Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
I see the letter on the mat when I come downstairs on Tuesday morning – a white envelope with a window, Alex’s name printed behind the cellophane, and the logo of a solicitor’s firm in the top corner that isn’t his own.
I know what it is before I pick it up. I know what it is the way you know a phone call at three in the morning is bad news.
I leave it on the kitchen table, propped against the salt cellar, and put the kettle on.
It’s been a month since the school library, since the night that split our lives into before and after.
Thirty-one days of waking up in this house and checking, first thing, that Alex is still beside me and Olivia is still in her room and the front door is still locked.
Thirty-one days of drinking tea at this table, waiting for the post, jumping when my phone rings and telling myself it’s going to be all right, it’s going to be fine, we’ll get through this.
Christmas came and went somewhere in the middle of it.
We did the quietest version we could get away with – a tree Olivia decorated in ten minutes, presents nobody put much thought into, lunch at this table with the phone face down beside the gravy boat.
Nobody said his name. We were all grateful when it was over.
I’m not sure I believe it is over yet. But I’m getting better at saying it.
We took Jeff’s Land Rover back in the first week – Alex driving it, me following in the Volvo to bring him home. I stood in the farmyard and tried to apologise for all of it. Jeff put the kettle on instead, cut me a slice of cake, and asked no questions at all.
This morning, though, there’s just me, the kettle, and the envelope propped against the salt cellar, waiting.
Alex comes down at half seven. He’s dressed – shirt, trousers, belt – but he isn’t going to work.
He hasn’t been to work in four weeks. The firm have been good about it, or as good as a solicitor’s firm can be when one of their own is under investigation for manslaughter.
They’ve called it compassionate leave, which is a polite way of saying please stay home until we know whether you’re going to prison.
He comes into the kitchen, sees the letter on the table, and stops.
‘Is that—?’
‘I think so.’
He picks it up. Turns it over. Doesn’t open it.
‘I’ll read it after breakfast,’ he says and puts it back against the salt cellar. He fills his mug from the kettle as if it’s any other morning, as if the envelope sitting close to his elbow doesn’t contain the thing that will decide the rest of his life.
This is what Alex does. He portions out the fear into small, containable blocks and deals with each one in turn – breakfast, letter, whatever comes next – because if he lets them run together, if he lets the whole thing hit him at once, he’ll go under.
I’ve watched him do it every day since he came home from custody with a grey face and gravel in his voice and held Olivia on the sofa for forty minutes without saying a word.
He manages. It’s the most Alex thing about him, and it’s the thing that frightens me most, because one day the managing will stop working and I don’t know what’s underneath.
Olivia appears at quarter past eight. She’s in her school uniform – they agreed she’d go back this week, her and the counsellor, a gradual return, mornings only.
Her hair is brushed, her bag is over her shoulder, and she looks, from the doorway, like any other thirteen-year-old getting ready for school.
It’s only when she comes closer that I see the marks.
The skin on her wrists has healed, mostly – the redness is gone, the raw patches have faded to a pink that will keep fading until there’s nothing visible – but she still pulls her sleeves down over her hands.
She still tugs the cuffs of her jumper past her knuckles and holds the fabric in her fists.
I notice it every time, and every time it goes through me.
‘Toast?’ I say.
‘Not hungry.’
‘Half a slice. With Marmite. Come on.’
She sits at the table, and I make her toast. She eats half of it and leaves the crusts.
Alex reads something on his phone and doesn’t look at the letter, and for five minutes we are a family having breakfast. It’s the performance that keeps us going.
Not a lie, exactly – we are a family, we are having breakfast – but a version of normal that takes effort, that requires all three of us to agree, silently, that we will sit here and eat and speak and not mention the library or the letter or the fact that Alex’s hands are shaking around his mug.
Olivia leaves for school at half eight, insisting she’s safe enough to get there without our help.
I walk her to the door and watch her go down the path.
She turns at the gate and gives me a wave that’s half-hearted but real, and I wave back and stand there until she’s round the corner and out of sight.
The counsellor says she’s doing well. She says Olivia is processing, which is a word I’ve come to hate because it sounds like something a computer does, not a child.
But she’s sleeping better. She’s eating.
She’s started talking to her friends again, carefully, in the way teenagers talk when they know something has happened but aren’t sure how much to share.
She hasn’t asked me about Ross. She hasn’t asked me about what he said in the library before Alex came out of the dark, and I haven’t offered, and I don’t know if that’s the right thing or the cowardly thing, but it’s what I’m doing.
What I can’t fix is the flinching.
She flinches at sudden noises – a door slamming, a car backfiring, the bang of a cupboard in the kitchen.
She flinches when someone walks up behind her.
She flinched last week when I put my hand on her shoulder while she was doing homework, and the look she gave me – startled, wild, gone in a second but there – made me leave the room and cry in the bathroom with the tap running so she wouldn’t hear.
That’s on me. All of it. Every bruise on her wrists, every flinch, every session with the counsellor, every night she lies awake staring at the ceiling.
