Apples Never Fall

She felt her irritation dissolve beneath a slow-moving but inexorable tide of elation. Joy Delaney was no longer missing, presumed dead: she was alive and in excellent health. Christina no longer had to spend her nights at the office preparing the brief of evidence, wondering resentfully which witness statements the DPP would ask them to retake because it was their job to doubt every piece of evidence.

Like she should have done.

She and Nico could share a bottle of wine tonight and sleep late tomorrow. They would have sex tonight and in the morning and probably the afternoon.

This wasn’t a career case that would put her face on the front page of the newspaper. It was a cute dinner-party story she’d tell with Nico’s arm slung around the back of her chair. Or more likely Nico would tell it for her and she’d make small factual corrections.

She glanced at Ethan, who was smiling sentimentally at Joy and Stan as though he were father of the bloody bride. He caught her looking and abruptly adjusted his face.

“Perhaps we could speak privately, Mrs. Delaney,” she said to Joy. “You can tell us what’s been going on and where you’ve been all this time.”

Chapter 65

VALENTINE’S DAY

He was gone. The air vibrated with the terrible words they’d hurled. Joy walked in a daze down the hallway, back into the kitchen, and looked around her. Her empty water glass sat on the sink. She put it in the dishwasher. Closed the dishwasher. Wiped a single droplet of water off the sink.

Right, then.

It used to be that when Stan left, the fast-running current of Joy’s life picked her up and carried her through until he returned, but now there were no children to distract or console, no lessons to reschedule, no business to run. She had no idea what to do next. She didn’t know how to fill her day. She didn’t know how to fill her life.

The dusty bottle of whiskey still sat on the kitchen table. She poured herself a shot glass with shaking hands and drank it in one dramatic gulp like a person in a movie. She shuddered. Whiskey was awful but she enjoyed the slow warmth it created, like an electric blanket heating up cold sheets.

She saw a pair of nail scissors sitting innocently on top of the junk in the bowl on the sideboard, as if they had always been there, so she sat at the table and trimmed the two broken nails that had scratched Stan’s face while she wondered if they could ever come back from this, or if they’d finally reached the end of their forgiveness, their love, their patience.

It occurred to her that she wanted to be gone when Stan came back.

For once, she wanted him at home waiting for her. But where could she go?

She was in the process of idly googling answers to all her problems when her phone rang like a gift. Her heart lifted. She answered without looking at the name. Surely it would be one of the children, remembering at last that they had a mother. Her money was on Brooke.

“Hello?”

“Joy?”

She recognized the voice instantly. “Savannah.” Her eyes went to Harry Haddad’s memoir sitting on the table in front of her.

Should she hang up?

She had once answered a late-night call from a young man who Joy knew was trying to scam her, because he was telling her that she’d won some extraordinary prize and just needed to pay a “nominal fee” for “shipment” and Joy had let him rattle on for ages, just for the company. They’d ended up having an interesting chat about climate change, before she told him that he really needed to consider a more honorable choice of career, at which point he hung up on her.

She felt the same way about Savannah. She knew she should be wary, and she was wary, but she was also lonely.

“How are you, Savannah?” she asked. Cool but not cold. “Where are you?”

“Great, Joy!” said Savannah. “Excellent! Top of the world! How are you this morning?”

Oh dear. She seemed to be channeling the fast-talking energy of a door-to-door salesman who knows he only has seconds before the door is shut in his face.

Joy felt a sudden spurt of fury. “You know, I’m not great, Savannah. I’m not actually having the best day, as it happens, I’m drinking whiskey in the morning, so if you’re calling for another spot of blackmail—”

“I’m not,” said Savannah.

“Because I hope you know that what you did to us was unacceptable,” said Joy. “If you’d gone public with those accusations about Stan you could have ruined our lives forever—”

“I returned the money,” said Savannah. “And I never would have done that.”

“Well, I don’t know what you would have done, do I?”