Chapter 40: After

AFTER

When Hannah wakes it’s to a confusion of noise, people crowding around, Geraint saying “Give her some air!” over and over, and November kneeling beside her, concern all over her face. There is a coat under her head and someone has removed her glasses. It makes her feel strangely vulnerable, even more than she already did.

“Someone call an ambulance,” she hears, and she struggles up onto her elbows.

“No, no, please, I don’t need an ambulance.” Her voice is shaky, but she tries to put conviction into it. “I’m pregnant—that’s all.”

“You’re pregnant?” The words don’t seem to calm Geraint down. If anything he looks more alarmed, like she is a ticking bomb that might explode at any moment.

“We need to get you checked over. Is there a doctor here?” November calls over her shoulder to one of the hovering hotel staff. She stands up. “Anyone? Do you guys have a house doctor for the hotel?”

“I’m a doctor.” The voice comes from the far side of the foyer, a man’s voice, his accent English, not Scottish, getting louder as the footsteps approach. “Can I help?”

Hannah tries to sit up. Without her glasses all she can see is a blur of faces.

“This lady—she’s fainted,” Geraint is saying in a worried voice. “She’s pregnant. Should we be calling an ambulance?”

“I really don’t think I need an ambulance,” Hannah says. She feels on the verge of tears. This can’t be happening. She looks at the doctor, pleading with him to say it’s nothing serious. “People do faint when they’re pregnant, don’t they? I didn’t eat breakfast.”

The doctor is opening his bag. Inside is a stethoscope and a blood pressure monitor. He smiles kindly.

“Well, it’s not uncommon for low blood pressure to cause faintness in early pregnancy, but getting as far as actually passing out, that’s a bit less standard… Do you mind?”

He holds out the blood pressure cuff, and Hannah gives a shaky nod of assent. He straps the cuff around Hannah’s arm, inflates it, and puts the stethoscope to the curve of her elbow, listening as the cuff deflates. Then he sits back and smiles reassuringly.

“Probably nothing to worry about, but I think we should get you along to the maternity department for a spot of monitoring. How far gone are you?”

“Twenty-three—no, almost twenty-four weeks. Twenty-four tomorrow. Could someone call my husband?”

“I’ve got your phone,” November says, holding it up, and then turns to the doctor. “Thank you for checking her over. She should be in hospital, right?” She jerks her head at Hannah, her huge earrings swaying.

The doctor nods reluctantly.

“I’m afraid so. It’s a long time since I’ve done any obstetrics, but actually passing out does warrant a check. Your BP is a little bit up; they may want to take some bloods and do a trace.”

“I’ve got a driver round the corner,” November says. She picks up a leather jacket from the back of the chair. “Give me five minutes, I’ll get him to pull up at the front.”

“I can manage,” Hannah says. She feels almost tearful at the idea of being ushered out of the foyer into a waiting car like an invalid being carted off. “I don’t need a lift, I can call Will, get the bus.”

“By all means call your husband, but I’m not putting you on a bloody bus. It’s my car or an ambulance,” November says. She folds her arms, and her expression is pure April, at her most haughtily inarguable. “Which is it to be?”

Hannah shuts her eyes. She knows when she is beaten.

---

SOME FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER HANNAHis sitting in a padded chair in the maternity unit of the Royal Infirmary, a monitor strapped to her stomach, a blood pressure cuff around her arm, and November, slightly uncomfortable with all this, perched on the edge of a plastic stool beside her. She’s had a pee test and given what felt like about a pint of blood in little vials, and now part of her wants to be left alone with her thoughts, but a larger part of her wants anything but.

Mostly she wants Will, but his phone is ringing out. Where is he?

“Do you want me to try him again?” November asks, as if reading her mind. She has been allowed to stay as Hannah’s “companion,” which feels a little strange given Hannah has known her all of ninety minutes. But there is something about her, something so close to April that she feels as if it’s been much longer.

“No, I’ll do it,” Hannah says, knowing that Will shouldn’t hear this from November. She rubs her arm where the bruise from the needle is beginning to bloom, and then dials his number for what her phone says is the ninth time. It rings… and rings. She hangs up. Call me, she texts. It’s kind of urgent.

She puts the phone down in her lap, fighting the tears. It’s not just the fact that Will is unreachable—it’s everything. The idea that she has somehow caused this with her own actions, put her baby at risk by investigating April’s death. But the alternative feels equally unbearable—for how can she spend the next sixteen weeks in this state of agonizing uncertainty, obsessing over what she saw and thought and said? She just wants to know, to prove Geraint’s fears wrong and move on with her life. The baby flutters inside her stomach, and the monitor whooshes, speeding up with her heart.

“Is there anyone else?” November asks now. “Anyone else you can call, I mean?”

Hannah shakes her head. “Not really. My mum lives miles away. But if you need to go…”

“I’m not going,” November says firmly. “Not until you’re discharged. But I’m happy to wait in the car if you don’t want me here. I get that this is weird—I mean, we hardly know each other.”

“No, I’m happy for you to stay. It’s nice to—to talk.”

“Okay then,” November says. She folds her arms. “I’ll stay.”

There is a silence, punctuated only by the whoosh and click of machines and the faint conversation of the women in the next bay.

“It could have been Dr. Myers,” Hannah says. It’s what’s been preying on her mind ever since that moment in the hotel, and now it’s a relief to say the words out loud, but there’s also a different quality—it is as if saying them makes the possibility real. “He was already on the staircase. He could have got access to the room between Neville leaving and Hugh and me arriving. Geraint’s right—if he was sleeping with April, if he had got a student pregnant—well, that would give him motive and opportunity. Neville was convicted because he was the only person who had the opportunity to kill April. He never had a motive. But Myers—he’s the one person who could have slipped in there without anyone noticing.”

