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Jen feels like her knees are going to give way. The pain, the pain, the pain in her baby boy’s voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kelly says. ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry. I’m sorry. How many times can I say it?’
‘This is the most fucked-up thing that has ever happened to me,’ Todd says. Only he doesn’t merely say it: it’s a scream. A scream of anguish.
Something thumps, a fist on a table, maybe. ‘I tried!’ Kelly says. His voice is hoarse, ragged at the edges with emotion. Jen has heard this side of him only a handful of times. Once in the station, after Todd’s arrest. No wonder. He’s trying to stop it. And – clearly – doesn’t manage. ‘I tried so hard. Joseph either knows or is about to find out, Todd, and we’ve got to extract ourselves from him. Without him knowing why.’
‘Collateral be damned, right?’ Todd says. ‘Me.’ Jen thinks of how Clio wouldn’t discuss the break-up with her, and wonders if, somehow, Todd has told Clio something about this conversation. Something he shouldn’t have.
‘Right,’ Kelly says softly, and Jen wants to step away from her position at the gate, cold and alone, and go and shake her husband. That was rhetorical, she’d say. Todd was not offering that up to you, you complete idiot.
‘There is no indication that he knows,’ Todd says.
‘The second he does, he will come here, and he will …’
‘That’s a hypothetical. I can’t believe you have involved me in this. Lies? Kidnapped kids?’
Jen’s entire body goes still, covered in goosebumps. The baby.
‘It’s this or much, much worse,’ Kelly says, an inky-black note to his voice.
‘Oh yeah, keep it secret at all costs. Sail me and my first love up the river!’ Todd shouts. The back door slams. Feet on stairs inside.
Jen stays at the gate, trying to breathe.
It’s pointless asking them. Clearly, they will lie. And clearly, too, there is a secret at the heart of their relationship that they will do anything to keep. They will do anything, except tell Jen.
In the cool night air, three weeks before her son becomes a murderer, Jen hears her husband begin to cry in their garden, his sobs becoming quieter and quieter, like a wounded animal slowly dying.
Day Minus Forty-Seven, 08:30
A lot can happen in three weeks. It is the biggest jump back so far.
Eight thirty in the morning, Day Minus Forty-Seven. Nearly seven weeks back in total.
Jen stops at the picture window on her way downstairs. The street looks completely different. The sepia-brown of late summer, grasses parched from lack of rain. The breeze against her arms is warm. She wonders what Andy would make of it.
She went to bed last night with Kelly. He did an admirable job of acting normally. You wouldn’t know anything had happened unless you’d overheard it.
He’d been lying on their bed, hands behind his head, elbows out to the side. A caricature of a relaxed husband. ‘Work good?’ he’d said.
‘Full of documents. What’d you do?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he had said. ‘Showered, dinner, scintillating stuff.’
She remembers this line from last time. She had thought Kelly was just being dry, but sitting underneath his words last night was a kind of quivering fury. A man who had lost control of a situation.
She’d gone to sleep next to him, her husband the betrayer, because she didn’t know what else to do. He’d spooned her as he always did, his body warm. Once he was asleep, she’d looked at the skin on his arms. His – like hers – didn’t look any different, but he was made of different stuff to what she had thought.
And now it is forty-seven days back. She feels utterly alienated again, like she did in those first few days. She has pink nail polish on her toes that she remembers getting done halfway through August, to see her through the final, warm, flip-flop days.
It’s mid-September. And what does she know? Kelly thinks Joseph is going to find something out, so he asked Todd to stop seeing Clio. He does, but then gets back together with her. Kelly asks Nicola Williams for help. Nicola is injured, and then Joseph shows up and Todd kills him.
Jen knows more than she did but, in many ways, it feels like less, it’s so confusing. The doorbell goes, interrupting her thoughts.
She checks the date again. Right – it’s the first day back at school, Todd’s first in Year Thirteen. She tries to spring herself back into action.
‘Who’s that?’ she calls.
