But at five thirty the shop empties out as if the customers are obeying a magic command, and Robyn looks up from where she’s ringing up a lone woman’s wrapping paper and sees Hannah surreptitiously checking the time on her phone.

“You off?”

“Well… it’s five thirty, but… are you sure?” Hannah asks. “It’s been so crazy today.”

“I’ll be fine, look, everyone’s gone home. Fifteen pounds, ninety-seven, thank you so much,” she adds to the woman at the desk, who nods and gets out her debit card.

“Well… if you’re sure,” Hannah says. “I’ll be here a bit longer, so if there’s a last-minute rush, I can still help.”

In the staff room she puts on her coat. The face looking back at her from the mirror is pale and worried, and she wishes she had planned ahead, thought to bring makeup. She needs something to make her feel like she’s ready to face Hugh.

The only thing in her bag is an ancient lipstick, but it’s better than nothing. Now, standing there, applying it in the cracked mirror over the sink, she thinks of April, doing her makeup at the crowded chest of drawers in her bedroom.

Seriously, the only lipstick I would wear is Chantecaille, Han. Or Nars at a pinch. Number Seven just doesn’t cut it—I mean, what’s it made out of? Engine oil? And barely any pigment.

Hannah looks down at the lipstick she’s holding, the worn stub of the deep rose Chantecaille that April gave her for Christmas so long ago, and for a moment the stabbing pain of the past feels very close and very real. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath.

Then, she snaps the cap back on the lipstick, shoulders her bag, and shuts the door of the staff room behind her.

“Big night out?” Robyn says in surprise as she passes the till. Hannah smiles and shrugs.

“Not really, just a quick drink with an old friend. But he’s very smart, I always feel dowdy whenever we meet up. He’s a cosmetic surgeon.”

“Probably earns a packet?” Robyn raises an eyebrow, and Hannah grins and nods. “Well, if he’s single…”

“He’s single,” Hannah says, but she can’t imagine Hugh and Robyn together. Truth to tell, she can’t really imagine Hugh with anyone—he’s just… Hugh.

“Well, have a good one,” Robyn says as Hannah moves towards the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“What does that rule out?”

“Not much,” Robyn says, and grins, and Hannah laughs and opens the shop door, setting the bell jangling, and makes her way out into the chilly night air.

It’s been raining while she was in the shop, and now the pavement is dark and slick, reflecting the jeweled shop lights back at her, and the glitter of the streetlamps, and the moving car headlights.

At the end of the road she crosses, then turns right, and then left, feeling her breath frost in the night air. At the junction she stops, waiting for the Walk signal. There is a limousine idling at the lights on the opposite side of the road, two cars back, blacked-out rear windows, and Hannah is just wondering whether it’s a celebrity or a hen party when the rear window opens a crack and someone peers out, wiping condensation from the glass. And Hannah’s heart almost stops.

The woman inside—the woman inside… it’s April.

For a moment Hannah just stands, frozen, staring, and then she realizes that the lights have changed and the green man is blinking in her face, telling her it’s her last chance to cross.

April. April. It can’t be. But it is—surely it is?

“April!” she calls, but the woman has wound the window back up. Her heart racing, Hannah almost runs across the pedestrian crossing. She reaches the pavement and instead of turning right, to Hugh’s practice, she turns left, hurrying up the line of cars to where the limousine is waiting. But before she reaches it, before she can knock on the glass, demand to speak to the occupant in the back seat, there is a revving of engines and the line begins to move.

Damn. Damn.

“April!” she calls helplessly as the limousine shifts into second gear and picks up speed, but it’s too late. The car is gone. As it disappears around the corner, though, she knows. It wasn’t April. It never is. For this is not the first time this has happened—not the first time she’s seen a cropped blond head through a crowd and hurried towards it, her heart pounding, to find a teenage boy or a forty-something woman looking at her in surprise.

It is never April, she reflects as she turns slowly on her heel and retraces her steps back to the junction, back in the direction of Hugh’s practice. It never will be. But she will never stop looking.

