Aidan’s head had been spinning with questions after Helena had gone. It was only when he was alone that he had had time to really process it all. Garda Sullivan had arrived not long after Helena had left and his heart had sunk as she had confirmed what Helena had told him – that James O’Herlihy was the other passenger travelling in the car with his wife and daughter. He had so many questions that he needed answered, but Garda Sullivan was only able to help with circumstances surrounding the crash. She told him that forensic crash investigators had examined the scene and their findings would be made known in the inquest in a few months’ time but that several witnesses had come forward claiming that the lorry in front of Rowan was stationary in a queue of traffic at the time and her car hadn’t braked early enough. They said she had tried to swerve at the last minute, but the driver’s side of the car had ploughed into the lorry. Garda Sullivan had told him that the car was written off and had been taken to a dismantlers’ yard. As she was leaving, she had handed him a clear plastic bag with belongings retrieved from the wreckage. Amongst other items, Aidan saw Rowan’s phone with its screen smashed, her handbag, a pair of sunglasses, a bottle of sun cream, a hoodie belonging to Callum, two footballs and Milly’s lunch bag. All evidence of happy family life, nothing that had foretold of the carnage that was coming down the tracks for them and nothing that explained why James had been travelling in the car with them.
He watched Milly as she slept peacefully beside him. He wondered if she remembered anything from the crash. She hadn’t mentioned it during the brief periods she had woken and now that she was just starting on the road to recovery, Aidan didn’t want to risk upsetting her by triggering any memories she might have, but he longed to ask her about James and whether she remembered what had been going on in the moments before the crash.
He had always known that James and Rowan had had a ‘thing’ back in college. Rowan had once told him that their friendship sometimes transcended into sex, but they had never officially been a couple. As far as he knew, they kept in touch sporadically, a text message here and there. James had invited them to his wedding, along with all the old college gang. Rowan used to have nights out with her college friends, but they had died off in recent years. They were all married now, most of them had young children and it had become harder to organise a night that suited everyone. He was sure Rowan hadn’t seen James since his wedding day. Until now. So why on earth was James in her car? Had something rekindled between them… But no… they were both married – Rowan had children. She wouldn’t do that to them – to him.
Aidan and Rowan had always been something of an odd couple, everyone knew that. Even Aidan knew that. She was so creative and vivacious, he was so steady – so safe – but she told him that that was what she liked about him. When Rowan had first introduced him to her friends, they had all regarded him as something of a curiosity.
They had met at the party of a mutual friend when they were in their early twenties. Aidan had noticed her as soon as she had walked into the room; she had glossy dark hair and her green eyes had been accentuated by the emerald shade of her dress. She had picked up a guitar that was standing in the corner and Aidan had been transfixed as she started to play. Aidan hadn’t thought she would even cast him a second look. Safe, dependable Aidan, with his work suits, a mortgage and a pension plan before he had even turned twenty-three.
Somehow that night they had got talking and had got on well. He had offered to walk her home and as they had laughed together as the sun was rising over the Irish Sea, Aidan knew something had started between them. They had quickly become inseparable. Aidan had felt a bit unsure of himself at the start, but she said she liked his sensible clothes and the way he always called when he said he would. She liked the way he took care of her. Once, she had told him that he reminded her of her father and at the time Aidan had taken that as a compliment, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Aidan had been raised in a working-class family; his father was a line manager in a factory that bottled soft drinks and his mother had worked in the canteen there, so it had been drilled into him from a young age that he had to work hard and get a solid education or he would end up working in the bottling factory too. He was determined to have a better life than they had had, so he got his degree in finance (first class honours) and landed a good job in an investment bank straight out of college. He had worked his way up the ladder rung by rung and was proud that he was a director now. Rowan had studied art history in UCD and although she sometimes helped out in her friend Annabelle’s gallery, she earned a pittance from her work there, but Aidan was pretty sure Philip kept her account topped up.
He always thought it was the difference in their upbringings that gave them such diametrically opposing attitudes towards money; Aidan always took a cautious approach when it came to their finances, whereas Rowan could be frivolous and if Aidan ever dared to say anything, her reply was always ‘it’s only money’. It’s only money – like he hadn’t had to spend his whole life grafting to make sure his family had enough of the stuff! He never could get his head around that, but Rowan’s family had never had to worry about money and he guessed that bought freedom. She was always complaining about the crazy hours he worked; yes, he did work long hours, but it was all for them. There was no way they could keep up with the lifestyle Rowan was accustomed to without his job and his annual bonus, and even then it was a struggle.
Money had been tight after Christmas last year and when the invoice for Callum’s school fees had arrived in January, Aidan had pushed it out for a while to give himself a breather, but when he went to pay it a few weeks later, he found it had already been magically paid. It appeared Philip had saved the day yet again. Rowan had shrugged when he had asked her about it. She knew he didn’t agree with her readiness to take handouts from her father, but what could he say without appearing ungrateful, and so it had slipped away unspoken, like everything else between them. Now it seemed so silly. Why had he spent so much time worrying about that stuff? Things like pensions and mortgages and having college funds set up for the kids. He should have relaxed more; loosened up, instead of being boring, dependable Aidan.
Rowan definitely would never fit into the mould of suburban stay-at-home-mum and if he was being really honest, he sometimes had found her unconventional ways a bit tiring over the years. Not long after they had first met, she had spent five nights sleeping rough on the steps of Leinster House to highlight the growing numbers of the city’s homeless population. While watching his girlfriend outside government buildings on the nine o’clock news every night, Aidan had been torn between pride and mild embarrassment in case his work colleagues recognised her on their TV screens, as the news cameras reported live from the scene of the protest.
