was sad her pet rabbit had died and Kate kept pretending she would see him when Jessica wasn’t looking, to make her feel better. He had wondered if Kate would do the same thing about him when he was gone and I had told him he wouldn’t have to wonder, wouldn’t have to put them both through that if he stayed alive for them. The woman looked shattered. Simon’s wife, Susan. My heart began to palpitate, the guilt of my involvement wracking my body. I tried to remember what Angela had said, what everybody had said: it wasn’t my fault, I had only tried to help. It wasn’t my fault.
‘Hello.’ I struggled with how to introduce myself. It may have been seconds of silence but it felt as though it stretched on for ever. Susan’s face was not inviting, it was not warm and it was not reassuring. It did nothing to help my nervousness and worsened the sense of guilt I felt. I sensed Adam’s eyes on me, his saviour, now floundering in my lesson in self-belief and inner strength.
I stepped forward and extended my hand, swallowed, heard the shake in my voice as I spoke. ‘My name is Christine Rose. I was with your husband the night he …’ I glanced at the two little girls looking up at me wide-eyed ‘… the night of the incident. I’d just like to say that—’
‘Get out,’ Susan said quietly.
‘I’m sorry?’ I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. This had been my worst nightmare. I had lived this scene a thousand times in various ways and through the eyes of many people in my late-night/early-morning fears, but I didn’t think it would actually come to fruition. I thought my fears were irrational; the only thing that had made them bearable was knowing they weren’t real.
‘You heard me,’ she repeated, pulling her daughters further into the room so that the doorway was clear for me to leave.
I was frozen in place; this wasn’t happening. It took Adam placing a hand on my shoulder and giving me a gentle shove to finally make me come to my senses. We didn’t speak until we were both in the car and on the road. Adam opened his mouth to speak, but I got there first.
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ I struggled not to cry.
‘Okay,’ he said gently, then he looked like he was going to say more but he stopped himself and looked out the window.
I wish I’d known what it was.
I grew up in Clontarf, a coastal suburb of North Dublin. When I met Barry, I obligingly moved to Sandymount, his side of the city. We lived in his bachelor pad because he wanted to be close to his mother, who disliked me because I was Church of Ireland although I didn’t bother practising – I wasn’t sure which bothered her most. After six months of dating, Barry proposed, probably because that’s what all our peers were doing at the time, and I said yes because that’s what all our peers were saying, and it seemed like the mature and grown-up thing to do at our age, and six months later I was married and living in a new apartment we had bought together in Sandymount with the party behind me and reality now and for ever stretching ahead of me. My business remained in Clontarf, a short DART journey away each morning. Barry had been unable to sell his bachelor pad and instead rented it; the rent paid the mortgage. It would solve a lot of our current problems if Barry moved back into the pad he had made such a song and dance about leaving, thereby allowing me to stay in our home, but no, he was claiming our apartment. He was claiming our car too, so I was currently driving a friend’s car; Julie had emigrated to Toronto and still hadn’t managed to shift the car, which had been for sale for a year. In return for the favour of driving it, I was also responsible for taking care of its sale, advertising it with a FOR SALE sign on the front and rear windows with my phone number, and as a result fielding phone calls, enquiries and test drives. I was learning that people had a tendency to phone at random hours looking for the very same details as the car magazine advertisements already stated, as if they were expecting to hear a completely different answer.
My office was on Clontarf Road, on the first floor of a three-storey house which had been the home of my dad’s three spinster aunts, Brenda, Adrienne and Christine, for whom me and my two sisters were named. Now the building was home to my dad and sisters’ firm, which was called Rose and Daughters Solicitors because my dad was a feminist. My dad had held his practice there for thirty years, ever since his remaining aunt decided to move into a self-contained flat in the basement instead of looking after the large house by herself. As soon as my sisters were qualified, they joined the firm. I had been dreading the day I’d have to tell him I didn’t want to work for the family firm, but he was more than understanding. In fact, he didn’t want me to work with him.
‘You’re a thinker,’ he said. ‘We’re doers. The girls are like me, we do. You’re like your mother, you think. So go, think.’
Brenda took care of property law, Adrienne took care of family law and Dad liked to chase the accidents, because that’s where he believed the money was. They took over the top floor; my office was on the first floor, along with an accountant who had been there for twenty years and who hid a bottle of vodka in a drawer in his desk and thought nobody knew about it. It was obvious from the smell of the room and his breath, but mostly I knew because of Jacinta, the cleaner, who gave Dad all the gossip on each of the offices that paid rent. It wasn’t a spoken agreement, but they had an understanding that the more information she supplied, the more Dad paid her. I frequently wondered what she told him about me.
The ground-floor businesses had changed so many times in the past few years I didn’t know who was who when I passed them in the halls. Thanks to the recession, businesses were moving out as quickly as they moved in. The basement, which had been my great-aunt Christine’s home in her final years, had gone from being an insurance company to a stockbroker’s to a graphic design studio, and it was currently my home. From one Christine to another. My dad had grudgingly agreed to let it to me and furnish it for me; the day I’d arrived I’d found a single bed in the bedroom, a single chair in the kitchen and an armchair in the living room. I had to kit the rest out myself by raiding my sisters’ houses. Brenda had found it hilarious to donate her son’s Spider-Man duvet cover to me. She’d thought it would cheer me up, but it had only made me sadder about the state of my affairs. A duvet cover I could easily afford, so for the first few days I kept meaning to change it, only to keep forgetting until I got to the point where I didn’t even notice it any more.
Next door was a bookshop, the Book Stand, also known as the Last Stand due to its stubborn inclination to stay open and current when every small bookshop for miles around had been forced to shut. It was run by my close friend Amelia, and I suspect that ordering books for me was the only thing keeping her in business, as the shop was almost always empty. The stock was low and most things you wanted had to be ordered, which meant it wasn’t appealing to browsers. Amelia lived above the shop with her mother, who was in need of constant care as a result of a severe stroke. More often than not the bell ringing in the shop was not the sound of a new client coming through the front door but her mother upstairs, needing some attention. Still a child when her mother fell ill, Amelia had been caring for her ever since and she seemed to me to be in desperate need of a break, of some TLC. Like most carers, she needed someone to protect and care for her for a change. The bookshop seemed almost secondary to what Amelia spent her days doing, which was being at her mother’s beck and call, devoting every thought and waking moment to her.
‘Hi, sweetheart.’ Amelia bounced up from her stool where she’d been reading to pass the time in the empty shop. She looked over my shoulder at Adam, who followed me in, and her pupils dilated at the sight of him.
‘I thought you were waiting in the car,’ I said.
‘You forgot to leave the window open for me,’ he said, poker-faced, looking around the shop.
‘Amelia, this is Adam. Adam, this is Amelia. Adam is … a client.’
‘Oh,’
