Once Emma had left, silence cloaked the room. Steph noticed distantly that their ceiling light had two bulbs out, making one half of the living room darker. Everybody else seemed to be on the illuminated portion of a stage whereas she was in the wings, the shadows. She shut her eyes to complete the darkness, trying to grasp what Emma had said, feeling that it was what she hadn’t said that was vital.
“Have you any idea what Miss Brighton’s son might be referring to?” George asked them.
Nobody answered. Steph turned to Paul. “We need to talk.”
Paul nodded. His skin was gray and there were half-moons of exhaustion beneath his eyes. Steph’s glimmer of sympathy was overridden by a quick wave of fear.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Paul said.
“I’d like to discuss this with you both,” George said.
“We need a moment.” Steph left the apartment before George or her in-laws could protest further. Paul caught up with her outside. He’d brought her coat and he slipped it around her shoulders. They walked briskly, without speaking at first. There was a charge in the air as if another downpour was imminent, and the buzz of a police helicopter in the bruised sky. Steph stared at each car and pedestrian that passed them, and noticed Paul doing the same. She had the fleeting, terrible thought that this could be their life from now on: looking for their daughter in every turned-away face or shadowy window.
“I promise you,” Paul said, “whatever Freya found out about me, wherever it took her, I’ll bring her home.”
The words dead or alive knifed through Steph’s head and she pushed them violently away. She glanced at Paul, his clenched arms, the intensity in his face. What was he carrying that made him so sure he was to blame?
“What is there to find out?” she asked as spots of rain landed cold and soft on her forehead.
She watched for his reaction. Did he know what his dad had let slip? Would he be honest with her now?
The rain gathered urgency. Streams ran beneath her collar, drops sticking to her eyelashes.
“Let’s duck in here,” Paul said, pointing toward the church.
They darted up the path. The door clanged shut behind them and the silence inside was chilly but peaceful, Sunday-morning service long finished. Rain dripped from their clothes as they walked down the aisle in a parody of a wedding.
Sitting in the front pew, with blue light slanting through the stained-glass window in front of her, Steph felt The Question rising from her core. The one she’d stopped herself asking him all these years. It seemed even more pertinent now that she knew the true nature of his police work.
Yet still she swallowed it, and instead said: “You were undercover. For three years.”
His head swung toward her. “How do you know that?”
“Your dad told me.”
Paul pressed a hand against his face and she heard him exhale.
“I wish you’d told me,” Steph said.
He stared at the floor. “I couldn’t.”
“I know the details must be classified but you could’ve at least—”
“I couldn’t talk about it, Steph!” His voice surged. “And I don’t just mean because it was classified.”
She felt tears behind her eyes. Paul moved his hand as if he was going to touch hers, but he didn’t: He ran his fingertips along the worn edge of the pew.
“What was your name?” she asked quietly. “Can you at least tell me that?”
There was a pause before he said, “Paul Darren Jacobs.”
“Paul?”
“It’s better to use your real first name if possible. Less scope for slipups.”
“Oh.” Even this small insight made her feel overwhelmed. Clueless.
“Things went wrong,” he said, “when I was undercover. I thought it was all in the past, but now . . .”
Dread shivered through her. “Wrong how?”
“I . . . deceived people. Made bad choices. Lost control . . .” He seemed to coil in on himself on the pew, long legs bent, his spine a question mark. “And there were consequences.”
Steph felt her pulse in every part of her. “Was it to do with drugs?”
He shook his head. “In a way I wish it had been. Drug dealers, straightforward villains—perhaps I would’ve dealt with those better. But it was more complicated than that. It was more . . .” He seemed to grapple for the right word, then choked out, “It was hard.”
“Did you have a relationship?” Steph asked, replacing The Question with one that had troubled her almost as often over the years—for different reasons, perhaps, and without realizing then that Paul might have been with someone who didn’t even know his real identity.
She felt the pew move and creak. “What makes you ask that?”
“I’ve always had this feeling . . .” She gazed toward the stained-glass window. In it, three people were lying side by side. Steph couldn’t tell if they were praying or sleeping or dying. “. . . that you loved someone before me. Someone you didn’t want to tell me about.”
He seized her hand. “I love you. And Freya. You’re my world.”
Sadness exploded through her. The man who’d learned her favorite passage from Jane Eyre for their wedding, who could still make her tingle by kissing her neck, who’d had damp eyes on Freya’s first day of school, he was receding from her again. Or maybe it was her who was retreating. Shutting down because it was all too much.
Paul stood up and paced back and forth, like an impassioned minister delivering a sermon, except that he was murmuring, “Fuck,” over and over. His curses echoed in the crest of the ceiling, as if they were collecting up high.
“Did you kill someone?”
The Question had broken free.
Paul stopped abruptly. “What?”
Steph didn’t want to repeat it. She was already regretting asking, but she was also breathless to hear his answer, as though she was detaching herself from the conversation, watching two unknown people and wondering, What is he going to say now? And what will she say?
Then she looked at her husband and recognized what he was doing. His shoulders were drawn forward. There were pain lines in his face. He was trying to keep himself upright, like someone who’d been struck in the stomach and didn’t want to fold.
Steph got up and stepped toward him but he flinched away as though wary of a second blow. Suddenly all she felt was blistering guilt. “Paul, I . . .”
He straightened and they looked at one another. Then a loud beep startled them. It was just a text message alert, coming from Paul’s pocket, but the acoustics of the church and the tension of the moment made it feel like a small explosion. Paul blinked as if waking from a confusing dream. His hand hovered toward his pocket, his gaze still on Steph. Finally he broke eye contact and drew out his phone. The moment seemed to cave in.
“I have to go,” he said, staring at his screen.
“No, Paul—”
“I’m sorry.” He was already moving toward the church door. “But I really have to this time. I’ve just had some information . . . Steph, I don’t want you drawn into this. Please go home, stay safe. And I’ll be back, I promise. With Freya.”
She saw how his face had now transformed. He was fired up, reawakened, but all it stirred in Steph was a new rise of panic. Paul thrust open the church door. As he disappeared yet again, intent on reversing whatever damage he was convinced he’d caused, a chill of doubt spread beneath Steph’s skin.
“Wait!” she called, but her legs were shaking too much to follow.