She pushes the bell and when a receptionist answers says, into the grille, “Hannah de Chastaigne, here to see Hugh Bland.”

“I’m afraid he’s finished for the day.” The woman’s voice crackles back through the intercom. “Did you have an appointment?”

“Oh, I’m not here for a consultation. This is personal. He’s expecting me.”

“Just one moment,” the voice says, and then the line goes dead. Hannah stands there, waiting, for a surprisingly long time. Just as she is wondering if she should try the front door, or ring again, there is the noise of feet on the stairs inside and the gleaming black door swings open.

It’s Hugh, tall and immaculate in a long camel-hair trench coat, tweed waistcoat, and perfectly tailored herringbone suit. He is smiling, and when he sees Hannah he opens his arms.

“Hannah!”

They hug. Hannah inhales Hugh’s expensive cologne and feels the umbrella he’s holding digging into her back. Her bump presses between them in a slightly disconcerting way. She is still getting used to the baby asserting itself in these situations. She can’t imagine how it’s going to be when she’s eight months. Then Hugh releases her, and they step back, surveying each other in the golden glow filtering through the fan light above the door.

“Well,” Hugh says at last, “no need to ask how you are, I can see you’re blooming.”

Hannah blushes at that, although she can’t put her finger on why exactly.

“Thank you. You look very well yourself.”

“I can’t complain,” Hugh says. He hooks his umbrella over his arm and tosses his fringe out of his eyes. “Where shall we go? I know a nice little bar around the corner, the Jolie Beaujolais. It’ll probably be a bit noisy at this time, but the owner knows me, so he’ll be able to get you a seat.”

“I can still stand for an hour, Hugh,” she says, half-offended, half-touched by his solicitude. “I’m pregnant, not ill.”

“I know you, Hannah Jones,” Hugh says, waving a finger. “You’ll have been standing all day in that bookshop; the least I can do is get you a chair now.”

“Well, thank you,” she says, smiling. “And honestly, the Jolie whatever it was sounds great, I really don’t mind where we go.”

Hugh links his arm with hers and they walk companionably down the street, Hugh matching his stride to hers. Glancing sideways at him, Hannah can’t help but smile. He looks like such a caricature of the English civil servant, straight out of Central Casting for a John le Carré film with his camel-hair coat, suit, hooked umbrella, and horn-rimmed glasses. He’s even wearing his old school tie with the Carne crest. Only a bowler hat could finish the ensemble. But Hugh has always been good at playing a part—in a different way from April, of course, but even at Oxford, he always had the air of someone who was playing at being the quintessential student he had seen in films like Brideshead Revisited or Chariots of Fire.

“How’s work?” she asks, as they round the corner. It is beginning to drizzle, and Hugh opens up the umbrella and holds it above them both with his free hand.

“Good,” he says, smiling down at her. “Profitable. No one’s suing me this year.”

Hannah laughs. Last year a disgruntled client sued Hugh’s practice over her new nose not being sufficiently different from her old one, but she lost, after Hugh was able to produce a recording of their preop discussion where she requested that any changes be “very, very subtle… almost indistinguishable from my current nose.” Apparently she got what she asked for.

“How was Ryan?” he asks in return, and Hannah bites her lip. She should have known this was coming. In some ways she had been hoping for it—it’s the natural way to segue into the subject she really wants to discuss, but this feels too soon. She had imagined bringing up April when Hugh had a drink in his hand.

“He was… good,” she says, after a pause. “Surprisingly good. I hadn’t seen him for a while, I felt really bad when I realized how much time had passed. He said you’d kept in touch?”

“Just every now and again,” Hugh says. His voice is kind; Hannah knows he’s trying not to add to her guilt. “I think perhaps it was easier for him to talk to me, you know, being a medical man and all that.”

Hannah nods, grateful that he’s letting her off the hook, and then Hugh turns abruptly down a little alleyway between two tall stone buildings, where a lighted sign flickers above a stairwell. LE JOLIE BEAUJOLAIS, Hannah reads as they descend a short flight of stairs and find themselves in an almost aggressively French-themed bar, complete with Toulouse-Lautrec drawings on the wall, Gauloises drinks coasters, and row upon row of shining wineglasses and bottles. LE BEAUJOLAIS NOUVEAU EST ARRIVé! says a sign above the bar.

