Megan was still glaring at her through the computer screen, and Corinne felt ashamed. After everything that had happened, here she was, saying ‘Emily’, as if she were real. A living creature, a cluster of reproducing cells growing fat in the shelter of Hannah’s swelling belly.
A grandchild.
Even now, after all the psychiatrists’ reports and the medical explanations and the sleepless nights lost to Google, Corinne still couldn’t quite believe it had happened.
‘Was it my fault?’ she asked Megan now, even though they’d been over this so many times it was just picking at an old wound.
‘Don’t talk bollocks, Mum.’
‘But why didn’t I notice it was odd? That the doctor’s appointments and scans all seemed to fall when Danny was away? That she cut out scan pictures and pasted them on to cards instead of showing us the whole printout?’
Hannah had printed them off the internet, it transpired. Cropping out the bit that said ‘Baby Jenkins’ or ‘Baby Cooper’.
‘All the signs were there,’ said Megan. ‘She looked pregnant. We saw her stomach, for fuck’s sake. And her tits. We couldn’t have known.’
The first psychiatrist they’d seen, a woman with blonde highlights and a sympathetic expression that made Corinne burst into tears within seconds of meeting her, had told them that some women’s bodies literally fool them into believing they are pregnant, imitating the hormones of pregnancy. They’d probably be surprised how often it happened.
But the deliberate deceit, that’s what Duncan had fixated on. The doctor’s appointments that were never made, the scans Hannah never had. How could she explain that?
The doctor wasn’t sure, but she would hazard a guess at some kind of dissociative disorder. Had Hannah had any major life crises recently? That kind of thing could make someone’s behaviour erratic and cause her to distance herself from reality. So the rational part of Hannah could put the lies in a little box and shut it away somewhere so deep and dark she didn’t even know it was there.
‘If you hold this fervent, emotionally driven wish, it’s possible you might disconnect yourself from the part of you that knows the wish is not reality,’ the doctor said.
Corinne hadn’t been able to think of any life crises at the time. Because Megan hadn’t told her about Danny and this other woman.
‘What else do you know about her, this – Steffie?’ Corinne pronounced the word as if it were a lie, and they both knew it.
Her eyes travelled back to the photograph lying on the sofa next to her. The bare brown legs in the cut-off shorts. The white vest over the perfectly flat stomach.
Megan shrugged. ‘She had family in Tunbridge Wells, Hannah said. Maybe she went back there to live. Maybe she is honing her husband-stealing skills on the unsuspecting men of Kent as we speak. Mum …’
There was a pause.
‘Mum, I wish Hannah would let me come and see her. Have you talked to her?’
Corinne nodded. ‘She’s still hurt, Megs. About the things you said about Danny.’
‘Someone had to tell her the truth.’
‘Darling, I’m afraid you’ll find out that, most of the time, the truth is the very last thing any of us want to hear. Hannah will come round. Just let her get out of the clinic and back home.’
Most of Corinne’s other Skype calls ended awkwardly with no one wanting to be the first to cut the other off, but as always Megan cut out with a cursory ‘Bye’, so one minute Corinne was looking at her face and thinking again how tired she looked and the next there was just that wallpaper photo of the three of them in Crete.
A different lifetime, it felt like.
Without thinking about what she was doing, Corinne called up the Google home page and typed in ‘Steffie Garitson, Tunbridge Wells’. Not much. A Facebook profile that led to a page with a picture showing the same photograph Corinne had already seen – only this time with eyes – and everything else set to private.
She tried ‘Stephanie Garitson’ and found a couple of entries. One was a 192 entry that kept the address hidden but listed the other occupants of the house. Jeremy Garitson. Patricia Garitson. Jacob Garitson.
Corinne googled ‘Jeremy Garitson, Tunbridge Wells’. She found a LinkedIn profile but couldn’t access it. There followed a quote in a local newspaper piece canvassing opinion about Brexit, on why he’d voted Leave.
Nothing identifying.
Patricia Garitson, on the other hand, was more forthcoming. She ran her own catering company and the company address was listed, and it looked very much like a residential address. Bingo.
Corinne copied the information down carefully underneath the words ‘Steffie Garitson’, neatly underlined.
She closed down Google and gazed again at the smiling photograph of her and her daughters on the screensaver.
Then she looked at the name and address written on the piece of paper in her jagged, sloping hand.
There was a nugget of hatred inside her, dense and hard and solid as a bullet.