow penetrating my thoughts. ‘I’ve got an email from Tom.’
‘Don’t open it!’ I shout. I race across the kitchen. ‘It’s a virus,’ I say. ‘Delete it. Don’t even open it, it will corrupt your computer and all your files.’ I grab the mouse, almost pushing Luke over.
‘All right, calm down,’ says Luke. ‘How do you know it’s a virus?’
‘What else can it be?’ I delete the email and then go to recently deleted files and delete it from there too. ‘His account must have been hacked. I mean, he’s dead, right? It’s not like he can speak to us from the grave.’
Luke makes the tea and I repeat the procedure on my phone. Tom must have been able to set some sort of time delay on his emails, like a newsletter or something. I’ll have to go through all his files and make sure everything has been deleted and then destroy the hard drive of his laptop, despite what he said about never storing anything on there, I’m not taking any chances. After that, I’ll destroy all the memory sticks. I’m just glad we didn’t hand anything over to the police. After I had been plucked from the sea, Leonard had the foresight to go to Tom’s flat and grab the memory sticks and laptop. He wanted to keep the whole business of Tom stealing money out of the equation. We played it down and put Tom’s death down to an accident. The police seemed happy with that.
I sit down next to Luke and smile. He doesn’t ever have to know or doubt whether he’s Hannah’s father or not. I don’t know for sure and I have no intention of going down the DNA-testing route. What good will it do? Luke is Hannah’s father, biological or not. It doesn’t matter.
‘Love you,’ I say.
Luke leans over and kisses me. ‘Love you too, Babe.’
I hold onto his arms, squeezing them tight around me as I close my eyes in a bid to banish the image of the photograph from my mind and all that it represents.
Sometimes the darkest places are not in the pitch black of the night, when the moon is clouded over. Or when you close your eyes and track the sparks of colour dancing behind your eyelids. Sometimes the darkest places are when your eyes are wide open. When the sun shines brightly and the dust motes float in the beams of light.
THE END