It’s hot and very, very full, but after a shouted conversation with the man behind the bar, true to Hugh’s promise, a tiny table is found for them in the corner. Hannah is ushered onto a velvet-covered banquette, and Hugh hitches his pressed suit trousers and sits opposite on a stool. The barman wipes their table with a theatrical flourish, puts a fresh candle in the wax-spattered bottle between them, and then hands them two menus.

“Thank you so much!” Hannah says to the barman above the noise of the crowd. He gives a little Gallic bow.

“De rien, mademoiselle! For Monsieur Hugh, nothing is too much trouble. What can I get you?”

“Just something soft, thanks.”

“Perrier? Evian? Orangina? Coca? Jus d’orange?”

“Um… Orangina would be great, thanks,” Hannah says.

“Monsieur?” The barman turns to Hugh.

“Well, I have to have a jolie Beaujolais really, don’t I?”

“A glass of the nouveau? It’s very good this year.”

“That would be great, thanks. And maybe something to nibble—an assiette de fromage, perhaps? And some bread?”

The barman gives a grin and another little bow, and then turns and weaves his way back through the crowd to the bar.

“It wasn’t just auld lang syne that made me go and see Ryan, though,” Hannah says, as if there had been no interruption to their conversation. She feels as if she’s taking her courage in her hands. Hugh raises an eyebrow.

“No?”

“No, I had a visit. From an old friend of his.”

She begins to explain, about Geraint, about the meeting in the coffee shop, about the pregnancy test and Will’s reaction… everything. By the time she is winding up the account, Hugh’s expression is mild as ever, but his right eyebrow is nearly up to his hairline.

“And so, well, I thought… I would come and see you,” Hannah finishes. “You’re the only other person who really knows what happened that night. Who really remembers.”

“I see,” Hugh says. He takes off his glasses and polishes them on his pocket square as if buying himself time. Without them his face looks different, less finished, somehow, his eyes smaller and less defined. Before he has finished polishing, the barman comes up with a tray bearing Hugh’s wine, Hannah’s Orangina, and a plate of mixed cheeses and charcuterie. At the sight of it Hannah realizes suddenly how very hungry she is, but also that she can’t eat 90 percent of what’s on there.

When the glasses and plates are laid out, the barman retreats and leaves Hannah and Hugh in silence. Hannah waits. Is Hugh going to speak? Should she? She’s not sure what exactly she wants to ask.

“Will—Will isn’t completely on board,” she adds at last, more as a way of breaking the painfully stretching silence than because she thinks she really needs to tell Hugh this. “That’s why he isn’t here. He’s not—I don’t think he understands why I’m pursuing this. As far as he’s concerned Neville’s dead and that’s it. But for me… it was my evidence, Hugh. And if I got it wrong, and Neville died in prison because of me…”

“I see,” Hugh says again. He settles his glasses back on his nose and sighs. He looks very tired, as if Hannah’s story has put a huge weight on his shoulders that wasn’t there at the start of the evening.

“Hugh, listen,” Hannah says impulsively. “Look, if you’d rather forget all this, just say, I can go. We don’t need to talk about this. If you feel the same as Will, I wouldn’t blame you, but—”

“No, I understand,” Hugh says. He rubs his face with his hand, his palm rasping against his stubbled cheek. “I wish—I mean, I wish this Geraint chap hadn’t opened this can of worms, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I understand your feelings. What do you want to know?”

“Just what you remember from that night, something, anything that I might have missed or forgotten. I don’t care if it’s something to reassure me or something to make me doubt the verdict even more, I just feel like I have to know.”

“I don’t know if I can tell you very much more than what you already know,” Hugh says. He takes a long gulp of his wine as if gearing himself up for something painful. “But I’ll try. I mean, the first part of the evening you know—I was up in that room above the Lodge, acting as lookout, and she came in with those friends of hers from the play. They were all dressed up, do you remember? All in their wigs and makeup.”

