I know what he meant, and to be honest I’m so pleased he’s here he could literally say anything right now. I smile. “Well, then maybe you shouldn’t be creeping around outside people’s houses like a murderer, Chris.”
“Yeah, I definitely need to stop doing that.” He smiles mutedly before his expression drops slightly. “But someone did ring you to let you know I was coming, right?”
“Yeah, I literally just got off the phone with Pe—with someone.” I catch myself. I’m not sure if I should be mentioning Peter at this stage. I know he’s in close contact with the police but I don’t know if it’s above Chris’s pay grade. I move on swiftly. “They said someone would be coming. I just didn’t know you’d get here so quickly.”
But Chris catches my misstep. “Who called you, Marn?” he asks, suddenly serious.
I rub my eyes. I’m so tired. “Please stop calling me Marn, Chris. I haven’t been Marn for years. And it’s none of your business who called me, okay? That’s confidential.”
I regret my tone instantly when I see his expression.
“I’m sorry, Emma. I’m sorry about all this, the press finding out. I didn’t know Zara would do this. She threw me out this morning, by the way, so…I don’t know. She thinks we’re having some kind of affair.” He shakes his head dismissively, as if the thought were beyond absurd. “Anyway, I’m just saying that I’m not sure whoever you’re working for really has your best interests at heart. I mean, they could have moved you somewhere safer than this for a start, couldn’t they?”
“What do you mean she threw you out?”
“Don’t change the subject, Emma.”
“Whatwasthe subject? What? Why I’m stayinghere,in the middle of nowhere? Well, for a start they wanted to keep me away from Holt,” I reply indignantly.
The mention of Holt silences him and when I look back he’s intent on my foot again. I sigh and fall back into the cushions. “I’m sorry, Chris. I’ve just got a lot going on in my head right now.”
He tugs and another spike of glass pulls painfully free. “Are you scared? About what will happen tomorrow?”
I close my eyes and blow out a soft breath as he pinches another shard out.
“Yes. I am. I’m very scared: for my mother, what she’ll wake up to in the morning, for Joe and how he’ll have to pull Chloe from her daycare. I’m scared for all of them waking up to reporters on their doorsteps, and it being my fault that their friends won’t look at them the same way again, and I’m terrified of the questions, and of the judgment.”
“It won’t be as bad as before, I don’t think. It can’t be.”
“Chris, have you seen those TV crews outside the hospital? The world is a totally different place than it was fourteen years ago, everything is bigger, faster, meaner. This time it will be everywhere.”
“You know, if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t read about it, at the time. It seemed wrong to read about your personal life like that. They shouldn’t have released some of the things they did. I’m sorry it happened.” He wipes both feet with an alcohol wipe and presses on a final dressing. “All done here, Dr. Lewis.” He throws me one of his ridiculously handsome smiles, gives my ankles a warm squeeze. His skin on mine.
All the blood in my body rushes up my inner thighs.Oh God.Every natural impulse tells me to pull away from his hands, but his touch feels so good.
My body bypasses my brain. “Would you like a glass of wine, Chris? I know you’re on duty but one won’t hurt, right?”
He holds my gaze, eyes crinkled around the edges. “No, it wouldn’t. And yes, I would.”
I pull on the socks he passes me and hobble off on tender Band-Aid-covered feet to the kitchen.
The evening passes in a blur of sensations. The hot flush of wine, his smiling eyes taking in my face, a burst of laughter, his hand resting on my thigh and its electric throb of possibility, and suddenly his warm mouth on mine. The feel of his hands all over me as we kiss, the desperate animal need of it.
Later, I offer him the second bedroom but he says he’ll sleep on the sofa, he’s supposed to be on duty anyway, and I head upstairs to bed.
I lie there awake, thinking about what happened that night fourteen years ago.
I didn’t see my father do it, maybe that’s half the problem—or maybe it’s the silver lining?
I heard it, though. The crack of it in the night, like thunder, the rip of the double-barreled shotgun as it echoed up the thick carpet of our staircase, along a landing lined with our family pictures, and into my childhood bedroom.
But before the echo of the gunshot there was the helicopter. The sound of it circling in tight loops over the house was what woke me. I’d sat up in bed groggy, blinking into the shadows, as it rumbled over the house, my head throbbing. A headache and nausea from too much sugar and excitement at the fireworks that evening. After a moment Joe trundled into my room too, his silhouette in my doorway. “Helicopter,” he’d said croakily as the mechanical roar receded off into the night.
“Yeah,” I offered up into the growing quiet. The noise gone as quick as it came.
Joe disappears back to his room and I lie back down with a wave of dizziness and pull my duvet up to my chin. Safe. The sharp scent of spent fireworks in the air.
I think of the bonfire earlier that night, of nice things, of being cold and now being warm. Snapshots of memories. Dad’s concentrated face as he lit the sparklers. Mum’s smile. The crunch of teeth on burnt caramel. The rush of sugar through my body. Watching the giant pyre as flecks of gold and orange crackled and floated away into the darkness.
