‘You look really happy,’ he said, zooming in on their smiles. ‘I kind of thought you’d forgotten how to smile like that.’
She made a dry sound of laughter. There was something accusatory in the tone of his voice, as if she’d somehow let him down by being happy.
‘Yeah, well,’ she said, ‘they were playing Mariah. You’d have been smiling too.’
‘Just never think of you as the party type,’ he continued, and she felt herself starting to tense up. This, she thought, this was why she didn’t want to get back together with him. Having a baby had changed her; it had changed everything about her. Leaving school had changed her again. Being single after three years in a couple had changed her. She wasn’t the soft, romantic girl she’d been before she got pregnant, before he’d walked awayand left her to cope on her own. And she knew deep down that that version of Tallulah Murray was the only one that Zach was really interested in being with.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘things change, don’t they?’
‘I guess,’ he said, and there was a note of sadness in his voice.
At a few minutes before midnight, they took the champagne out of the fridge and a pair of wine glasses and went into the garden. The next-door neighbour’s cat sat on the fence, curled into its haunches, eyeing them curiously before turning to look up into the sky. It was cold and Tallulah shivered slightly. They’d had a couple of beers by then and when Zach put his arm around her shoulders to warm her up she didn’t shake him off. They used their phones to count down to midnight and Zach popped the cork and they heard people all around them cheer, and cars hoot their horns and fireworks pop and splutter in the blackness of the sky and they held their glasses of champagne aloft and said Happy New Year to each other and hugged. As they pulled away from each other, Zach looked as if he was about to kiss her and she thought, no. No, I don’t want to kiss you. I’m not sure I’m ever going to want to kiss you again.
‘Oh fuck, Tallulah,’ Zach said. ‘I wish I’d never done what I did last year. It’s, like, the greatest regret of my life. You know that, don’t you?’
She nodded.
‘Will you ever forgive me?’ He threaded her hands into his.
‘I already forgave you,’ she said. ‘I forgave you ages ago.’
‘Then why?’ he said. ‘Why can’t we start over?’
‘I just … I don’t know, I just don’t feel like I want a relationship right now. Noah, he’s enough for me.’
She felt his grip tighten around her fingers.
‘But Noah,’ he said, ‘he’s ours, we made him, that makes us a union, a team. It’s not just about our relationship any more, is it? It’s about all three of us.’
‘You get to see him all the time.’
‘Yeah,’ he sighed, impatiently, ‘I know that, but it’s not the same, not the same as being with him twenty-four-seven. As a family.’
‘Yes, and that’s not what I’m saying. Obviously it would be better for Noah if you were here all the time. But I don’t know if …’ She paused, buying time to find exactly the right words. ‘… if it’s right for me.’
He laughed, slightly dismissively. ‘Lula,’ he said, ‘for fuck’s sake. We’ve known each other since we were fourteen. We know we’re right for each other. Everyone knows we’re right for each other. Please. Give me a chance.’
‘But where would we even live?’
‘Here!’ he said. ‘We could live here. You’ve got that big bed. Your mum loves me. Ryan loves me. I tell you what, tell you what,’ he countered quickly, clearly sensing her lack of enthusiasm for the idea. ‘Let’s do a trial run, yeah? Maybe I could stay over one night. Nothing like that,’ he reassured her. ‘I’d sleep on the floor. Imagine Noah’s face in the morning, waking up and seeing Dad there. And I could do his morning feed and let you have a lie-in. Yeah? Wouldn’t that be good?’
He smiled down at her, using her hands to pull her closer to him so that their stomachs just about touched, their faces just an inch or two apart, his eyes boring deep into hers. ‘Wouldn’t it?’ he said again, kissing her knuckles, looking at her coquettishly, a lazy half-smile on his lips.
And something inside her gave way at that moment, a kind of sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach paired with a swoon in her groin, a feeling of wanting to be touched by someone, but not by Zach, of wanting to be wanted but wanting to be left alone, all at the same time; and she saw Zach’s mouth move towards hers and found herself moving towards him and then they were kissing and all her misgivings fell away in a moment, all her ambivalence crystallised into a single longing for him, for it, for flesh, for limbs and mouths and all of it. Within a moment she was against the back wall, her arms and legs wrapped around him, and it was all over in under a minute and it was what she wanted, it was what she wanted so much, and he carried her afterwards, still inside her, her arms and legs still wrapped around him and twirled her round and round the garden, and she was smiling, properly smiling, the blood pumping through her, the moon shining down from the velvet sky and when Zach said, ‘I love you Lula, I love you so much,’ she didn’t stop for even a second before replying that she loved him too.
Because right then, for that moment in time, she really did.
15
June 2017
DI McCoy leaves Kim’s house at about 10 a.m. and at around 11 a.m. a call comes through on Kim’s phone from a number she doesn’t recognise. She assumes that it must be him, that it must be the detective, that there is news, an update, a development of some kind and her heart immediately begins to gallop and adrenaline pumps hard through her body.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, hi, is that Kim Knox?’
It’s a girl’s voice.