Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: I thought it was the wife, to be honest. All my instincts were telling me it was the wife. I would have put money on it. Goes to show you can’t always trust your instincts. So there you go. That’s it. You must have all you need by now, right? You’re turning that off? Because I was wondering, I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I wondered if you fancied a dri—
84.
A Year After the Trivia Night
Celeste sat behind a long table with a white tablecloth, waiting for her name to be called. Her heart thumped. Her mouth was dry. She picked up the glass of water in front of her and watched her hand tremble. She quickly put it back down; she wasn’t sure if she could get it safely to her mouth without spilling it.
She’d spoken in court a few times recently, but this was different. She didn’t want to cry, although Susi had told her it was fine, and understandable, and even likely.
“You’ll be speaking about some very personal, very painful experiences,” said Susi. “It’s a big thing I’m asking of you.”
Celeste looked out at the small audience of men and women in suits and ties. Their faces were blank, professional; some of them looked a little bored.
“I always pick someone in the audience,” Perry had told her once when they were talking about public speaking. “A friendly-looking face somewhere right in the middle of the crowd, and when I get up, I speak to him or her as if it’s just the two of us.”
She remembered that she’d been surprised to hear that Perry needed any techniques at all. He always appeared so scrupulously confident and relaxed when he spoke in public, like a charismatic Hollywood star on a talk show. But that was Perry. Looking back it seemed that he’d actually lived his life in a state of perpetual low-level fear: fear of humiliation, fear of losing her, fear of not being loved.
For a moment, she wished he were here to see her speak. She couldn’t help thinking that he’d be proud of her, in spite of the subject matter. The real Perry would be proud of her.
Was that delusional? Probably, yes. Delusional thinking was her specialty these days—or perhaps it had always been her specialty.
The hardest thing over the past year had been second-guessing and mistrusting her every passing thought and emotion. Every time she cried over Perry’s death it was a betrayal of Jane. It was foolish and misguided and wrong to grieve for a man who had done what he’d done. It was wrong to cry over the tears of her sons when there was another little boy who didn’t even know that Perry was his father. The right emotions were hatred and fury and regret. That was how she should be feeling, and she was happy when she felt all those things, which she often did, because they were appropriate, rational feelings, but then she’d find herself missing him, and looking forward to when he returned home from his trip, and she’d feel idiotic all over again and remind herself that Perry had cheated on her, probably on multiple occasions.
In her dreams she screamed at him. How dare you, how dare you? She hit him over and over. She woke with tears still wet on her face.
“I still love him,” she told Susi, as if she were confessing something disgusting.
“You’re allowed to still love him.”
“I’m going crazy,” she told her.
“You’re working through it,” said Susi, and she listened patiently as Celeste talked through every misdemeanor for which Perry had punished her, in what must have been excruciating detail—“I know I should have gotten the boys to tidy up the Legos that day, but I was tired”; “I shouldn’t have said what I said”; “I shouldn’t have done what I did.” For some reason she needed to pick endlessly over even the most trivial events over the last five years and try to get it straight in her mind.
“That wasn’t fair, was it?” she kept saying to Susi, as if Susi were the referee, as if Perry were there listening to this independent arbiter.
“Do you think it was fair?” Susi would say, just like a good therapist should. “Do you think you deserved that?”
Celeste watched the man sitting to her right pick up his glass of water. His hand trembled even worse than hers, but he persevered on bringing it to his mouth, even as the ice cubes clinked and water slopped over his hand.
He was a tall, pleasant-looking, thin-faced man in his midthirties, wearing a tie under an ill-fitting red sweater. He must be another counselor, like Susi, but one who suffered a pathological fear of public speaking. Celeste wanted to put her hand on his arm to comfort him, but she didn’t want to embarrass him when he, after all, was the professional here.
She looked down and saw where his black trousers had ridden up. He was wearing light brown ankle socks with his well-polished black business shoes. It was the sort of sartorial mishap that would give Madeline a fit. Celeste had let Madeline help choose her a new white silk shirt to wear today, together with a pencil skirt and black court shoes. “No toes,” Madeline had said when Celeste had modelled the outfit with her choice of sandals. “Toes are not right for this event.”
Celeste had acquiesced. She’d been letting Madeline do a lot of things for her over the past year. “I should have known,” Madeline had kept saying. “I should have known what you were going through.” No matter how many times Celeste assured her that there was no possible way that she could have known, that Celeste would never have permitted her to know, Madeline had continued to battle genuine guilt. All Celeste could do was let her be there for her now.
Celeste looked for her friendly face in the audience and settled on a woman in her fifties, with a bright bird-like face, who was nodding along encouragingly as Susi did her introduction.
She reminded Celeste a little of the boys’ Year 1 teacher at their new school just around the corner from the flat. Celeste had made an appointment to see her before they started. “They idolized their father, and since his death, they’ve been having some behavioral issues,” Celeste had told her at her first meeting.
“Of course they have,” said Mrs. Hooper. She looked like nothing would surprise her. “Let’s have a weekly meeting so we can stay on top of this.”
Celeste had managed not to throw her arms around her and cry into her nice floral blouse.
The twins had not coped well over the past year. They were so used to Perry being gone for long periods that it took a long time for them to understand that he wasn’t ever coming home. They reacted like their father reacted when things went wrong: angrily, violently. Every day they tried to kill each other, and every night they ended up in the same bed, their heads on the same pillow.