Then there was the time a few years later when she had befriended a young homeless girl called Magda and had moved her into their house for three months. Aidan was proud of his wife’s strong sense of social justice, but the boys had only been small at the time and he didn’t think it was right to have a stranger living with them. She had argued that she owed it to share their privileged life with others, but it was easy to be a social justice warrior when you had never worried about money a day in your life. Things had come to a head when he had arrived home from work one day to find Magda sitting at their kitchen table entertaining a group of her friends with Rowan nowhere to be seen. That day, Aidan had given Rowan an ultimatum – it was either Magda or him. In the end Rowan had got Magda a job as a live-in house-keeper for a friend of hers and so she had finally moved out.
There had been many times he had wished she could just try to fit in a bit more, just try to live a more normal life. However, these thoughts were usually followed by a rush of guilt – he had fallen in love with Rowan purely because she was different, he loved her free spirit and flair for anything creative. He couldn’t expect her to change who she was just so he would feel more comfortable. She was like a tree that you tried to shape but it just grew whatever way it wanted to anyway, no matter how much you tried to prune it. Now he couldn’t help but wonder why had he wanted her to change? Why hadn’t he appreciated her for the way she was?
Sheila and Philip arrived again that evening, looking a lot more refreshed than they had when they had come in earlier that morning. They had changed into clothes more suitable for the Irish weather. Aidan asked them to sit with Milly while he returned home to see the boys for a few hours. It was so difficult being apart from them at a time like this, when they needed him more than ever. He knew the hospital wouldn’t let them in to visit Milly yet and besides, she was still in and out of sleep and he was worried it would upset the boys to see her like this instead of their livewire little sister who was always tearing around the house. Gemma was keeping him updated on how they were, but he longed to be with them. He also knew he could use a shower and change of clothes himself.
‘The boys are in a bad way,’ Philip began. ‘We called in on our way here.’
As usual, Philip didn’t beat around the bush.
Aidan felt a flood of guilt. While Aidan was desperate to see his sons, he was equally dreading seeing their raw grief.
‘They’ve lost the best mother in the world, of course they are,’ Sheila said, her voice dancing on tears once more.
‘Did you manage to find out who the other passenger was?’ Philip continued, lifting the newspaper that Aidan had bought in the coffee shop that morning and studying it again. Aidan could see it in Philip’s eyes that his lack of awareness about such a key detail in the crash was yet another sign of his failure as a husband. Sheila and Philip had read the newspaper earlier on and had asked Aidan who the third person was. Aidan had explained that he was just as mystified as they were and that he assumed it was a journalistic error but now he knew differently.
‘Actually I did,’ Aidan admitted.
‘Well go on,’ Philip said.
‘It was James.’
‘James who?’ Philip asked impatiently.
‘James O’Herlihy – you know, her friend from UCD?’ Aidan prompted. He was sure that Philip and Sheila would have met him over the years.
Sheila paused in thought for a moment. ‘I remember him – wasn’t he the one who—’ she broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished. ‘But why would he have been in the car with Rowan?’ She was clearly bewildered.
‘I’m not sure, but I think she might have been giving him a lift,’ Aidan lied, thinking on the spot. He knew that if he told Philip and Sheila the truth, that Rowan had wanted to talk to James about something, it would open a whole new chasm of questions that he was still searching for answers for himself. ‘His bike had a puncture and she happened to be driving by.’
Sheila shook her head sadly. ‘She was always helping other people right up until her dying moment. How is James doing?’
‘He has a broken femur apparently, but he’ll be all right.’ Helena had said that James didn’t know why Rowan had called him out of the blue wanting to meet, but Aidan was sure she wasn’t telling him the full story. There had been something she was holding back; he could tell. He decided that once Rowan’s parents were gone, he would go down that corridor to St Mary’s ward and ask James himself. He would ask all the questions that were tormenting him.
‘He had a lucky escape then,’ Philip said, shaking his head. ‘I was talking to the mortuary director a little while ago… The body will be released tomorrow.’
‘I see,’ Aidan said, feeling like he had been punched. Why had nobody informed him? Surely as Rowan’s husband and next of kin, they should have told him; but knowing his father-in-law, he had probably instructed them to call him first. Philip had to be in control of everything.
‘We’ll have to organise the funeral,’ Philip continued.
Here he goes, thought Aidan sourly, Philip was already starting to take charge of the arrangements. Aidan nodded, it was one of those things that was looming on the horizon, but he didn’t have the strength to think about it right now. The thought of his wife lying in a wooden box, being lowered into the ground, was terrifying.
‘We were thinking of St. Xavier’s church for the mass,’ Philip went on.
St. Xavier’s was the parish church where Rowan had grown up, but their church now was St Brigid’s, beside the kids’ school. They weren’t very religious, but they traipsed to mass there every Christmas morning and it was where their children had been baptised and made their communions. This was where the kids would expect it to be.
‘But St. Brigid’s church is in our parish,’ Aidan said. ‘It’s the church that the kids know best.’
‘Well, my little girl made all her sacraments in St Xavier’s and you both got married there in case you have forgotten,’ Philip said pointedly.
‘It’s what Rowan would have wanted, Aidan,’ Sheila backed up her husband, knowing there was no comeback from that.
‘Okay,’ Aidan agreed, clenching the bar at the end of Milly’s bed tightly. He didn’t have the energy to fight them on it. If it meant that much to them, he would go with it. Aidan knew from years of dealing with his in-laws that it was wiser to pick your battles.
‘I’ll contact Father Waldron,’ Philip said, satisfied that he had won the battle.