Chapter 14: After

AFTER

In the restaurant, Hannah looks at her phone again, gnawing at a breadstick. Wednesday night is date night—it always has been, virtually since she and Will moved in together, when they realized that between book events for Hannah and accountancy exams for Will, they needed to carve out time for each other. For the first few years it was nothing fancy—fish and chips on summer evenings in Prince’s Street Gardens, the castle glowing red-gold in the sunset and the hills shining in the distance. Popcorn and a movie at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, then McDonald’s on the way home. Lately, as Will has moved up the ranks at Carter and Price, the restaurants have become nicer—and tonight’s is one of their favorites, a cozy little Italian place tucked along one of the winding medieval lanes leading down from the Grassmarket, not far from Tall Tales.

But Will is late, and now, as Hannah stares down at the menu she knows practically by heart, pregnancy hunger growling in her stomach, she notices the prices for perhaps the first time since they started coming here. It’s… not cheap. In fact, tonight is going to set them back about the same amount as their weekly supermarket shop. They are going to have to cut back when the baby comes.

“Can I get you anything to drink or are you still waiting for your companion?” says the waiter, passing her table with his order pad in hand. Hannah is just about to reply when a tall figure appears behind the waiter’s shoulder.

“Will!” Relief washes over her.

“Sorry,” Will says, half to her and half to the waiter. “I’ll order fast, I promise. Can you come back in five?”

The waiter nods and departs, and Will bends to kiss her. As his lips, still cool from the crisp evening air outside, meet hers, she closes her eyes, feeling her body go liquid with it—that need that never goes away, that still unbelieving realization that Will is her husband.

“I love you.” The words come out in spite of herself, and he smiles, holding on to her hand as he takes his seat, his strong fingers linking with hers as he picks up the menu with his free hand, scanning the specials.

He is her kryptonite, she thinks as she watches him read, one thumb absently stroking the back of her hand. She has never told him this, but she knows how Superman feels when they brandish the green sticks in his face, the way his strength deserts him and his limbs go weak, because she feels exactly the same way when Will touches her. Dazed. Stupid. Meltingly soft. And it has always been so, ever since that first day in the hall at Pelham. He has always had that power over her. Sometimes the realization makes her almost afraid.

After they have ordered, Will runs his hands through his black hair, making it stick up like a hedgehog’s spines, and sighs.

“I’m sorry I’m late. Massive cock-up with a client account that needed sorting and I couldn’t really run out.”

“It’s fine,” she says, because it is now that he’s here. “I get it. Now isn’t the time to be coasting, what with the partnership thing.”

“I know, but today of all days…”

“I’m fine. I didn’t sit at home all day moping. I went to the park, then the cafe. I talked to Mum—she’s going to come for a visit sometime, bring some maternity clothes. And, well, actually—” She pauses. For some reason the words don’t quite come naturally. “I, um… I also talked to Emily.”

“Emily?” Will raises an eyebrow. She’s not sure if he’s surprised or just… making conversation.

“Yes. She called me, in fact—she’d seen the news. Did you know she was back in Oxford?”

“Yes, I told you, remember? I heard it from Hugh.”

Hugh is the one person from college they both still see regularly. He and Will are best friends—have been since they were little prep school boys in short trousers, and perhaps because of that, their bond survived the earthquake of April’s death. It helps that Hugh also lives in Edinburgh, in a beautiful bachelor’s flat in the elegant Georgian quarter near Charlotte Square. He and Will play cricket for a local team in the summer months, and Hugh comes into the bookshop most Saturdays, buying whatever literary hardback the Sunday Times has recommended. The three of them meet up for dinner or brunch every few weeks.

But until today she had no idea that Hugh and Emily were in contact at all. They weren’t even particular friends at Oxford—they hung around together because Will was dating April, and Hannah was April’s roommate, and Emily liked Hannah. But beyond that, they had nothing in common. Hugh was shy and bookish, and thirteen years at an all-boys’ school had left him awkward around girls. Emily was sharp and spiky with absolutely no time for the kind of old-fashioned courtesies Hugh had been brought up to think were necessary when dealing with women.

“Emily said he’d been down for the Gaudy,” Hannah says now. “It’s weird, I would never have put them down for the ones to keep in touch.”

“I know.” Will takes a breadstick and crunches it meditatively. “They were never that close at Pelham. In fact I always got the impression she thought he was a bit of a joke.”

