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  ‘So, what do you do?’ I fall back on that most conventional of dinner party questions.

  ‘I’m in IT. I commute to London three days a week, then work from home the rest of the time – hence this.’ He gestures to the buggy. ‘How about you? You’re an interior designer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ The unease which has been stirring inside me since I first heard his voice steps up a notch. Has he been keeping track of me? ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I’m not sure… maybe someone told me…’ His forehead creases as he tries to recall who that might have been. ‘Oh no, I know, I saw something in the local paper – you won an award, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ I was proud at the time, but now I feel curiously violated at the thought of people from my past having seen that article, knowing things about me whilst remaining anonymous themselves. I start to mutter something about having to get home, but he interrupts me.

  ‘Have you heard about the reunion?’

  ‘Yes, I saw something about it on Facebook,’ I say.

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Are… are you?’ I know he is, I’ve seen his name on the Facebook guest list. Why am I so embarrassed about going to the reunion? Sophie doesn’t have any shame about it, neither do all the others that have signed up for it.

  ‘I thought I might,’ he says, looking down. ‘I know I’m not strictly class of eighty-nine, but obviously I hung out with a lot of you – and, you know, Maria was. I thought I might go, sort of on her behalf.’

  The mention of her name takes my breath a little. Although she has occupied a private space in my mind for so long, until the past week I hadn’t heard or spoken her name since I was a teenager. I had thought that Tim and I were going to get through this whole, utterly strange conversation without talking about her. Suddenly I realise I can’t let the moment pass without at least trying to tell him how sorry I am.

  ‘I think that’s a really nice idea,’ I say. ‘Look, Tim, about Maria.’ I screw up all my courage. ‘I know I treated her badly, and I’m so sorry. I wish… well, I wish I could go back and change it.’ I know he didn’t think very much of me back then, and he was probably right. I don’t think very much of myself either when I look back.

  Tim looks away into the distance.

  ‘I don’t blame you, Louise,’ he says stiffly.

  ‘Really? I think Esther Harcourt does,’ I say without thinking.

  ‘Esther Harcourt? Do you still see her? She’s a lawyer now, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Do you remember Esther then?’

  Part of me is surprised that someone like Tim, who was part of the cool crowd and didn’t even go to school with us, should recall Esther.

  ‘Yeah, she spoke at the memorial service, didn’t she? And Maria saw a lot of her in the time before… you know. Mum talks about her a bit too. She’s kept an eye on her career over the years. Esther was a good friend to Maria.’

  The unspoken hangs in the air like a bad smell: unlike some people.

  ‘How is your mum?’ I think of Bridget the last time I saw her, the night Maria disappeared: the rising panic, her fear-drenched eyes locking onto mine for those few heart-stopping seconds.

  ‘Not great, to be honest. She’s not been at all well recently, and she’s lonely. She never met anyone else after Dad left. Having a grandchild helps a bit, but she’s never got over what happened to Maria.’

  Of course she hasn’t. How could you?

  ‘Look, Louise, none of us know what happened that night.’

  I try to keep my face neutral.

  ‘Mum believes Maria killed herself, but I don’t know… she’s tougher than… she was tougher than she seemed, Maria. I know she was drinking that night. If she wandered off, if she was upset, she could easily have missed her footing up there.’

  The baby stirs in her buggy, and Tim jiggles her gently back and forth. She sighs and relaxes back into blissful sleep.

  ‘I know I was hard on you back then, but I felt so protective of Maria, especially after what had happened to her in London. And I was so angry; at our dad for leaving, and at Maria sometimes, for getting involved with that boy, although of course it wasn’t her fault. Really, of course, I was angry at myself. I thought I should have protected her, I should have seen what was happening with that boy earlier. I thought it was my fault, that if I’d behaved better, not made such a fuss about leaving London, then Dad wouldn’t have left.’

  He assumes I know the story about the boy in London, thinks that Maria told me. Of course she didn’t, but I don’t feel I can ask him now.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ he says with obvious effort, ‘it wasn’t yours either. I know you didn’t behave well, but you weren’t to know what was going to happen. No one did. I should have kept more of an eye on her at the leavers’ party. We were close, Maria and I.’

  How close, I wonder? Everyone used to comment on how protective he was of her, she even said so herself. Close enough to want to reopen old wounds, to punish the girls he sees as responsible for his sister’s unhappiness?

  ‘I knew she was… having trouble, you know…’ he goes on.

  Having trouble. It’s kind of him to frame it like that, but I know the truth. We had made her life a misery.

  ‘No one else can take the responsibility for what happened to her. Either she bears that herself, or it was an accident, a misstep, a one-in-a-million chance.’ He’s watching me closely, and I shift from foot to foot, wishing the encounter over.

