She felt ludicrous in a flappy black graduation gown over the dark suit she’d borrowed from Indy. Being a student, Hannah didn’t have any smart clothes, but Indy needed respectable dress for dealing with the bereaved. Hannah scratched the label at her neck, felt the weight of the olive-green hood with white fake-fur trim. So much daft tradition attached to this, though at least nobody wore those ridiculous mortarboard hats.
The McEwan Hall was fizzing with energy, hundreds of graduating students in their subject’s colours, friends and family in the circle and balcony. Hannah gazed at the ornate domed ceiling, thin light drifting through high windows, a colossal pipe organ on stage up front. Students were parading across the stage at a clip, doffed on the head with an old cap then handed scroll tubes and ushered away. She looked at the balcony and saw Jenny, Dorothy and Indy beaming at her. She was doing this for them, really, she couldn’t care less about it all.
Soon it was her turn, shuffling out of the row, up on stage, heard her name read out. She managed not to trip during her ten seconds of fame, then back to her seat. A first in physics at Edinburgh was something, but she almost didn’t make it. She struggled through her third year because of everything with her dad, but when he went to ground she made a conscious decision to sort her shit out, not to let him dictate her life. So she’d knuckled down in her final year, revelled in relativity, quantum field theory and cosmology, spent her energy studying and revising, experimenting and writing. And here she was, one of the best in her year with a fully funded PhD in the astrophysics department.
The hall reverberated with applause. Hannah realised the ceremony was over and everyone was beaming. She looked at her course mates, felt kinship but nothing more, most of them avoided her because of the business with Craig, then there was the funeral home and PI work. She was not a normal student. She tapped the scroll tube with her fingers, she might not be a normal student but she was a good one.
The bigwigs paraded off stage and out the door, an old man at the front waving a staff with an ornate silver top. Hannah saw her family standing and clapping. She threw them a warm smile and waved her degree, then went out of the door blinking in the sunshine.
Sonder was busy for a lunchtime, mostly graduates and their families. At least she wasn’t the only one in a gown and hood. She and her gran were at one side of a booth by the window, Jenny and Indy across from them. The place was mint green and grey, busy spotlit open kitchen.
Hannah looked at the menu, fancy stuff at a tenner for a starter, twenty for a main. The menu had an explanation of the restaurant’s name: ‘Sonder: The realisation that each passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.’ She swallowed in recognition, thought about what the other three women in the booth did for a living, coming into people’s lives at a terrible moment and treating their grief as if it was the most important thing in the world. Which it was.
She looked out of the window and saw a young man draped in blankets begging at the cash machine across the road. She wondered about his vivid and complex life, the bad decisions and life blows that led him to that place. Thought about how easy it would be to end up the same. Then inevitably she thought of her dad, hiding somewhere, guilty but free.
Indy clinked her glass with a knife. Dorothy had ordered champagne, and Hannah couldn’t remember if she’d ever drunk the stuff before.
Indy was beaming. ‘I’d like to say something.’
Hannah beamed back.
‘First of all, congratulations to this wonderful woman on getting a goddamn first for her physics.’ She locked eyes with Hannah, who felt her heart swell. ‘She’s worked so hard, she deserves it. It would’ve been so easy to say “fuck it” and take a year off, but Hannah you are so strong, stronger than you know, and I’m unbelievably proud to call you my girlfriend.’
Indy took Hannah’s hand across the table and looked round. ‘To Hannah.’
Hannah’s cheeks flushed, bubbles tickling her throat as the champagne went down.
Indy removed her hand. ‘There’s something else.’
She put her glass down. She was wearing a low-cut red dress with a large floral print, like a Georgia O’Keeffe thing, and best of all it had pockets. Hannah had no idea where Indy found these things. Indy tucked her dyed-green bob behind an ear and swallowed.
‘I just said I was so proud to call you my girlfriend,’ she said. ‘But I was hoping I could call you something else.’
She slid out of the booth and took something from her pocket. She got down on one knee and opened the ring box, held it towards Hannah, who felt dizzy. The ring was platinum, a small emerald in the centre, the mount carrying an interlinked Hindu pattern. Hannah stared at it and tried to get her mind to work.
‘Hannah, would you do me the incredible honour of being my wife?’
Hannah looked at her face, shining eyes, kind smile, and her eyes welled up. She was vaguely aware of Mum and Gran smiling in the booth, but there was only one person in her universe right now.
‘Of course,’ she said, pulling Indy to her feet and kissing her.
The Meadows was bursting with life as Hannah and Indy walked arm in arm around Melville Terrace. Or maybe that was just Hannah’s state of mind, or the daytime champagne she wasn’t used to. Indy squeezed her arm and laid her head on Hannah’s shoulder, and they bounced on their heels, dumbly in love.
She smelled barbecues across the road, saw folk playing with Frisbees, footballs, the thwack of balls at the tennis courts. Magpies flitting between trees, dogs sniffing scents, squirrels clinging to tree trunks.
They reached the corner of Argyle Place and Hannah looked at their flat. There would be a million things to sort for the wedding, but she wasn’t thinking about that, just trying to soak in every moment.
Indy opened the stairwell door, turned and kissed her long and hard against the wall. She kissed back.
‘Oof,’ Indy said. ‘I love you.’
‘Likewise, babes.’
Both said with laughs in their voices.
They walked up three flights of stairs, and Indy went to unlock the door but frowned. It was ajar already. Indy pushed and it swung open. As Indy went inside Hannah saw that the wood around the lock was splintered.
‘What is it?’ Hannah said.
Indy stood in the hallway. Hannah looked past her at the large sign draped across the back wall. ‘CONGRATULATIONS’ in a colourful font, three unnecessary exclamation marks at the end, a pattern of party balloons and streamers in the background.
Hannah felt the unfamiliar ring on her finger, turned it with her other hand, imagined champagne-blood fizzing to her fingertips.
Indy turned to Hannah, shaking her head.
‘I didn’t do this,’ she said, and Hannah knew straight away what that meant.