I brought Ross into our lives. I opened the door when I should have locked it, answered the messages when I should have blocked them, and walked into that library with my husband just behind me.
And the result is a dead man, a damaged child, and a family held together with string.
I carry it everywhere. The guilt. It’s there when I wake and there when I sleep and there when I’m standing at the sink washing Olivia’s cereal bowl and staring out at the garden where she used to do cartwheels on the grass.
I don’t talk about it, because talking about it means admitting what I already know: that if I’d told the truth from the beginning – to Alex, to the police, to myself – none of this would have happened.
Ross might still be alive. Olivia might still sleep with her door open. Alex might still be going to work.
But I didn’t tell the truth. I told lies, and the lies grew, and now here we are.
Alex opens the letter after Olivia leaves.
He sits at the table with his reading glasses on and the envelope slit neatly along the top – even now, even with this, he uses a knife, not his finger – and he reads it in silence.
I stand by the kettle, watch his face and try to read the words from his expression.
His jaw tightens. His gaze moves across the page, back to the top, across again. He puts the letter down.
‘They’re still deciding,’ he says. ‘CPS haven’t made a determination yet. My solicitor says it could be another six to eight weeks.’
Six to eight weeks. Another month and a half of this – the waiting, the not knowing, the letter on the mat and the phone call that could come any day.
Another month and a half of Alex sitting in this kitchen in his work shirt with nowhere to go, managing and managing and managing until the managing runs out.
‘What does your solicitor think?’ I say.
‘She thinks they won’t charge. Self-defence, defence of another, proportionate response to an immediate threat. Olivia was tied to a chair. The note proves the intent. She thinks it’ll be dropped.’
‘But she’s not sure.’
‘Nobody’s sure, Kim. A man died. Someone has to account for that.’
He folds the letter, puts it back in the envelope, and slides it to the far end of the table.
His glasses come off. He slumps in his chair – and he sits like that for a while, breathing, holding himself together by the method that has kept him upright for thirty-one days.
Then his hands come down, and he looks at me. His eyes are red but dry.
‘We’re going to be all right,’ he says.
I cross the kitchen and sit beside him. My chair touches his. My hand finds his on the table. His fingers close around mine, and we sit there in the quiet kitchen with the letter at the end of the table, the cereal bowls in the sink, and the clock ticking above the oven.
Something has changed between us. I’ve been trying to name it for weeks, and the closest I can get is this: we have seen each other at our worst. Not the everyday worst of a tired marriage – the bickering, the silences, the Sunday afternoons where neither of us can be bothered to try – but the real worst. The worst that involves a dead man on a library floor, a lie told to the police, and a daughter with tape on her wrists.
We have seen every ugly, frightened, desperate part of each other, and we are still here.
Still sitting at this table. Still holding hands.
It doesn’t feel like forgiveness. It’s too raw for that, too recent.
It feels more like a decision – a mutual, unspoken agreement that whatever we are now, broken and mended and broken again, we are it together.
There’s no version of this where one of us walks away.
We’re bound. Not by love alone, though the love is there, battered but breathing.
By what we did. By what we survived. By Olivia sleeping upstairs in a room we can both hear from the landing if we leave our door open, which we do now, every night.
I think about Ross.
I think about him more than I should, and less than I used to, and in a different way.
The boy I loved is gone – he was gone long before that night in the library, if I’m honest. He was gone the day he vanished without saying goodbye, and what came back in his place was something else: a man shaped by the same wound I carried, but twisted by it in ways I couldn’t see because I was too busy seeing the boy.
I wanted him to be the Ross I remembered.
I wanted the first love, the library kiss, the window in the dark.
And because I wanted it, I missed everything that should have frightened me – the messages, the showing up, the way he always knew where I was, the brick through the window of a cottage.
He said I was wrong about what happened at the cottage.
In the library, seconds before Alex came out of the shadows, Ross looked at me with something on his face I still can’t put away – confusion, fury, hurt – and said I was wrong.
I don’t know what he meant, or if it even matters now.
What I know is that a man who ties a thirteen-year-old girl to a chair to force her mother into a conversation is not a man I can mourn in the way I want to.
I can mourn the boy. I can mourn what we had and what we lost and the years of silence that ate us both from the inside.
But the man who stood in that library with my daughter bound and gagged behind him – I can’t grieve for him without lying to myself again, and I’m done with lying.
So I let him go. Not all at once, and not cleanly. But in small pieces, the way you let go of anything that mattered too much for too long. I close the door I should have closed years ago, and I turn the lock, and walk away.
Alex squeezes my hand. Outside, the sky over Keynsham is grey. Somewhere out there, Olivia is walking through the school gates with her sleeves pulled down and her bag on her shoulder. She is brave, she is mine, and she is alive.
Whatever comes next – the CPS, the investigation, the charge or the relief of no charge – we’ll face it from this table, in this kitchen, in this house. The three of us.
That’s the only thing I’m sure of now.
It’s enough.