PROLOGUE
Okay, we’re ready,” he tells her, looking up from the camera. He’s more nervous than she’s seen him before – jittery, unpredictable. He won’t meet her eye. “Is there anything in particular you’d like to share? Or shall we just start the interview and see how we go?”
She bites the inside of her lip. She hadn’t really thought this through, hadn’t thought beyond the fact of this man and his camera on one side of a room, her on the other. “I don’t know if I can talk about…” She hesitates, staring down at her hands. “I don’t know if I can talk abouther.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “We’ll go slowly.” He clicks a few buttons on the camera and gives her a nod. There’s a short beeping sound and the light directly above the lens glows red. She feels it immediately: that sensation of a thousand eyes all over her body, eyes from the future, eyes that know what happens tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. It makes her pulse buzz, but she can’t tell whether it’s with excitement or dread.
“Okay, Elly,” he says. He sounds unsure, though he’s smiling. “Let’s talk a bit about what brought you here, to the house.”
THEN
Elly is running. She can’t remember the last time she ran like this, the way you run in a nightmare: blindly, furiously, both away and towards. The baby squirms inside her but she can’t stop now. What is she running from? The images are there behind her eyelids when she blinks: a bone-white dress, Ethan’s hand gripping her wrist, her mum sitting in the pews, smiling a little too widely.
The night air is cold as old stone. This morning already feels like another life. The wedding had taken place in a church with a looming bell tower and toppled gravestones across the lawn. Elly’s mum had requested that: the village church, where all the women in her family had been christened, got married, eventually been laid to rest – the place where their lives had been punctuated with import.It’s what your dad would have wanted, she’d said the day before the wedding, drinking white wine in the kitchen,if he were still here.
If Elly’s dad were still here, he might have been the oneto notice, the one to pull her aside and say,You seem a little quiet, pet, has something happened? Are you sure this is what you want?He had met Ethan properly only once: the first time Elly brought him home for dinner. Her dad was already ill by that point, but not yet ill enough for the hospital. She remem bered that they’d eaten spaghetti carbonara and homemade garlic bread. Ethan had made clever jokes about the stock market and complimented their buddleias. Afterwards, feeling giddy, Elly asked her parents what they thought of Ethan. Her mum said,He’s so well spoken. Her dad said,His shoes are very shiny.
Elly’s mum walked her down the aisle, and with every step Elly tried to ignore the feeling in the bottom of her stomach, like a burnt piece of paper curling. When her mum kissed her on the cheek and handed her over to Ethan, resplendent in his charcoal suit, eyes glittering like dark stones, he held her so tightly it was as though he knew she was a hair away from running.
Well, she’s running now. Now, when it’s too late. The muscles in her thighs feel like liquid, but she presses on.
Elly can’t remember much else of the ceremony, only that sayingI dointo the silence of the church had felt both as natural as opening a door and as final as pulling a trigger. The way he’d smiled at her – like she’d finally done something right – made her pulse hop, like a spring hare trapped under her skin.
They held the reception at the village hall. It smelled like old trainers and wood polish. Ethan had scoffed when she first suggested it, had wanted some fancy bar in Edinburgh, but Elly couldn’t let it go. She needed the reception to be somewhere her dad had been before, somewhere he wasfamiliar with. That felt important. Ethan shrugged and acquiesced when she told him that, and she was relieved not to have to push the matter further. Elly’s mum had made the red-and-white gingham bunting, had spent many nights swearing at the sewing machine, trying to get the stitches perfect. Everything had to be symmetrical, neat, tied up in a bow. When she and Ethan walked in as a newly married couple, people threw confetti at them and thrust phones into their faces for pictures.Smile, Ethan said in her ear, squeezing her hand so that the bones rubbed together.Come on. It’s our wedding day.
They ate ham hock terrine slathered with piccalilli, poached salmon dressed in lemon and dill and sitting on top of buttery new potatoes, a lemon meringue tart and ice cream to finish. Suzanne had made the tarts for her at the bakery. Elly had asked for them specifically, because they were her dad’s favourite, because the decision on dessert was something she could control. At the reception, she took bite after bite, tasting nothing. Ethan’s arm was a familiar weight around her shoulders, and she met his every smile with one of her own.Steady on, he said as she chewed on flaky pastry,there’s eating for two, then there’s just being greedy. Elly put down her fork.
During the disco, her cousin’s kids stalked around the cake table, stealing strips of icing, using their tiny white shirts as napkins. Suzanne passed her a wrapped, bottle-shaped gift. Elly said,Is it a can-opener, and Suzanne laughed, pulling her into a perfumey hug. They used to spend every day together at the bakery but had barely seen each other since Elly left.Help me, she wanted to whisper into her friend’s ear,I don’t know if I’ve done the rightthing, but Suzanne pulled away. Her mum danced to ABBA with a vigour Elly hadn’t seen in years, not since her dad died, maybe even before that, swaying with her Aunt Judith and singing the lyrics to ‘Dancing Queen’. When she came over to Elly’s table afterwards, her skin was flushed pink and slightly damp. She reached over and kissed Ethan first, clasping his hands in both of hers. Her eyes were shiny.
I’m just so pleased you’re going to take care of her now.
Ethan smiled. To Elly, she said,I’m so proud of you.
She beamed so bright, her happiness blinding as a lens flare. To stop herself from crying, Elly thought about her dad’s hands – large and wrinkled and caked with dried clay from his pottery wheel. She opened her mouth and thought about all the things she wanted to say.
