sat down at the table, waving Ethan towards the chair opposite. He took the one next to her instead, leaning forward and taking her hands. Lucy flinched but didn’t pull away. He had slim, long hands. Clever, surgeon’s hands, that had once touched her and held her, but were now holding someone else. She looked down at them dispassionately.
‘How are you?’Lucy couldn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t want him to see the pain in them any more than she wanted to see it in his. It should be a shared pain, something they should face together, but Ethan had given that up. When she didn’t answer he started talking in a broken voice, cracking the way Ricky’s had started to now that he was hitting puberty, and Lucy looked at him properly then and saw the anguish in his eyes.
‘I really thought he wouldn’t get parole, you know? Thought they would never let him out yet. Jack would still only be eleven now.’
‘I know how old he would be.’ Lucy didn’t mean for her words to come out so harsh and yet somehow they did. She didn’t want to do this with him, didn’t want to relive the horror, and couldn’t bring herself to offer a comfort she didn’t feel.
‘Does your wife know you’re here?’ she asked instead and Ethan started, a flash of guilt in his eyes, though he still didn’t remove his hands.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to see how you were. To talk. She doesn’t understand.’ His voice sounded choked again and Lucy pulled back, wrenching her hands away from him. Ethan looked up at her, hurt, and Lucy realised she was suddenly angry.
‘She doesn’t understand, so you come here, to me? Because your wife doesn’t understand you?’ she laughed, and it sounded bitter even to her own ears. ‘Isn’t that what you used to say to her about me when you were fucking her behind my back?’
Ethan’s eyes grew wide and shocked and Lucy pressed her own hand to her mouth as if to stop any further outburst. She rarely, if ever, swore. And she knew it wasn’t really Ethan she was angry at. When he reached for her again she stood up, bumping her hip against the edge of the table.
‘This is hardly the time, Lucy,’ he reprimanded, regaining some of his usual composure. ‘I came here to talk about Jack.’
Lucy pressed a hand to her head, which had begun to pound, heralding one of the fierce headaches she suffered on and off. Tension headaches, her doctor called them.
‘Jack’s dead,’ she said. As she spoke the words it occurred to her that in eight years she had never spoken them aloud, had either avoided such simple statements of fact or cloaked the cold truth in less final language. Because she had never spoken to the press and avoided discussing her business with either strangers or friends, those two words, together like that, had never come from her mouth.
Now they lingered in the air between them, weighed down with eight years of guilt and grief.
Ethan winced.
‘About Terry Prince then. About this mess.’ Such an understatement. He spread his arms, belying the word. Lucy folded hers, not in anger now but as a way of holding herself upright on suddenly weak legs.
‘I’m going to have my solicitor release a statement to the press detailing how sickened we are. There must be something we can do, surely?’
She didn’t like this side of Ethan. He had always been in control, always taken care of everything. Now he sounded lost, was sitting here in her kitchen looking at her like there was something she could do; as if she had all the answers and he was waiting for her to enlighten him.
‘They won’t lock him back up now they’ve let him go,’ she said, turning her body away from his, ‘not unless he re-offends.’
Her head was really pounding now and she wanted him to go if only so she could take some painkillers and lie down. She had phoned in sick at work this morning and now she genuinely did feel ill, a psychosomatic response perhaps. Also, she wanted to phone Ricky and check he had got to school before his first class began. He would moan at her for mollycoddling him, but the memory of those brief minutes when she had taken her eyes off her youngest son and lost him forever haunted her every time Ricky went out of the door, even now.
Ethan stood up and pushed in his chair, straightening himself even as Lucy crumpled, leaning back against the kitchen side with her head in her hands, trying to fold into herself. Her head whipped back up though when Ethan approached her.
‘Just go, please. You shouldn’t be here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without quite knowing what he was apologising for, ‘but if you do want to talk; if there’s anything I, or we, can do…’ His voice trailed off as she turned her face away, dismissing him, and he gave up and walked towards the door. Before he opened it he heard her speak, hissing like a cat under her breath, so that he had to strain to hear her.
‘Find out where he is.’
But when Ethan looked over at her she had turned fully away with her back to him and so he left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Those last words, uttered in that low angry hissing that sounded wholly unlike any side of Lucy he had ever known, resounded through his head all day, until he felt he was going crazy.
An hour later Lucy herself wondered if she would go crazy. Two aspirin had dulled the pain in her head but failed to get rid of it completely, and the constant shrill ringing of the telephone had threatened to render them completely useless until she had given in and unplugged it. The first call, moments after Ethan had left, had been from Ricky, for once pre-empting his mother’s worrying and letting her know he was safe at school. Then two calls from reporters and one inviting her to talk on the radio, all of which Lucy hung up on without saying anything further. Then her mother, then Susan, wearing her out with well-meaning but pointless questions. Of course she wasn’t okay. No, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help. The only thing she wanted was an answer to her last question to Ethan, and she knew that was impossible.
Finally, after a call from a shrill-voiced female journalist from the Telegraph, who Lucy had none too gently slammed the phone down on, she went and lay on her bed, overwhelmed and feeling completely alone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have rebuffed Ethan’s attempts to connect but really, what was the point? They could cry on each other’s shoulders and even start campaign plans but none of it would be any use, and at the end of it all Ethan would go home to the wife who didn’t understand him and she would be alone again. She lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, about to drift into sleep when the doorbell rang yet again. For a second she wondered if Ethan had returned, and wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or pleased, but it wasn’t Ethan’s knock. Funny how people had their own knocks, their own patterns and rhythms that, once you were familiar with them, heralded their presence. This was a stranger.
Lucy opened the door to a strange woman who smiled warmly but had strangely cold eyes. Lucy knew she was a reporter even before she spoke.
‘Lucy Randall? I’m from the Sun. I wondered if you would like to take the chance to express your opinions on the early release of Terry Prince.’
The woman smiled. She had a sweet voice, so polite, but eyes like a snake, Lucy thought. She smiled back.
‘Fuck. Off.’ Then she slammed the door in her face.
Lucy went to go back upstairs, feeling pleased with herself until she realised that was the second time she had used the ‘f’ word that morning. She who, in the transition