“He is a bit of a joke,” Hannah says, but not unkindly; she doesn’t mean it as a put-down. It’s just that Hugh is… well, he’s Hugh. Posh, floppy hair, smudged glasses. He’s Dead Poets Society crossed with Four Weddings and a Funeral—everyone’s caricature of a public school boy grown up.

“That’s just the surface, though,” Will says, and she nods, knowing it’s not just Will defending his best friend, it’s also true. Because although Hugh may come across as slightly effete, the reality is very different. Underneath the self-mocking veneer, Hugh is tough, and driven, and very, very ambitious. It’s why he’s done as well as he has. Will’s family is old money—not that there’s much of it left now, apart from some land and a few paintings. April’s was new—her father came from nowhere, a brash Essex boy who made his fortune in the city and cashed out at the right time. But Hugh’s family were neither, in spite of his schooling. His father was a GP, his mother a housewife, “county” folk who scraped together the money for their only child’s education, going without themselves, even as they pinned all their hopes on him.

That sacrifice is something Hugh has been trying to justify ever since he left Pelham—and now, to a large extent, he has succeeded. He followed in his father’s footsteps as far as graduation, but then went swiftly and lucratively into private practice—he’s now the head of a very successful plastic surgery clinic in Edinburgh. One of his first clients was April’s mother. Hannah doesn’t know how much he earns, but she can tell from his flat that he must be extremely comfortable—you don’t get a place like that in central Edinburgh for small change.

“So, what was she saying?” Will continues, and Hannah has to drag her mind back to Emily’s conversation. The sinking feeling in her stomach returns.

“She was saying…”

She breaks off. The waiter has arrived with their starters and there’s a moment’s respite as they sort out whose is whose, but then Will prompts, “She was saying?”

“She was asking if I was okay and…”

“Yes?” Will says. He’s looking worried now, and puzzled, and maybe slightly irritated too, it’s hard to tell.

“There’s this journalist. He’s been trying to get in touch with her—and me. He’s a friend of Ryan’s and he thinks…”

Oh God, this is hard.

She puts her knife and fork down, takes a deep breath, forces the words out.

“He thinks there might have been a mistake. He thinks Neville’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice.”

“Bullshit.” Will doesn’t even stop to consider her words; his reaction is swift and decisive, and he slams his hand down on the table, making his plate and cutlery clatter and jump. The people at the neighboring table look around in surprise and Hannah winces, but Will doesn’t lower his voice. “Utter bollocks. I hope you told Emily not to speak to him?”

“She already has,” Hannah says, her voice practically a whisper as if to compensate for Will’s, and then, seeing Will’s expression, she backtracks. “Not about Neville. They seem to have talked mostly about Ryan. But don’t you think—”

She stops.

Don’t you think it’s at least a possibility?is what she wants to ask. But she can’t quite bring herself to say the words. It’s been hard enough turning them over and over inside her head without articulating them.

“Sweetheart.” Will puts down his cutlery and reaches across the table, holding her hand, forcing her attention. “Hannah, don’t do this. Don’t start second-guessing yourself. And for what? Just because Neville’s dead? His death changes nothing. It doesn’t change the evidence—it doesn’t change what you saw.”

And that’s the thing. She knows he’s right.

Of course he’s right.

The fact that Neville went to his grave protesting his innocence proves what exactly? Nothing. There have been plenty of murderers who denied their guilt until their dying day.

But the truth is that Neville could have been heading towards parole by now, if he had played the game—accepted his guilt—done his time. Instead he spent the years after April’s death protesting his innocence and launching futile appeal after appeal after appeal—all of which achieved nothing except to keep his name in the press and public anger high.

Would a guilty man really have shot himself in the foot like that?

“Hannah?” Will says. He squeezes her hand, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Hannah, sweetheart, you know that, right? This is not your fault.”

“I know,” she says. She withdraws her hand, shuts her eyes, rubs at the headache that is beginning to build beneath the plastic nose-rest of her glasses. But when she shuts her eyes, it’s not Will’s face that she sees, full of love and concern—it’s Neville’s. And not the Neville that has dogged her since university—glowering, full of belligerent defensiveness—it’s the one she saw the other day. The haunted, hunted old man, staring out of the screen with a kind of pleading fear.

And she knows, what Will said? It’s not true.

This is all her fault—all of it.