“Yes, but the two girls changed halfway through the evening, didn’t they,” Hannah remembers. “Clem and whatever the other one was called. Sinead, or something like that? Only April and the boys stayed in costume.”

“We were all in the bar all evening,” Hugh continues. “None of us left, I’d swear to that.” Hannah nods. That chimes with her recollection too. “And then it was almost last orders and April decided to go up and change.”

“It was so late,” Hannah remembers. “It was utterly stupid, the bar was never going to let her back in. I suppose she thought we’d all carry on drinking in our room or something.”

“But she didn’t return,” Hugh says. “So you said you were going up to find her, and I said I’d come too. We walked across the quad, and just as we were about to get to your stairs, you saw Neville coming out.”

“You didn’t see him?”

“I saw someone who looked a lot like Neville, but I didn’t see him coming out of your staircase,” Hugh says. “But you did—and you saw it before you knew there was anything going on. And besides, he admitted being up there, didn’t he? Don’t start second-guessing yourself now.”

“I’m not,” Hannah says. “I mean—I am—but not like that. I don’t want you to think I’m looking for holes in my own memories, not exactly, I just want… I just want to be sure—do you know what I mean? I want to see it from another perspective, see something that I might have missed. Does that make sense?”

Hugh nods.

“Well, then, what happened next?” Hannah asks.

“Well…” Hugh says slowly. He takes another sip of his wine. She has the impression he is steadying himself, steeling himself to answer. “After that… you went up the stairs. And I waited. I was just about to walk away when I heard you cry out. I knew it couldn’t be Neville, we’d seen him leave, or at least you had, but you sounded… you sounded really scared. I knew something was wrong, I can’t explain it. I ran up the stairs, the door was open, and you were inside, on your knees, leaning over—” He swallows. His face in the candlelight looks suddenly much older. “Over April’s body.”

“You knew she was dead?” Hannah whispers. Her throat feels dry, but she doesn’t raise the Orangina to her lips. She doesn’t think she would be able to swallow it. Hugh shakes his head.

“Not at first. I mean—I wasn’t sure. She looked an odd color, but that could have just been the remains of the makeup. She was—” He chokes suddenly. “She was still wearing her wig.” He puts a hand to his face, over his eyes, as if he can’t bear to look all of a sudden. “I always wondered—” and again, he swallows, and then stops.

“What?” Hannah says. She is puzzled. She has heard Hugh’s story before, but not this detail. What has he wondered?

“I always wondered,” Hugh says softly, “if he thought she was you.”

Hannah feels suddenly cold.

“What do you mean?”

“April had short blond hair. Back then you had long dark hair. And the lights were very dim, it was just that one lamp in the corner burning.”

Hannah nods. She knows the lamp Hugh means, it was the one with the rose-colored shade, the one they always left on when they left the set, so that they didn’t have to come back to a dark room.

“I always wondered if Neville walked in, saw a girl with dark hair and thought… and thought…”

“You mean, he meant to kill me?” Hannah says. Her lips are dry and her hands feel suddenly cold, as if all the blood has drained out of them.

“You had just reported him to the college authorities,” Hugh says miserably. “Hadn’t you? I’ve always wondered…”

“Oh my God,” Hannah says. She picks up her glass and takes a sip of her drink, trying to cover her shaking hands. “You mean… you mean she might have died because of what I did?”

“No,” Hugh says forcefully. He leans across the table, takes Hannah’s free hand in his. His hands are large, capable, and bony, and very strong. They are surgeon’s hands. “That’s not what I’m saying. Whoever killed April, it was their fault, Hannah, not yours. Don’t let yourself get sucked into that narrative. But I’ve always wondered, if you had gone up first…”

“Oh my God,” Hannah says again. She feels sick.

“That’s what I meant. Don’t let yourself get caught up in what-ifs. That way madness lies.”