“I wonder if he was ever interviewed,” November says. Her expression is sober. “I mean, the police must have asked him whether he heard anything. But was he ever seriously a suspect?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah says. “I never saw him in court, but I wasn’t allowed to see the other—”

She breaks off. Her phone is buzzing in her lap. She turned the ringer off, in semi-deference to the hospital’s NO MOBILEPHONES sign, but now it’s vibrating with an incoming call. It’s Will. Thank God.

“Will!”

“Hannah.” He sounds out of breath. “I just got your message—I was swimming. What happened? Are you okay?”

She swallows. Will is not going to like this.

“I—I fainted,” she says at last. “I’ve gone into the maternity unit for some monitoring.”

There is a long pause. Hannah can tell he is trying to keep himself in check, not overreact, make her more upset, particularly after their recent argument. She hears him swallow on the other end of the phone.

“How—is everything all right?” he says carefully. “Is the baby okay?”

“I think so,” she says. “I haven’t been signed off yet, but they keep coming in and looking at the baby’s heartbeat chart and they don’t seem too worried.”

“Good,” Will says. “Look, I can be there in…” His voice goes faint and she can tell he’s looking at his phone screen, figuring out how long the journey will take. Then he comes back on. “Twenty, twenty-five minutes?”

“I don’t know if I’ll still be here.” Hannah looks up at the clock on the wall. “When they hooked me up they said they’d monitor me for half an hour—it’s been nearly that now. Shall I call you when I know what’s happening?”

“Okay,” Will says. He sounds worried, but also like he’s trying to keep his concerns from her. “I love you, and Han—”

“Yes?”

“I’m—I’m really sorry about… you know.”

“It’s okay,” she says. For anyone else, his words might be hard to decode, but Hannah knows he means their fight. She bites her lip. She wishes Will were here. “This isn’t your fault, I promise.”

“Okay,” he says, though he doesn’t sound completely convinced. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

She hangs up. November has moved away, trying to give at least the illusion of privacy, but now she turns around, looking over her shoulder.

“Everything okay?”

“I think so.”

There is a rattle at the door and a tall, smiling obstetrician comes in, holding a clipboard.

“Hannah de Chastaigne?”

“Yes,” Hannah says. She struggles to sit up straighter in the padded chair, the plastic creaking. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Excellent. Could we have a moment?” She looks at November, though it’s not clear whether she’s inviting her to leave or stay.

“I’ll be in the corridor, Hannah,” November says tactfully. She picks up her bag and slips out.

The doctor takes November’s stool and begins to look through Hannah’s notes and at the readout on the monitor.

“Well,” she says at last. “I hear you had a little fainting spell.”

Hannah nods. “I think I just—I don’t know, I’d had a bit of a shock, low blood pressure probably. I feel fine now.”

“Well, the good news is you look fine, and so does baby, all the vitals are really good, and your urine is clear, but… we do want to keep an eye on your blood pressure.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it’s been creeping up a bit over the last few appointments, and I’m afraid it’s a bit higher than we’d like.”

“What? But I don’t understand—the doctor at the hotel said low blood pressure was what makes people faint.”

“It can be, but yours isn’t very low, I’m afraid. I understand it’s been up at the last couple of checks?”

“Yes—but—but there were reasons—” Hannah feels tears rising in her throat, forces them down. If only Will were here. “I ran there. You don’t understand.”

“Have you had any headaches? Flashing lights? Dizzy spells?”

“No! I mean—other than today, obviously, but the rest, no, absolutely not. I feel completely fine.”

“Well, I think we’d like to get it down regardless. I’m going to give you a prescription for methyldopa—it’s a very safe drug, we’ve been using it for years with pregnant women—”

“You’re kidding.” Hannah heart is sinking, a hollow feeling of guilt and anger at her body’s betrayal taking its place. “Medication? I don’t want to take drugs. Can’t I just—I don’t know—take it easy?”

“It’s very safe,” the doctor repeats. She is trying to be reassuring, Hannah can see that, but she feels anything but reassured. In fact her heart is racing, the trace on the monitor spiking up and up. She feels again that sickening slide into uncertainty she experienced after April’s death—the sensation that events have taken over, and that her life is spiraling out of control. Only this time it’s not police officers telling her where to go and what to do and how to feel, it’s a doctor with a white coat, but the same pitying, understanding smile that Hannah knows so well.

“No,” she says forcefully. “No, this isn’t okay. This can’t be happening!”

“Your baby is fine,” the doctor says again, gently. “This really is just about taking the best care of you both. I understand it’s upsetting when things don’t go—”

“I’m not upset!” Hannah explodes, though it’s so patently untrue that part of her wants to give a sobbing laugh at the irony of that fact. Her throat is tight and she feels like crying. But she cannot. Will not. She takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I am, obviously, upset. It’s just—it’s so unexpected. I feel like things were fine a week ago and now, it’s like—”

It’s like someone has come in and taken over and everything is out of my hands and moving in a direction I don’t want and can’t control.

That’s what she wants to say. But she won’t. Because although it’s true, that is how she feels, the rational part of her knows that this reaction is only partly about the baby and her blood pressure. A far larger part of it is about April, and Neville, about what happened then, and about what is unfolding now.

And suddenly, with that thought, Hannah knows what she is going to do, and she feels her heart rate slow, and a kind of peace unfold inside her. Because Hannah has had her life ripped away from her by events beyond her control once before. She does not intend to let it happen again.

This time, she will be in charge.