Chapter 43

Chapter 43

Jennie stands at the graveside.

She’s glad Paul Jennings chose to bury Hannah in the cemetery at Little Cross, a small village a quarter of a mile outside the main town. White Cross is tainted with the violence that ended Hannah’s life and the friends who betrayed her. This place has none of that gruesome history.

The stone and flint church sits nestled between the canal on one side and an organic farm on the other. It’s silent here now aside from the clucking of the chickens whose paddock borders the graveyard. The service is finished and the other mourners are long gone. Jennie stands alone, watching as the sun sinks slowly in the sky and finally lets herself grieve.

She remembers Hannah free and happy, twirling in the woodland; taking charge as her personal stylist when they went shopping for a new dress; rescuing her from the bullies when she first joined White Cross Academy. Hannah had really made her feel like she belonged. It was Hannah who encouraged her to follow her dream to be a photographer when no one else cared. She was the one who told Jennie that she’d got bags of talent and that it was her wonderful photos that got her the modelling gig in London. She’d always had faith in her.

Jennie knows now there were things about Hannah’s life that her friend had kept secret from her: the drug use, the secret parties, her affair with Duncan Edwards, and the physical violence her dad had inflicted. Teenage Jennie might not have forgiven her friend for keeping her in the dark on some elements of her life, but adult Jennie does. Relationships are complex. Secrets are often held.

Reaching out, Jennie puts her hand on the top of the simple wooden cross at the head of the grave, a placeholder until the earth has settled and the headstone can be laid. The wood is rough against her fingers. Her voice cracks as she tells Hannah, ‘I miss you.’

Lottie’s accusation that Jennie caused the rift that led to the fatal argument between her and Hannah has weighed heavily on her mind. Rationally, she knows she isn’t to blame for Hannah’s death, but there is a small kernel of truth in what Lottie said. Unwittingly, the plan they’d hatched to run away together had set in motion the events that led to Hannah’s murder. When Hannah had disappeared, Jennie felt as though part of her had died – the creative part – as well as the confidence to follow her dream. Jennie had got through those dark days, but she never left White Cross and never allowed herself to be the person she might have been. Stuck in limbo. In arrested development for thirty years. She’s never let her guard down. Never fully given herself to anyone or trusted a person with her heart for fear that they’ll suddenly disappear on her. She’s never allowed herself to be happy in case it jinxed things and she lost that happiness.

Now she knows Hannah really had been coming to the bus stop that night; she didn’t abandon her on purpose. She didn’t betray her. Hannah was stolen away by their so-called friends in heinous actions fuelled by jealousy and resentment.

Kneeling down, Jennie places the bouquet of white roses on the heaped dirt alongside the other floral tributes. She smiles as she thinks that Hannah probably would have preferred a new lipstick over all the flowers, but Jennie wants to give her something beautiful to mark her final resting place. She deserves that.

Jennie presses her hands against the earth, her tears flowing freely now, and whispers, ‘I’m sorry I doubted you.’