“I just want to know,” Hannah says. She swallows against the dryness in her throat. “I just want to know what happened. I don’t remember what happened after that. I remember you doing mouth-to-mouth—”

She puts her hand to her head, as if she can press the memories back into place, remembering the sound of Hugh’s feet on the stairs, Hugh dropping to his knees beside April.

Hugh lets his hand drop and he brushes his fringe away from his forehead. His face is profoundly unhappy.

“I went over to her. You were kneeling over the—her body. You kept saying Oh April, oh my God, April, over and over again. I tried her pulse and I think in my heart I knew she was gone, but I couldn’t quite bear to admit it. I began pumping her heart, just kind of hoping against hope, and you were standing there, looking so awful, your face was just white and drained and you were kind of swaying, and I thought you were going to faint—and I said, Hannah, for God’s sake go and find someone, go back to the bar and get help. It was partly for April but partly because I thought I had to get you out of there before you passed out. I wanted someone to look after you as much as anything. And you gave this kind of gasping sob and you stumbled out into the hallway and I heard you kind of staggering down the stairs gasping Oh God, oh someone help, please help. I carried on giving April mouth-to-mouth and heart compressions for… oh God, I don’t know how long.” He stops and takes a long, shuddering swig of his wine. “I carried on until the police came. It felt like forever. But they did come. They did come in the end. They said I’d done all I could. But it wasn’t enough. I don’t think—I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that. It wasn’t enough.”

“Thank you, Hugh,” Hannah says. Her voice is husky and her eyes are prickling. This is the first time they have ever discussed this, the first time she has ever heard Hugh’s version of events. Before the trial they were told strictly not to discuss the case, for fear of prejudicing each other’s evidence. And afterwards—afterwards the last thing she wanted was to wallow in the pain and horror of that night. Now she is ashamed to realize that what Hugh went through was just as bad, maybe even worse. He has lived all these years with the memory of April’s dead lips on his, of his failure to save her. “Hugh, it wasn’t your fault, you know that, right? April was already dead—she was strangled. You couldn’t have saved her.”

Hugh says nothing. He only shakes his head. His eyes, behind the horn-rimmed glasses, are squeezed tight shut, as though holding back tears. When he speaks it’s with a catch in his throat and a little grating laugh.

“I’m sorry, I—I wasn’t expecting this. I would have bought a larger glass of wine if I’d known.”

“I’m sorry too,” Hannah says, and she means it. “I should have warned you. It wasn’t fair to spring this on you.”

“It’s all right,” Hugh says. He tries for the suave, urbane smile he probably uses on his patients, though it’s not completely convincing, not to someone who knows him as well as Hannah does. “God knows, I should be over all this by now. These days we’d probably all be offered free therapy. Back then it was, Oh well, chin up, and we’ll go easy on you in the exams, you know?”

Hannah nods, though the truth is that she doesn’t know. She never went back to Pelham. Hugh, Will, Emily, and Ryan, they all returned—shaken and traumatized, but they returned—and eventually they all graduated. But not Hannah.

Instead she moved back to her mother’s house. She would return to Pelham eventually, she told herself. Take a year out, perhaps. But then a year turned into two. Going back to Pelham became moving on to the University of Manchester. Or Durham. Anywhere else.

And then gradually that goal disappeared too, fading into the distance, along with the memories of her friends, her essays, and the girl she used to be. Only Will remained. Will, whose letters kept arriving, regular as clockwork, in his distinctive spiky handwriting, telling her about May balls and end-of-term parties, about rowing on the river and fluffing exams, about essays and tutors and rags and, eventually, about graduation ceremonies and MAs and postgraduate training.

She had thought at the time that nothing could survive April’s death, that she had been burned out by it, left a shell of the girl who had gone up to Pelham so hopefully that bright October day. And for a while that had been true—or almost true. Because one thing had survived. Her love for Will. It was the only thing that had endured.

“So… do you think it was Neville, then?” she forces herself to ask. She picks up her glass and takes a sip.

Hugh shrugs.

“I don’t know. I thought so at the time but now you’re making me wonder. I mean it’s not like—”

He stops.

