Chapter 18: After

AFTER

When they get home from the restaurant, Will falls into bed and straight into a deep slumber, but Hannah—though she felt tired in the taxi—finds she can’t sleep. She tries hot milk, white noise to drown out Will’s snores, but nothing works. Her joints hurt. Her breasts are sore. Everything aches and she can’t find a comfortable position in bed.

At last, she pulls out her headphones and does something she hasn’t done for months, years, even. She opens up Instagram and navigates to @THEAprilCC. April’s account.

April was the first person Hannah had ever met with Instagram, back in the days when filters were strictly for coffee, and plenty of people didn’t even have a camera on their phone. But April had been one of an early handful to download the app and she had known, somehow, that this would be big.

Now Hannah scrolls back through ancient selfies, with sun-soaked filters and frames to make them look like Polaroids. There are photos of April draped across punts, pictures from college bars, a snap of some tuxedo-attired boy being led by the tie down St. Aldates. All the drunken, laughing, unselfconscious mementos of student life, a decade ago.

She knows the photos well, and not just because the press mined them for publicity shots. In the early days, when they were all that was left of April and of her own life at Pelham, she had flicked through them obsessively—noting every like, reading every comment, each one testament to April’s impact on the world and the gaping hole she had left.

RIP April <3

OMG still cannot believe you’re gone. Luv u.

Wow she fit what a shame lol

It wasn’t healthy—she knew that, even at the time. And at last the pain the pictures caused outweighed her need to look, to prove that April had been real, and flesh and blood, and as beautiful and vivacious and happy as Hannah remembered. So finally, as the comments died away and the likes slowed down, she’d forced herself to stop going back.

But now, looking at them again, she is struck anew by April’s luminous, unpolished beauty, not just in the photos where she is dressed up to the nines, hip jutting, makeup on point, but even more so in the candid snaps—April lying in bed in a splash of morning sun, makeup-free, smiling sleepily at the camera. Oh hai there she had captioned that one, and then a series of hashtags: #nofilter, #nomakeupselfie, #sundaymorning, #godilookamess.

I miss you…Hannah types out in the comments, and for a moment her finger hovers above the send arrow. But she doesn’t post. Instead she deletes the three words and goes back to April’s feed, scrolling through the decade-old snaps.

A young, sharp-cheekboned Will laughing at her from the banks of the Isis makes her stop momentarily, ambushed by his vulnerability. And there, halfway down the page, is a photo that always makes her catch her breath, even though she knows it’s coming—a picture of herself and April, side by side, each holding up a drink. April has her mouth pursed in a selfie pout, but Hannah looks taken by surprise. She is laughing, uncertain, looking not at the camera but at her friend. It’s a Shirley Temple, Daddy, promise *kiss emoji* reads the caption, and Hannah feels something clench inside her, a mix of grief and anger and… oh, she doesn’t even know what emotions anymore. For a long moment she stares at the picture—at the two of them, so heartbreakingly young and vulnerable—and happy. Happy in a way that she can’t remember being for a very long time.

The urge to reach out through the years and warn the two girls in the photo is almost painfully strong—so strong that, suddenly, Hannah can’t bear it anymore. She shuts down the phone and lies there staring into the darkness, thinking of what might have been.

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PERHAPS IT’S BECAUSE OF THEphotos, but the next morning Hannah wakes early, in the predawn, from a dream of April. It was not the usual nightmare—Neville’s shadow looming out of the darkness; April’s body, golden in the lamplight, her cheeks still flushed.

Instead she was walking up one of the narrow medieval wynds that twist and turn their way up from the gardens all the way to the Lawnmarket in front of Edinburgh Castle. She was going slowly, her hand over the baby in her belly. And then, as she rounded a corner in the passage, she saw it—a flash of gold, a shimmer of silk. And somehow she knew—it was April.

Hannah sped up, going as fast as she could up the winding passageway, hurrying up the steps, and she could hear April’s footsteps in front of her, and see her flitting shape silhouetted against the walls of the alley by the lamps—but she could not catch her.

At the top, where the stairs spit you out suddenly into the bustle of the Lawnmarket, all tourists and bagpipers and souvenir stands, she stopped, catching her breath, casting around to see where April had gone.

And then she saw her—one last glimpse of a mocking face as she disappeared into the crowd, far down the street. And the strangest thing was that it was April—but not April as Hannah knew her, not the April of the Instagram photos, skin dewy fresh, a trace of puppy fat lingering at the curve of her jaw. It was April as she would have been now—a woman on the cusp of her thirties, her features sharpened to show the bones beneath the softness of adolescence.

In her dream, Hannah hurried towards her—pushing her way through the crowd, straining for one last glimpse…

And then she woke.

Now she lies there, catching her breath, trying to anchor herself back in the present day. Gray light filters through the cracks in the curtains, and beside her she can hear Will’s slow, gentle breathing. Her bladder is complaining—she always needs the loo these days—but she can’t quite force herself out of bed yet. She needs a moment to orient herself, remind herself of what’s real and what’s not.

It’s been a long time since she dreamed of April. Longer still since she caught sight of her across a crowded room. There was a time when she would find herself scanning crowds for April’s face, her heart skipping a beat at the sound of a certain laugh rising above the hubbub, at the sight of a close-cropped blond head weaving towards the bar. But over the last few years those occurrences have become more and more rare—until tonight, anyway.

Now it’s as if the news of John Neville’s death has stirred the mud of her memories, and images from the past float up from the depths—not the ones memorialized on April’s Instagram, but others, more intimate, more real. As she lies there, gazing at the minute cracks and crannies in the ceiling, the faces of the others rise up in front of her—not as they are now, but as they were back then. Hugh, streaking across New Quad on a dare one misty morning, wearing nothing but his glasses, the blackbirds rising all around him, flapping and shrieking their indignation. Emily, bent over her books in the Bodleian, that little frown line etched between her thick black brows. And Ryan. Ryan jumping from the Pelham bridge into the Cherwell, in full white-tie evening dress. Ryan running down Broad Street bare-chested, football shirt flying like a banner above his head, after a Sheffield Wednesday win. Ryan in the Eagle and Child, downing pints of bitter and holding forth about the evils of capitalism, then standing on the table and shouting, “Rise up, my fellow workers, and seize the means of production!” then leaping over the bar and gulping directly from the beer tap before the astonished barmaid could do anything to stop him.

He got thrown out for that, she remembers.

“Next time I’ll ban you for life, you fucking layabout student!” the landlord had roared as he slung Ryan out into the street, the others tumbling, giggling after him. “Fellow workers my arse, you lazy little shit!”

Now she wonders how he is, and feels more ashamed than ever of the way she cut him off after college.

Beside her, Will stirs, and she looks over at him, and feels her love for him clutch at her insides with a force that is almost painful. She has always loved him best when she is watching him unawares. Awake, he is self-possessed, polished, still very much the perfectly mannered private-school boy who offered her a seat in the dining hall at Pelham that first night—and some part of her feels she has never really gotten to know him better than she did that first evening.

But asleep, or in his unguarded moments, he is Will. Her Will. And she knows and loves the very bones of him.

He seems to be dreaming, emotions chasing across his face, his eyes moving uneasily behind closed lids. She wonders what he is thinking—as she does so often. Will she ever learn to read him, to see the real depths of feeling that he hides behind his mild, amused manner? But perhaps that is why she loves him so much—the unattainability of him, the rare flashes of vulnerability that he reserves for her alone.

Only once has she seen him cry—and that was after April’s death, as they held each other and wept and wept for what they had both lost, but also what they had found in each other.