That evening Will spends a long time counseling Bella in her bedroom. Afterward, he eats some leftovers of the lamb, lost in thought at the table, looking straight through the spray of evergreen branches and berries in the vase, the freshly baked bread in its basket, the claret that Jessie drove for an hour to buy. The temperature plummets. They can see their breath in the hall. That night, under a pile of blankets, Romy wriggling beside them, Will tosses and turns, the adrenaline of city life still crackling through his veins. When Jessie rests her head against his chest, even as he sleeps, she can hear his anxiety, his rising blood pressure, like the gush of a swollen river. He talks in his sleep, and she’s sure he’s muttering Mandy’s name, hungering for the past, the comforts of the marriage that was stolen from him, which the love letters show were irreplaceable. She presses her body against him. He rolls away in his sleep.
Lying awake, she listens to the hiss of the wind in the trees and picks over her marriage, her mind opening doors to rooms she knows she shouldn’t enter. Does Will still fancy her? Why hasn’t he found a buyer for the company yet? Is it just an excuse to stay in London? At what point do they declare this divided life unworkable? Then Friday morning breaks, Romy wanders back to her bedroom, and Will’s longed-for body finally turns toward her. He rests his chin on his hand, hollowed-out eyes serious and searching, and asks, “Are you happy here, sweetheart?”
“Happy?” Jessie yawns, surprised. Her happiness has never seemed particularly important, resting, as it does, so much on other people’s right now, Bella’s in particular. “I’m happy to have you home.”
“It isn’t a weakness to admit you’re not, you know, that you—we, I mean—that we’ve made a mistake.” He takes her hand, opens it, and circles the inside of her palm lightly with his index finger, like she does to Romy, round and round the garden. “Maybe Applecote is too remote, too much house and land . . .”
She realizes where this is going. What she should say to make it easy for him. After all, they could sell up and move back, even if not to central London—prices have rocketed, leaving them behind—then closer to it, some more affordable suburb. “I’ve never experienced sadness without wanting to escape it before. I don’t need to be happy here, Will.”
Will frowns, puzzled. He doesn’t understand. He would have once. He would have known exactly what she meant. “Are you? Happy, I mean,” she asks, and immediately realizes it’s a mistake.
His tawny gaze slips away, like an owl in the woods, leaving her feeling instantly, intensely bereft. “I was a Londoner a long time, longer than maybe I realized.”
He means he was married to Mandy a long time, of course, stupid of her to expect him to lie, stupid of her to ask. So she says, too sharply, hiding her hurt, “I lived in London, too, Will. I didn’t lose a wife. But I did lose other things, things that mattered: my career, my friends . . . my freedom. It’s not the same, I know. And I don’t want it back, but it meant something to me, and I gave it all up, too.”
Will leans back heavily on the pillow, stares up at the ceiling, not at her. They listen to Bella clattering down the stairs in her hard-soled school shoes. “I never wanted you to give up anything, Jessie,” he says in a way that fills her eyes with tears. “That was the last thing I wanted.”
“It came out wrong. I’m sorry,” Jessie says, although she knows it’s too late, that the words are circling. And there’s a terrible silence that suddenly feels like an ending.
Jessie blows into the lattice of kindling in the grate until flames leap and dance. She’s gotten satisfyingly good at making fires. But in the mirror above the fireplace she sees herself more critically: the streak of soot across her cheekbone, the wild reddish hair frizzed by the wood smoke. The black dress she’s put on for the Friday evening jars with the rawness of her face, the animal brightness of her eyes. Hearing Will’s tread on the stairs, returning from Bella’s room, she frantically smooths her hair with the flat of her palm.
Will slumps to the sheepskin rug on the floor beside her, leans back against an armchair, his left foot tapping anxiously. She catches his eye and they smile at each other, the hesitant unsure smile of lovers who have been apart too long and fear the other might have met someone else in their absence. In that moment Jessie can see a defensive layer forming around Will. He had it when they first met, too. She never expected it to come back.
They talk. But gaps open in the flow of conversation like tiny splits in a seam. Jessie can’t remember that ever happening before. There’s always been too much to say. So she tries to repair it with chatter about Romy’s hide-and-seek antics—their little scamp so fast, so inventive—the latest on the flooding, the rising water table, the intriguing letters Joe Peat discovered hidden in the orangery window seat.
But she begins to feel something, a tension, like the moments before an electrical storm. “What’s wrong, Jessie?” he asks abruptly.
“Wrong?” There are so many things wrong, so many hidden feelings, stuffed into her pocket like unexploded fireworks. “What do you mean?”
His eyes roam her face, trying to work her out. “I don’t know. You don’t seem yourself. You haven’t for months. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m worried about you!” she says with a short, surprised laugh, throwing it back at him.
“That’s not really an answer.”
“And how would you know how I am, anyway? You’ve hardly been here.”
He frowns more deeply. He suddenly looks very, very tired, a man with the world on his shoulders.
“Bella’s said something, hasn’t she?”
Will’s mouth opens, shuts, caught between loyalties. “She says you won’t let her be alone with Romy.” He waits for Jessie to reassure him and deny it.
But Jessie’s cheeks heat. She won’t lie to him anymore. “I . . . I’m really sorry she feels that.”
“It’s true?” His eyes harden. She feels he’s looking at her dispassionately for the first time.
Jessie wraps her arms tightly around her knees. “Since that day. Romy, on the stones. I know it sounds silly, but I can’t forget it, Will,” she explains quietly.
It is the disappointment in his face that breaks her heart, the cool way he says, “You need to have a bit more faith in my daughter.”
“Faith? All I’ve ever had is faith!” She recoils at the injustice of it. They are spiraling back in time then, two people knocked off their feet by a gale, and Jessie is standing nervously in the hall of Will’s London house, Will introducing his stern, unsmiling daughter, Jessie thinking, You are part of the man I love, I will love you, too. Then months later at the hospital, Jessie too sore to move, ecstatic, offering Bella the most precious thing in her entire world, the baby’s skin still womb-pink, waxy. Jessie saying, “Do you want to hold your new little sister? You can hold her, Bella. She’s yours, too.” Bella shaking her head, mumbling, “She’s not.”