“It’s not like?” Hannah prompts. Hugh, unexpectedly, flushes, a splotch of bright color appearing high on his cheekbones. He tosses his hair out of his eyes with that nervous tic she remembers so well from the very first time they met. He looks embarrassed.

“What were you going to say?” Hannah says, frowning.

“Oh, I feel like a shit,” Hugh says. He looks really pained now, but Hannah shakes her head.

“Go on, just say it. We’re in a safe ‘no judgment’ space here.” She puts air quotes around “no judgment” and Hugh laughs shakily, as she had intended, breaking the tension a little.

“Oh… if you must. Well, look, all I was going to say was… it’s not like she didn’t have her enemies.”

“Enemies?” Whatever Hannah had expected Hugh to say, it wasn’t this, and she looks up at him, surprised. “What do you mean, enemies?”

“Well, I mean. You know. Her constant pranking. It… it pissed people off, you know?”

“They were just jokes—” Hannah says, but Hugh raises an eyebrow, cutting her off.

“Jokes to her, maybe, but not always very funny to the person being pranked. Remember how annoyed Ryan was when she made him flush his weed? And the call to the Master? I don’t think he found that very amusing. I got off pretty lightly in comparison. That stupid mobile phone thing, and a blow-up sex doll in my bed one night—God, I had a job smuggling that out without everyone seeing. It’s amazing we all let her get away with it.”

There’s an edge to his voice that surprises Hannah. When they were at university he was always so meek and pliable, passing everything off as a joke with a good-natured laugh. She never thought of Hugh as really minding anything. But now she remembers—a thousand tiny moments, a thousand small cuts, the way April bossed him around, took the piss out of him. She remembers even that very first night, Hugh trying to excuse himself gracefully from playing poker, and April’s flat Shut up, Hugh. Nobody cares. She remembers Hugh’s expression as he sat back down, a kind of tense, mutinous fury.

“Hugh…” she says slowly. “Hugh, did you actually… like April?”

There is a long silence. Then Hugh sighs, as if he is releasing something long pent up.

“Truthfully, I didn’t. I would never say that to anyone else but you. But I didn’t think she was a particularly nice person, and she certainly wasn’t good for Will—she made him absolutely miserable that last term. I do get why everyone else fell for her. She was so funny, and she could be incredibly sweet when she wanted to. But some of her antics were pretty cruel. Think about what she did to Emily.”

“What she did to Emily?” Hannah echoes, puzzled. “I don’t think she did anything to Emily, did she?”

“Didn’t you know?” Hugh frowns, and then his expression changes. “Ah, no, it would have been right before… well. Right before.”

He doesn’t need to spell it out. Hannah knows what he means.

“What did she do?” she asks.

“It was another letter one,” Hugh says, a little reluctantly. “Similar to the Nokia one she pulled on me. Only this time she pretended…” He takes a breath. “She pretended that Emily’s A-level results had been called into question. She wrote this letter—it was very convincing, Emily showed it to me. It was on headed paper and everything, I have no idea how April made it look so good. These days it would be a cinch, of course, with scanner apps on everyone’s phone, but back then, she must have worked quite hard to make it look official. It said it was from the exam board and that Emily’s answers had been found to correspond very closely with another girl’s at her school. It basically accused Emily of either cheating or feeding another student the answers.”

“Wow.” Hannah is taken aback. That really is cruel. She can see what Hugh means. It’s not even funny. Most of April’s jokes had at least a slight twist of humor to them, even if it didn’t seem that way to the recipient. But this… this just seems horrible. “How did Emily react?”

“Well, I only found out about it afterwards, so I’m not sure. But… I mean, you know Emily.”

Hannah nods slowly. She does indeed know Emily. And all of a sudden it comes to her, a memory as sharp and clear as a voice hissing in her ear—Emily, walking past the chapel on a frosty November evening, her voice ringing out as cold as the night air: If she tries any of that shit with me, I will end her.

“How did Emily find out?” Hannah says. “That it was a hoax, I mean?”

