Chapter 42: After

AFTER

“You have got to be kidding me.” Will’s expression, when Hannah tells him over supper what she is planning, is a mixture of frustration, shock, and confusion. “Why on earth are you going back there? And why now? Right when you should be resting up?”

He jerks his head towards the pharmacy bag Hannah left sitting on the arm of the sofa while they ate supper.

“The doctor was really clear—she said there’s no need for me to cut down on work or anything,” Hannah says again, patiently. They have been through this already—it was the first thing she told Will when she walked through the door and found him pacing the living room, googling high blood pressure in pregnancy on his phone. “It’s a really low dose; they give it to pregnant women all the time. I specifically asked her if I should reduce my hours and she said no need, this is not a big deal, just to make sure I had a chair and to take plenty of breaks. I mean, this is a break. That’s the whole point.”

“And as for November—” Will says, as if she hasn’t spoken. “Does she understand what you went through—does she have any idea what she’s asking?”

“She’s not asking for anything. It was my idea to go to Oxford, not hers. And you’d like her, Will,” Hannah says. She takes Will’s hand, feeling the tendons and the fine bones, rubbing her fingers across his knuckles. She picks it up and kisses the back. “You really would. She’s like—” She stops, trying to think how to put it. “She’s like April—but—I don’t know. Kinder, maybe. And she does understand, because she’s been through something very similar herself.”

“Was she dragged through the courts?” Will says angrily. “Was she doorstepped every day for months?”

“The last one?” Hannah lets Will’s hand drop. “Uh, almost certainly yes, Will. She’s April’s sister. Can you imagine what that must have been like? She was eleven when April was killed; she’s spent most of her childhood trying to come to terms with that fact, watching her sister get ripped apart in the press and her dad die from the stress of it. I’m pretty sure she gets it.”

Will has the grace to look slightly ashamed at that.

“I had no idea April’s father had died. When did that happen?”

“A couple of years ago, I think.”

Will pushes his plate to one side and puts his head in his hands. When he looks up, his expression is drained, almost gaunt, and his hair is ruffled.

“You know I don’t want you to go, right?”

“I know,” Hannah says gently. “But I need to do this, Will. I’ve spoken to Emily. I’m traveling down Thursday, and we’re going to do a tour of Pelham Friday afternoon. Emily’s going to set up a meeting with Dr. Myers.”

“On Friday?” Will looks, if anything, even more dismayed. “But I’m working. I won’t be able to get the time off at such short notice.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to come. You said yourself you didn’t want to dig all this up.”

“I don’t, but I don’t want you down there by yourself, meeting up with strange men—”

“Hardly strange, Will.”

“Possibly very, very strange, if your suspicions are correct.”

“And I won’t be by myself, I’ll be with Emily and November in a very public place. I mean, what do you think—he’s going to come lurching out of his study with an ax?”

“I have no idea!” Will says. He stands up now, as if his constrained emotions are too great to allow him to continue sitting placidly at the table, and begins to pace the living room. “All I know is, I don’t want my pregnant wife going to talk to a potential killer.”

“I have to do this!” Hannah stands too. She knows her voice is rising and her face is flushed. “Don’t you understand, Will?”

“No!” Will shouts back. “No, I don’t understand, I don’t understand at all!”

There is a moment’s silence as they both stand, glaring at each other, and then into the silence comes a resounding bang! bang! bang! that makes them both jump. Their downstairs neighbor is pounding on the ceiling with a broom handle, telling them to keep the noise down.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah says, at the same time that Will says, “Oh, Hannah, love,” and then somehow she’s in his arms, and he’s pressing his lips to the top of her head, and she can feel the tightness in her throat and the tears prickling at the backs of her eyes.

“Please,” he whispers into her hair. “Please.”

And she knows what he wants to say. Please don’t go. She knows him so well, she can hear the words straining at his lips, knows that he wants to fall on his knees and kiss her bump and beg her not to do this.

But instead he says, “Please, be careful, Hannah. I love you so much. If anything happened—”

“It won’t,” she says. She kisses him, gently, carefully, and then more urgently, feeling that familiar unfurling inside her, that longing for him that is never quite quenched, that ten years of him has not been enough to satisfy. “I love you,” she says, and he is saying the words back, speaking them against her cheekbone, her throat, the curve of her neck.

Now he sits, drawing her onto his lap, and she folds into him, thinking that they won’t be able to do this much longer, that soon her bump will be too ungainly.

“I love you,” she whispers again, and he looks up at her and smiles. And though he is older and his face has lines of weariness, it is the same smile that first caught her heart that day in the hall at Pelham. She wonders how many times she has traced his features in her mind’s eye since then—the crinkles at the corners of his mouth, the crooked bump of his long-healed broken nose. A hundred? A thousand? As she lay in bed in New Quad thinking about collections; as she paced the streets of Dodsworth, trying not to think about the upcoming trial; as she tried to sleep in her first rented flat in Edinburgh, reading his letters with her heart aching for everything she had left behind. Now she reaches out and touches his face—running her finger down the ridge of his brow and the crook of his nose.

And she thinks, You are mine. You were always mine.

“I’ll be careful,” she says now. “I swear. But I have to do this.”

And Will simply nods, defeated.