I’m sorry I’m so sorry but I honestly don’t think I can do this I know how much this means to you after Dad and you think Ethan’s funny and charming and clever and yes he is all those things and I love him but I don’t understand him and sometimes I think he does things just to hurt me and I’m worried it’s going to get worse and at the altar he held my hands too tight and I know it sounds silly and I know I really ought to be happier but—
Instead, she smiled and said,I’ll be okay now, Mum. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
Elly stops in the woods to catch her breath, one hand on her stomach. The baby is still. Everything has started to look the same in this light. All around her, the night is the colour of bled ink and smoke. She keeps moving. She just has to keep moving.
As the reception wore on, she’d found herself not wanting to leave, to stay with family, in safe company. Most of the guests were hers. Elly looked around at her friends and tried to remember when she’d last spent proper time with any of them, the last time Ethan hadn’t given her some reason why she shouldn’t. They smiled at her from across the village hall, far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to hear her if she said something. Their politeness was unbearable – the way they’d dressed up nicely, said congratulations, and were waiting until it was an acceptable time to leave. Smiling back at them felt like standing in a dark room, grasping towards the light. She willed them to notice, to see her, to take her into the corner and say the right combination of words that would have made it all right for her to confess how she was feeling, but what would those words even have been? She was marooned in a place beyond language now, a place she could no longer be reached.
It was difficult to breathe suddenly, difficult to swallow. Elly stood up without knowing where she was going, only that she needed to be away from the loud music and the dancing bodies, from the smiles that kept flashing up in front of her, belonging to people who seemed to expect one in return. She found herself in the toilets, which were quiet, cool and empty. Bracing a hand on either side of the sink, she studied her reflection in the mirror and tried to see a bride on her wedding day. All the pieces were there, but they seemed to add up to a different whole. Her white dress and veil felt sterile and seeped of colour; the blush on her cheeks made them look freshly slapped rather than rosy. Her face didn’t look like her own. How had she letit come to this? It had all seemed so inevitable – events rolling on with a fierce momentum towards a foregone conclusion – that she sometimes thought she couldn’t have stopped it at all. But that was just an excuse, she knew. That was just her being weak. Elly started to cry, wondering if she needed saving, wondering if it was too late for that now.
The door to the toilets opened and a woman in an orange dress entered. Elly straightened, wiping her face. The woman didn’t go into a cubicle but instead approached the sinks and started running the tap, her long fingers flexing and curling under the water. Elly sniffed in a way she hoped was discreet, rubbing at a smudge of mascara on her cheek and watching the woman from the corner of her eye. Could she tell that Elly had been crying? The thought of it getting back to Ethan made her breathing quicken. Whenever she’d cried in front of him, he’d always comforted her, but she’d sensed a flicker of something else behind his concern. She wished it was as simple as irritation or impatience, embarrassment even. But there was a tightness in his jaw, a heavy-liddedness to his gaze, which made it feel more like a thirst he didn’t know what to do with. Like he wanted to hold her in his palms and close his fingers around her.
As Elly watched the woman in the mirror, she realised she didn’t recognise her. She couldn’t remember seeing her during either the ceremony or reception, and yet there was something familiar about her face, something she couldn’t place. Perhaps she was a relative of Ethan’s, someone she’d once seen in the background of a photograph. The woman met Elly’s eye in the mirror, and her expression was socareful and serious that it made the hairs on Elly’s forearms prickle. She had dark skin that looked weathered, lived-in, yet smooth. Her black hair was cropped in a nest close to her head, the curls shining like the surface of a pond at night. The woman kept on looking at Elly for longer than was polite, eyes moving from her tear-stained face to her wrists, where the sleeves had ridden up to expose a newly forming bracelet of bruises. Elly looked down at them, too, thinking about the altar and the strength in Ethan’s fingers as they’d pressed into her skin, then shoved her sleeves back down. She thought about making some kind of excuse for it all, but the frankness of the woman’s gaze stopped her.She sees me, Elly thought, with a sudden clarity and something close to relief.Maybe she sees all of it. Maybe I don’t have to explain.
“You probably feel like it’s too late now,” was the first thing the woman said. Her voice echoed off the bathroom tiles. It had a soft, melodic quality, like the call of a bird heard in the seconds before sleep. “But it isn’t.”
Elly wiped her nose, suddenly aware of how pathetic she must look, eyes bleary and mascara smeared. “Sorry, what was your name?” she asked, still facing the mirror. “Today has been a bit of a whirlwind.”
“You’re frightened of that man,” the woman said, ignoring Elly’s question, nodding towards the bathroom door. The sounds of the wedding reached them from underneath it, persistent as smoke: the thumping bass of a pop song, the delighted shriek of a running child. “You’re frightened of the man you just married. I think you’re right to be.”
Elly’s pulse fluttered, a startled creature, her eyesflickering down to her wedding ring. It was shiny and tight around her finger. “I’m married,” she said simply. It felt like the only thing that mattered. The weight of those two words pressed down on her shoulders like a pair of hands, keeping her rooted to the spot. “I… I don’t really know what you mean. Why would I be frightened of Ethan? Everything’s fine.”
The woman inhaled, the lines around her eyes deepening. She looked to be around Elly’s mum’s age, maybe older. “Maybe everything is fine. Maybe it isn’t.” One of her hands found the small of Elly’s back, pressing gently. She lowered her voice to a whisper, leaned in close. “Do you want to wait and find out?”
