‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Jess,’ he said, into the dark, as if he could hear her thoughts. His voice was a warning.
‘You’ll be okay.’
‘Seriously. You can’t do your optimism tricks on this one. Whatever happens, I’m probably going to lose everything.’
‘So? That’s my default position.’
‘But I might have to go away.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I might, Jess.’ His voice was uncomfortably firm.
And she spoke before she knew what she was saying. ‘Then I’ll wait,’ she said.
She felt his head tilt towards her, a question. ‘I’ll wait for you. If you want me to.’
He took three calls on the final leg home, all on hands-free. His lawyer, a man with an accent so grand he should have been announcing the arrival of the Royal Family at dinner, told him he was due at the police station the following Thursday. No, nothing had changed. Yes, said Ed, he understood what was happening. And, yes, he had spoken to his family. The way he said it made her stomach tense. She couldn’t help herself afterwards. She reached over and took his hand. When he squeezed it back he didn’t look at her.
His sister rang to say his dad had had a better night. They had a long conversation about some insurance bonds that his father had been concerned about, some keys that were missing from a filing cabinet, and what Gemma had had for lunch. Nobody talked about dying. She said to say hello and Jess shouted hello back and felt a bit self-conscious and a bit pleased at the same time.
After lunch he took a call from a man called Lewis, and they discussed market values and percentages and the state of the mortgage market. It took Jess a while to realize he was talking about Beachfront.
‘Time to sell,’ he said, when he rang off. ‘Still. Like you said, at least I have assets to dispose of.’
‘What’s it all going to cost you? The prosecution?’
‘Oh. Nobody’s saying. But reading between the lines, I think the answer is “most of it”.’
She couldn’t work out if he was more upset than he was letting on.
He tried to call someone else, but the answer phone kicked in. ‘It’s Ronan here. Leave a message.’ He hung up without saying anything.
With every mile, real life moved steadily towards them like an encroaching tide, cold, unstoppable. Jess thought about the fact that there was a whole swathe of his life she knew nothing about, and tried not to think about bubbles.
They finally arrived back shortly after four. As the Audi pulled into the street the rain had eased to a fine drizzle, the road looked oily with damp, the sprawling Danehall estate struggling to show spring promise. There was the little house, somehow smaller and scruffier than Jess remembered it and, oddly, like something that had nothing to do with her. Ed pulled up outside, and she peered out of the window at the peeling paintwork on the upstairs windows that Marty had never got round to painting because he said, really, you had to do a proper job, sanding it first and taking off the old paint and using filler to plug the gaps, and he had always been either too busy or too tired to do any of it. Just for a moment, she felt a wave of depression wash over her at the thought of all the problems that had been sitting there waiting for them on their return. And all the greater ones that she had created in her absence. And then she looked at Ed, who was helping Tanzie with her bag, and laughing at something Nicky said, leaning over to hear him better, and it passed.
He had stopped at a DIY superstore about an hour out of town – his detour – emerging with a great box of stuff that he had to wrestle into the back alongside their bags. It was possible he needed to tidy his house before he sold it. Jess couldn’t think what you would do to that house to make it any nicer.
He dropped the last of the bags by the front door and stood there, holding the cardboard box. The children had disappeared immediately to their rooms, like creatures in some sort of homing experiment. Jess felt embarrassed then by the cluttered little house, the woodchip wallpaper, the long row of battered paperbacks that snaked along the hall.
‘I’m going back to my dad’s tomorrow.’
A reflexive twinge at the thought of his absence. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘Just for a few days. Until the police thing. But I thought I’d put these up first.’
Jess looked down at the boxes.
‘Security camera and motion-activated light. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.’
‘You bought that for us?’
‘Nicky got beaten up. Tanzie plainly doesn’t feel safe. I thought it would make you all feel better. You know … if I’m not here.’
She stared at the box, at what it meant. She felt suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that this man had considered these things and wanted to protect them. She spoke before she knew what she wanted to say. ‘You – you don’t have to do that,’ she stammered. ‘I’m good at DIY. I’ll do it.’
‘On a ladder. With a busted foot.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know, Jessica Rae Thomas, at some point you’re going to have to let someone help you.’
‘At some point you’re going to have to stop calling me Jessica Rae Thomas.’
‘I can’t help it. I like it.’
She liked it too. ‘Well, what shall I do, then?’
‘Sit down. Stay still. Put your injured foot up. And then afterwards I’ll walk into town with Nicky and we’ll buy a disgustingly unhealthy waste-of-money takeaway because it might be the last one I get for a while. And then we’ll sit here and eat it and afterwards you and I will lie around gazing in awe at the size of each other’s stomachs.’