“The letter asked her to call a number at the exam board and talk to one of their examiners. So Emily rang up and from what she said, she was completely taken in at first, but then something tipped her off—I think she heard something on April’s end that made her twig that the caller was at the college, a bell chiming or something. And she realized. She said April didn’t even apologize, just laughed idiotically and said it was Emily’s fault for being so stuck up and pleased with her own intellect. And then she hung up.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Hannah puts her hand to her face. Suddenly so many things make sense. Sorry. Work. Of course Emily didn’t come to April’s after-party. She must have been sitting in her room fuming and trying to figure out what to do. What would she have done?

I willend her.

Go to the college authorities? Complain to a tutor?

Whatever it was, she didn’t have time to act. Unless…

The thought comes unbidden, rushing in like chill sea water racing up a beach to soak you unexpectedly.

Unless she did.

But Hannah pushes that away. It’s ridiculous. Emily might have had a grudge against April, but she wouldn’t kill her, would she?

“Why would April do that?” she says, now looking up at Hugh, almost pleading with him for answers. “Why would she do something so horrible to Emily?”

“Well…” Hugh says slowly. “I might be wrong but I’ve always wondered… I think perhaps April had given Ryan an ultimatum, and it didn’t go the way she thought it would.”

“You mean…”

“I don’t know,” Hugh says, very gently. He puts out his hand and takes Hannah’s. “But… the way you and Will felt about each other, towards the end it was… well, it wasn’t obvious exactly, but I don’t think you had to be Freud to see it. And April was nothing if not good at reading people.”

Hannah goes hot, and then cold.

“You mean you knew? April knew?”

“I don’t think she knew anything. But I think there was a hell of a lot of tension that last week. And I think maybe April had already decided to cut her losses with Will and move on. But Ryan…”

“But Ryan wouldn’t play ball,” Hannah says slowly. “Because although he’d been messing around with April, he loved Emily.”

“It’s the only reason I can think of,” Hugh says with a shrug. “Why she would have been so frankly horrible to Emily. I mean, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between them, but there wasn’t much actual animosity. But that last prank—that smacked of real hate.”

Hannah says nothing. She is sitting there, chewing on her lip, trying to count back. As far as she can recall, Emily was perfectly civil to April in the week running up to the party. Which means she probably didn’t get the letter until Saturday morning. If it was in her pigeonhole on the morning of the party, then April must have posted it the day before, and she must have taken a few days before that to write it and mock up the headed paper. Which means that on Monday, when they were all at the theater, supporting April for her first night, raising glasses and smiling and telling each other how awesome April was, April herself was probably already planning this.

Hannah is remembering. Remembering the tension between Ryan and April, the polite smiles, the teeth-gritted argument with Will. Had April known she was going to do this to Emily all along, even while she was smiling and sharing drinks and inviting her over for coffee? She must have done. There’s no other explanation.

For a moment Hannah feels quite sick.

Then something occurs to her. If April was angry at Emily, who had after all done nothing apart from being Ryan’s girlfriend, how furious must April have been with Ryan for rejecting her? Furious enough to fake a pregnancy test?

In which case, maybe April wasn’t pregnant when she died?

But then if she was pregnant, and she had just been rejected by the father of her unborn baby, then perhaps that would explain her vicious overreaction to Emily.

Oh God. She has to stop going back and forth like this, guessing and then second-guessing. She has to find someone who actually knows what April was thinking that week. She’s just not sure who that could be.

For the next hour they talk about other topics, as if by unspoken agreement. The baby. How Will is doing at work. Hugh tells her some funny anecdotes about his patients, and she counters with some of her more eccentric customers. It’s only later, when they’re leaving, paying their bill, and Hugh is helping her into her coat, that something else occurs to her about Hugh’s revelation. Something that makes her stomach twist with a strange mix of anxiety and guilt, and makes her stop, coat half-on, half-off, so that Hugh has to gently cough and remind her where she is.

If April was that angry with Emily—poor Emily, who had done nothing wrong at all—how angry must she have been with the girl Will was, maybe, falling for? How angry was she with Hannah?