Before

Rebekah first told her dad that she wanted to be a doctor when she was fifteen. He said she’d be better off following him into a career as a cop, because she was – in his words – ‘tough and liked asking questions’. After he’d left the army, being a cop was all he understood, so it wasn’t a surprise he saw it that way, but Rebekah often wondered if the seven years she’d spent apart from her father, in a different country, had also clouded his view of what she was capable of: he didn’t think she had the endurance to make it as a doctor, because he wasn’t aware of her potential. Or perhaps there was a much simpler reason: her father loved her – and he never wanted her to feel the disappointment Johnny had.

From as far back as Rebekah could remember, Johnny had always wanted to be a writer, his bedrooms constantly stacked with old paperbacks. He loved science fiction and horror stories, but his real passion was history: his heroes were James Michener and Ken Follett, and his favourite novel was The Pillars of the Earth. After high school, he went on to study English at Brooklyn College; once he graduated, he returned home and wrote the great American novel on the veranda at the back of the house, a 700-page epic set in 1624 when the Dutch first landed at the southern tip of modern-day Manhattan. And after it was written, after he’d imagined himself on the bestseller lists, on tours around the country, at a table in a store signing copy after copy, he began to accumulate a pile of rejection letters a foot high. For Johnny, the reality had been crushing: eighteen months after it was finished, he consigned the novel to a dusty box under his bed, and began working behind the counter of an electronics store in Bay Ridge that made the same every year as Radio Shack made in an hour. At the time, Rebekah didn’t understand how her father must have felt, but when she finally became a mother she did: we want our kids to have the best jobs and the perfect life – but we don’t want to see them fail while trying.

In the end, though, Rebekah didn’t fail.

A year after she met Gareth in a bar on Madison Avenue, she was accepted to NYU’s School of Medicine. Four years after that, she began a residency at New York Presbyterian, and just before her first Christmas as a resident, Gareth took her to a restaurant with views over Central Park and asked her to marry him.

During their five-year engagement, they often talked about setting a date but they were both so focused on their careers it was a conversation that tended to disappear into the background. But then, after Mike died in the car accident, it was as if something had shaken loose: the wedding became far more important, something definite in a time of great uncertainty.

They were married in a church in Dyker Heights. Rebekah’s father always maintained he was Irish Catholic, which was partly true in as much as their surname was Murphy and his grandparents had come from Donegal. But there had never been much celebration of Henry’s heritage at home, and their mother’s family, according to what Johnny had overheard their father saying on the telephone one night, were Jehovah’s Witnesses from Essex.

Even so, a Catholic ceremony made Gareth and his family happy, and it made her dad happy too. Rebekah hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but it seemed so obvious when he fell sick soon after. Perhaps, on some deep level, he’d felt the illness in him, an eel writhing inside a net; perhaps he’d suddenly caught a clear vision of his impending mortality, and returning to church was the first step to whatever came next.

‘It’s been so long since I’ve been,’ he’d said to Rebekah, as they arrived in the car. ‘I hope he can forgive me.’

Rebekah looked at him from beneath the veil, uncertain whom he meant. ‘Who are you talking about, Dad?’

She could hear the panic in her voice, as she wondered if her father was losing it, just seconds before he walked her down the aisle on the most important day of her life.

But then, when he didn’t reply, she followed his eyeline towards the spaces above the main doors and saw who he was referring to.

He with a capital H.

A statue of Christ was gazing back at them.

‘Don’t worry,’ Rebekah said, and squeezed her father’s hand, wondering if it might be nerves. He’d told her in the days beforehand that he wasn’t concerned about his speech, but maybe that had been a lie to protect her and stop her worrying. ‘You’ve got nothing to ask forgiveness for, Dad.’

It occurred to her then that she had no real idea if that were true or not. She didn’t know how many men he’d killed in Vietnam. She didn’t know how many people he’d shot as a cop. She didn’t believe he would ever seek any pleasure in either, but she knew there had been a lot that Henry had chosen not to bring home when she was growing up. He would tell them enough about Vietnam, enough about being a cop to keep them sated, but in his eyes, their mother leaving had always been enough for them to cope with. That, too, was a story Rebekah knew her father had downplayed – the real tale of her parents’ marriage and why her mother had left. She often wondered if he was the reason Fiona had walked out on them, but she’d never found any evidence of that. Her father had always said Fiona’s decision had come out of nowhere, and eventually it became much easier for Rebekah to blame the whole thing on her.

In the end, the wedding was perfect. At the reception her father gave a warm, funny speech that everybody loved. He didn’t do much public speaking but Rebekah remembered thinking how good at it he was, how natural. He was witty, warm, his jokes a little predictable but delivered with love. He talked about Fiona, but only in passing, which was fine by Rebekah, and when they were eating afterwards, Gareth turned to her, kissed her cheek, and said, ‘I’m so lucky to be a part of your family.’

That was the kind of thing Gareth would say a lot, especially in the early days of their relationship. He got on well with his own parents, even though his father could be tough, but he really connected with Henry. After the wedding was over, they’d found Rebekah’s father asleep in the corner, drunk, exhausted, and Gareth was the one that helped him to the car.

It was easy to forget those times.

After Rebekah and Gareth’s marriage fell away beneath them, it was simpler to believe those moments had never been there between them. But they had. For a long time, their relationship had been good, loving, its foundations stable.

But then the rot had set in.

And, before long, she’d realized she didn’t know Gareth at all.