“Anna! Over here!”
“How do you feel about your mother’s death?”
Mark puts a hand in the small of my back and steers me across the street, all the while talking to me in a low voice. “Don’t make eye contact . . . keep looking forward . . . nearly there . . .” We reach the sidewalk and he takes back his hand to tip the pram wheels up and over the curb.
“Mr. Hemmings—what first attracted you to the millionairess Anna Johnson?”
There is a ripple of laughter.
Mark takes a key from his pocket and unlocks the gates. Someone has tied a cellophane-wrapped bunch of flowers to the bars. For Dad? My mother? For me? As Mark slides the gates open—just wide enough for me to push the pram through—a man from the Sun steps in front of us. I know he’s from the Sun because he has told me so, every day for the last seven days, and because he has a dog-eared identity card dangling from the zip of his fleece, as though this hint of professionalism could negate the daily harassment.
“You’re on private property,” Mark says.
The journalist looks down. One scuffed brown boot is half on the sidewalk, half on the gravel that covers our driveway. He moves it. Less than an inch, but he is no longer trespassing. He thrusts an iPhone in my face.
“Just a quick quote, Anna, then all this will go away.” Behind him stands his sidekick. Two cameras lie like machine guns across the older man’s body, the sagging pockets of his parka stuffed with lenses, flashes, batteries.
“Leave me alone.”
It’s a mistake. Instantly there’s a rustle of notebooks, another phone. The small crowd of hacks surges forward, taking my broken silence as invitation.
“It’s a chance to put your side of the story forward.”
“Anna! This way!”
“What was your mother like growing up, Anna? Was she violent toward you?” This last with a raised voice, and now they’re all shouting. All trying to be heard; all desperate for the scoop.
Robert’s front door opens, and he comes down the steps in a pair of leather slippers. He nods briefly to us, but his eyes are fixed on the reporters. “Why don’t you just fuck off?”
“Why don’t you fuck off?”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“Nobody.”
It’s enough of a distraction. I shoot Robert a grateful look, feel Mark’s hand on my back again, pushing me forward. The pram wheels crunch on gravel, and then Mark’s pulling the gates closed, turning the key. There are two, three, four flashes.
More photos.
More photos of me looking pale and anxious; more photos of Ella’s pram with a privacy blanket clipped to the hood. More photos of Mark, grimly escorting us in and out of the drive when necessity demands that we leave the safety of the house.
Only the local paper still has us on the front page (the nationals have already relegated us to page five), with a photograph taken through the railings, as though we were the ones behind bars.
Inside, Mark makes coffee.
They wanted us to stay somewhere else.
“Just for a few days,” Detective Sergeant Kennedy said.
I had just finished giving my statement, the result of almost eight hours in a windowless room with a female detective who looked like she’d rather be anywhere but there. She wasn’t the only one.
Back home, the kitchen—the scene of my dad’s murder—had been cordoned off, white-suited forensic officers swabbing every inch of it.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They found traces of Dad’s blood in the grout between the tiles, despite the bleach poured on the floor by Laura and Mum. Blood beneath my feet, for all those months. I feel like I should have seen; should have known.
It was three days before we were allowed full use of the kitchen again; another twenty-four hours before they finished in the garden. Mark has pulled the curtains across the glass doors from the kitchen, so I can’t see the piles of earth that now pass for our lawn, and closed the shutters at the front of the house, to avoid the telescopic lenses of the headline hunters in the road.
“There aren’t as many today,” he says now. “They’ll be gone by the end of the week.”
“They’ll be back for the trial.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.” He hands me a steaming mug of coffee, and we sit at the table. I’ve moved things around; repositioned the table and switched the two armchairs. Small changes that I hope—in time—will stop me remembering; stop me picturing what happened here.
Mark sifts through the post, leaving most of it unopened and putting it in a pile for the recycling, along with the notes from reporters that litter the driveway until Mark picks them up.
Cash waiting in exchange for exclusive rights to your story.
There have been offers from publishers and literary agents. Approaches from film companies and reality TV shows. Sympathy cards, funeral leaflets, cards from Eastbourne residents shocked to discover that Caroline Johnson—campaigner, fund-raiser, committee member—had murdered her husband.
They all go in the trash.
“It’ll die down soon.”
“I know.” The hacks will move on to the next juicy story, and one day I’ll be able to walk through Eastbourne without people whispering to their friends. That’s her—the Johnson daughter.
One day.
Mark clears his throat. “I need to tell you something.”
I see his face and my stomach lurches, a lift dropping to the ground floor without buttons pressed for pause. I cannot take any more announcements, any more surprises. I would like to live the rest of my life knowing exactly what is happening each hour, each day.
“When the police asked about the appointment Caroline made with me . . .” He stares into his coffee; falls silent for a while.
I say nothing, my heartbeat a drumroll in my ears.
“I lied.”
I feel that shift again, the ground beneath me cracking, splitting, moving. Life, changing with a single word.
A single lie.
“I never met your mother.” He looks up, his eyes searching mine. “But I did speak to her.”
I swallow, hard.
“I didn’t make the connection, not until after your first session with me. I looked through my datebook and there it was: your mother’s name. And I remembered her phone call; remembered her telling me her husband had died, and that she needed help working through it. Only, she never showed up, and it didn’t enter my head again until that moment.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mark lets out a breath as if he’s just run a marathon. “Patient confidentiality?” There’s a question mark in his voice, as though he knows it sounds absurd. “And because I didn’t want you to leave.”
“Why not?” I say, although I already know the answer.
He takes my hand and rubs his thumb across the inside of my wrist. Beneath his gentle pressure the skin pales, blue-green veins just visible, like the tributaries of a river. “Because I was already falling in love with you.”
He leans forward, and I do the same. We meet in the middle, awkwardly bent across the corner of the kitchen table. I close my eyes and feel the softness of his lips, the warmth of his breath on me.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I understand why he did it. He’s right: I would have gone somewhere else. It would have felt too strange to unburden myself to a man my mother had chosen for her own confessions. And if I’d gone elsewhere, Ella would never have been born.
“No more secrets, though.”
“No more secrets,” Mark says. “A fresh start.” He hesitates, and I think for a second there’s something else he wants to get off his chest, but instead he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, velvet-covered box.
He holds my gaze as he slips off his chair and onto one knee.