  It’s a comforting fallacy, and I wish with everything in me that his version of events was the true one. Or if that can’t be (and of course it can’t), I wish that I could tell someone the truth without being judged, or worse. I wish that I could loosen this secret knot within me, a knot that is tied so tightly I don’t think anyone will ever be able to get their fingers into its intricacies to tug it apart, however hard they try.

  Tim doesn’t know it, but we are talking at cross-purposes here. He thinks we’re talking about the fact that I abandoned Maria for Sophie and the promise of popularity, and how I was partly responsible for ostracising her at school. He thinks we are talking about a bit of schoolgirl bullying, not sticks and stones but words that were meant to hurt, and did. And it’s true; I did do all that. I ignored her, I deserted her, I let her down. What Tim doesn’t know is that I also did something else. Something much, much worse.

  We say our goodbyes, and I drive slowly back through the streets of my childhood. As I put my foot down on the A11, something about my conversation with Tim tugs at the corners of my mind. It takes me a while to figure out what it is, but then I get it. She’s tougher than she seems, he started to say, but then corrected himself. A slip of the tongue maybe, or perhaps seeing me threw everything up in the air, flung him back in his mind to 1989. But whatever the reason, there’s no getting away from it: Tim referred to Maria in the present tense.

  Chapter 11

  Some days she feels like a prisoner in her own home. There’s no reason why she can’t go out, of course. Nobody could tell from simply looking at her. But on days like today, it feels as though someone has peeled back a layer of skin, leaving her face red raw, offering no protection from the elements. From anything. On these days she hides away, waiting until she feels able to face the world again; ready to put her mask back on, to keep smiling.

  She wonders sometimes how long she will be able to keep it up. For ever? In some ways, she’s so used to keeping this secret that it comes naturally. And on the days when it doesn’t, when she yearns to open her heart, her mouth, to let it come spilling out, he is there to remind her, as he has been over all these years. Keep quiet. Don’t tell. The consequences will be worse for you than for anyone else. He’s just trying to protect her, she knows that, and is grateful for it.

  So she carries on, shaking off those thoughts of the past that haunt her. It’s not only the past that scares her; she fea
rs the present too, some days, and not even staying at home helps. Sometimes she feels even more suffocated there than she does out in the world.

  She keeps her circle small because she finds it hard to trust people. Even those who she does let in don’t know the whole story, or even half of it. He is the only one who understands. Only he has helped her, reminded her that other people are not to be trusted with their story.

  She doesn’t need reminding that not everyone is what they seem. She of all people knows that only too well.

  Chapter 12

  2016

  Waking the morning after my Norfolk trip, I feel relieved to be at home in something resembling normality, although I can’t imagine how things will ever be normal again. I know Polly thinks I should do more for myself, reach out to the friends I’ve neglected over the past couple of years, but I can’t cope with adding anything new to my life. I am only just managing as it is.

  Henry always goes to Sam overnight on a Wednesday, so in the morning I begin gathering his things – underwear, spare uniform, Manky – and chucking them into his little rucksack. He’s had Manky since he was a baby. At some point, when it began to get very ragged around the edges, Sam and I started calling it Manky Blanky and the name stuck. Things go back and forth from Sam’s house to mine so I’m never quite sure what he’s got there that he might need, but there is only one Manky and he is irreplaceable. As I shove a spare school jumper in, I feel something hard and sharp in the front pocket of the bag. I unzip it and peer in. When I see what it is, I sink down on Henry’s bed, staring at the photo of me and him on the beach, both of us grinning and squinting against the sun.

  ‘Henry, can you come here a minute?’ I call.

  He comes running in from the kitchen, licking jam from his fingers, but stops dead when he sees what I’m holding.

  ‘Why have you got this in your bag, H?’

  ‘I like to look at it,’ he says under his breath.

  ‘When?’

  He seems to grow smaller. ‘When I’m at Daddy’s. Sometimes I miss you.’

  Tears ache in my throat and sting the backs of my eyes. ‘Come here.’

  He rushes to me and leaps onto my lap, wrapping himself around me, his solid little body melting into mine.

  ‘I miss you too,’ I say, straining to speak lightly. ‘But you have fun with Daddy, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says into my neck, ‘but sometimes I want to look at you.’

  ‘That’s fine, H.’ My voice cracks slightly and I swallow. ‘You didn’t need to take the photo, you could have just told me. Tell you what, why don’t we make up a big frame with lots of pictures of you and me, and you can put it up in your bedroom at Daddy’s?’

  He gives me a final hug and goes back to his toast. I sit for a moment on his bed, looking at the photo of the two of us, arms around each other, bathed in sunlight. It feels like a million years ago. As I put the photo back in its place on the shelf, I can’t help feeling relieved. I was being paranoid after all; no one has been in my flat.

