‘Should you be walking so much with your—’ he gestures at my middle.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, though he knows I’m not, he winced watching me stand up, he reached out to help but I batted him away. This is the most I’ve walked since the postnatal ward, they wouldn’t discharge me until I could cross its length, so I did, I forced myself through each excruciating step; I’d have rather split my stiches than watch Kit flinch every time a baby cried. But at home, I lay down on the floor of my greenhouse, I didn’t get up. What for? I had no baby to feed, no one who needed my heartbeat to fall asleep. Millie snuck downstairs a few times to visit me. ‘What are you doing, Mama?’ she’d ask, tossing Acorn across me so she could use both hands to scramble onto my dirty futon. ‘Play ice cream with me, read to me, colour with me.’ I’d cry, put my hands on her plump cheeks, inhale the sweet gloss of her hair. Then I’d hand Acorn back to her. ‘Go inside, baby.’ To your father, Aunt Cassie, any one of those good, whole people who haven’t killed your sister.
‘Let’s get a taxi,’ he says.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I insist. I find my painkillers, swallow two dry. ‘I want to walk.’ Walking reminds me of Kit. Before we had Millie, Kit and I used to meet outside one of our firms and just walk the streets of the City, before getting on the nearest underground. ‘No destinations, no maps,’ Kit said the first time, taking my phone out of my hand and slipping it into my coat pocket. ‘Not until the end.’ I would have gone with him just because he asked. But after he explained it was a family tradition, how his entire family would set out together on the weekends, I understood he was trying to create a family with me, a family I’d never had. I wanted it too, a mother who was alive, a father with a name, siblings. I took it for the sparkler of a promise it was.
‘You didn’t reply to what I said in the café.’
‘I’m not sure what to say.’
A drop of rain skims the back of his hand. ‘Say anything you want.’
We’re on Moorgate now, empty except for the rumble of an occasional van. Kit’s firm, Williams & Pierce, is off to the right on Ropemaker Street, the rounded glass, the closed Costa beneath; if I go right up to it, I can see his office on the fourth floor, he might be right there, finishing an email.
He’s not.
It’s a Sunday. His wife is missing. He’s with Millie, where I should be, and then I’m so scared of what I’m putting them through, it’s not worth it, I haven’t made it worth it. Years of preparation have amounted to nothing more than accusations about crime and consent, when none of these have moved Daniel. Now, walking past Williams & Pierce, places I’ve been to with clients and colleagues and Kit, I realise my mistake. I’ve been appealing to Daniel like I would to Kit, who’d turn back to pay for a packet of sweets Millie stuffed into her buggy or balks at running a red light. But Daniel isn’t Kit. He said,I’m not particularly interested in whether I’m a criminal,because he isn’t frightened of being one. He already is.
But watching Daniel in reflections of shop windows, how close to me he walks, how tenderly he looks at me, it is suddenly so clear what will convince him. He thinks I’m the rarest butterfly in the world, copper dashed with cobalt. He thinks he’s pushed back the tangle of nets, cupped me gently in his hands. He thinks he’s saved me. But that’s not true at all. I need to show him how he’s ripped my head from my body, torn my wings to rags. He’s not a conservationist. He’s a killer.
‘You said it was real,’ I say. Rain glistens on the silver of his temples, darkening the wool of his blazer. It’s going to wash all the poison away. ‘You said it wasn’t wrong. Because you never saw the harm.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ he says, his pace slowing. ‘I went toprison.’ As soon as he says the word, something in him collapses. Everything flooding out. ‘You have no idea what it was like. How many people killed themselves. The blood. The fights. I’dbe walking to dinner and, a second later, the alarm would blare, everyone flying out of their cells, pulling flick knives from their socks, razors from their waistbands. There are things I wish I didn’t know. Like what Spice smells like. Like how to sharpen a chicken bone into a blade.’ He drags his hand across his mouth. ‘So don’t tell me I never saw the harm. I wasted the best part of my life withanimals. I wasted it slowly. I watched it trickle away.’
I try to imagine the slippage of weeks into months into years but I can’t. The last eighteen years for me have been so full – Wyatt, Oxford, law school, Dulwich & Sullivan, Kit, Millie and Faye. So many things have happened to me against the nothing that has happened to him. Pity rushes in at the pointlessness of it, and then, as quick as it comes, it turns sour inside me. I will not feel sorry forhim.
‘You didn’t go to prison for me.’ My voice is a low hiss. ‘You went to prison forkillingthat boy.’ I didn’t realise, until I said it, how much I want to keep that day in the past, how much it hurts to talk about in daylight. The day I disappeared. The day he hurt someone else. ‘How could you have done something like that?’
‘It was an accident!’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Course not.’
‘But why were you driving so fast? Why did you leave him to die?’
‘To get to you!’ His eyes on me are tunnels. ‘I was driving that fast to get to you! I left him there to get to you!’
I shut my eyes. I’ve spent so much time trying to separate my decision to run away from Daniel, from the death of that boy.It’s not my fault, I’ve repeated a thousand times,he ran him over,he didn’t stop, he didn’t get out and help.But eighteen years on, my guilt still astounds me; in the unfurling consequences, I cannot see where my responsibility ends. Because it’s true, isn’t it? If I hadn’t run away, Daniel wouldn’t have come after me. That boy would still be alive.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. His neck and wrists are inflamed, but he’s trying not to scratch, he just presses his fingers to them. ‘I’m not saying it’s your fault.’ He pulls up the collar of his blazer against the rain. ‘I just think I’ve done my time.’
He says it flatly, no remorse. I’m so jealous of the easy way he’s put down his guilt, his complete absolution. There are weeks I can’t shut my eyes without seeing car crashes. ‘What about me?’ I ask.
‘You?’
‘I’m the only person who’s served time forus.’
His laugh cuts through the muffling of the rain. I ball up my hands. ‘You haven’t suffered! You’re thirty-two, utterly beautiful, you have a career, a husband, a family, you have everything you could want!’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ I pound my fist against my chest; it makes a dead sound. ‘You split me open, you slit my throat!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I can’t have normal relationships! I have no real friends!’
‘That’s my fault?’