  I’ve got to stop neglecting my clients or I’m going to start losing them, so with Henry at Sam’s I am able to finally get somewhere with Rosemary Wright-Collins’s latest project. Having Rosemary as a client is so important: without her, my business would be floundering. Sam suggested once that I was misguided to work so much for her, that having most of my eggs in one basket was a mistake. He wanted me to turn down work from her, thought I was spreading myself too thinly trying to fulfil all her requirements and keep other clients happy. He was glad my business was doing well, I am sure he was. But it’s not lost on me that he left me for someone much younger, much further down the career ladder. I know Polly thinks so.

  On Friday, I pick Henry up from after-school club, and when we get home instead of plonking him in front of the telly, I play with him. We make a huge and complex track with his wooden train set and then he instigates a convoluted story where the trains have to save one of the cows from his farm set who is stuck on the line. Every time I attempt to bring the story to a close with some kind of resolution, he creates a new and apparently insurmountable obstacle that extends the game further. I watch as he pushes the little engines around the track, his face deadly serious, totally absorbed in the world we have created. It’s cosy in the sitting room, but a chill creeps over me. This is why no one must ever know what really happened to Maria. I cannot allow anything to jeopardise Henry’s innocent faith in the world as a benign place, where no one would allow a cow to be run over by a train, or take a mother from her child.

  Once Henry is in bed, I sit at my kitchen table with a glass of red wine, the lamp in the corner casting a calming glow. The smell of the ready meal warming in the oven is beginning to waft through the room: onions, garlic, herbs. I scroll through my emails – the problem with working from home is that in a sense I’m always at work, unable to ever fully switch off. I open another window and go to Facebook. I’ve been checking it constantly both on my laptop and my phone, and each time there’s no message the faint hope that it’s over grows stronger. That it was someone playing a sick joke, a stupid prank – upsetting and disturbing, but no more than that. One of the school mums is spewing the details of her latest break-up on her page, but she has some of her ex’s mates as Facebook friends and they are weighing in, disputing her version of events, calling her names. I am drawn in, as I used to be years ago when I watched the soaps on TV, but with the added fascination that this is real life, or at least something like it. I’m amazed by the extent to which some people live out their lives on here. This woman doesn’t even say hello to me on the rare occasions I see her at the school gate, yet I know all the gory intimacies of her love life.

  I go to Maria’s page where I can see that Sophie has now accepted her friend request, but just as I’m about to close the window, I notice that Maria has another new friend listed: Nathan Drinkwater. I turn the name over in my mind, but it means nothing to me. I’m sure there was no one of that name at school with us. I click onto his page, but there’s nothing there – no posts, no profile photo, nothing. Maria is his only friend.

  There’s a group Facebook message that I’ve been included on about a night out with some old colleagues. My instinct is to do what I would normally do – ignore it and let them assume that I’m not interested, too busy with the business and Henry. But I let the mouse hover over the reply button, trying to imagine myself in a bar with a glass of wine: chatting, catching up, swapping news. I am pouring myself a second glass of wine, and trying to persuade myself to accept the invitation, when the doorbell rings. I jump, and the bottle jogs in my hand, red wine slopping down the side of the glass, pooling like blood around the base and seeping into the oak table. I put the bottle down and walk cautiously along the corridor. Even though I’ve found the photo, I haven’t totally shaken the feeling that I’m not safe, that there’s someone watching me. I haven’t forgotten the panic that surged through me as I ran through the tunnel at South Kensington. Run as fast as you like, Louise. I can see the outline of someone through the frosted glass of the front door, but I can’t make out who it is. I stand in the dark hallway, framed by the light from the kitchen behind me, my body pulsing with every beat of my heart. I take a step back. I won’t open it, creep back to the kitchen, let whoever it is assume I’m not in. But then the letterbox opens and a voice calls through:

  ‘Louise? Are you there?’

  I hurry to the door and yank it open.

  ‘Polly!’

  I enfold her in a hug, so thankful to see her that I hold her too long, too tightly.

  ‘Hey, are you OK?’

  I smile, biting back tears.

  ‘I’m fine. Just glad to see you. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Um, you invited me for dinner? When I was here babysitting last Friday?’

  ‘Oh God, so I did. I’m so sorry, I completely forgot, what with everything…’

  ‘How do you mean everything, what’s going on?’


  I’d forgotten for a minute that she knows nothing. Where to start? Should I even tell her anything at all?

  ‘Oh, nothing much, just busy with work and stuff. How are you anyway?’

  ‘Oh you know, same old, same old.’

  We go through to the kitchen and she plonks herself down at the table.

  ‘Something smells nice.’

  ‘It’s an M&S cottage pie for one,’ I admit. ‘Sorry. I’ve got some salad and bread and stuff, we can probably make it go far enough for both of us.’

  ‘That’s fine, I have wine and crisps,’ she says, plonking them on the table. ‘Who needs dinner?’

  She glances at the shelving unit with the photo of me and Henry back on top of it. ‘You found it then? See, I told you! I bet you just put it down somewhere and forgot, didn’t you?’