The Husband's Secret

‘God, yes.’

‘I’ll come over once Liam is asleep.’ She put her lips close to the phone as if she was a secret agent. ‘I’ll bring hot cross buns.’

Rachel was walking towards her car when she saw her daughter’s murderer.

He was talking on his mobile phone, swinging his motorbike helmet held loosely in his fingertips. As she got closer, he suddenly tipped back his head to the sun as if he’d just received unexpectedly wonderful news. The afternoon light glinted off his sunglasses. He snapped the phone shut and slid it in his jacket pocket, smiling to himself.

Rachel thought again of the video and remembered the expression on his face when he turned on Janie. She could see it so clearly. The face of a monster: leering, malicious, cruel.

And now look at him. Connor Whitby was very alive and very happy and why wouldn’t he be, because he’d got away with it. If the police did nothing, as seemed likely, he would never pay for what he’d done.

As she got closer, Connor caught sight of Rachel and his smiled vanished instantly, as if a light had been snapped off.

Guilty, thought Rachel. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

‘This came by overnight courier for you,’ said Lucy when Tess was home unpacking the groceries. ‘Looks like it’s from your father. Fancy him managing to send something by courier.’

Intrigued, Tess sat down at the kitchen table with her mother and unwrapped the small bubble-wrapped package. Inside was a flat square box.

‘He hasn’t sent you jewellery, has he?’ asked her mother. She peered over to look.

‘It’s a compass,’ said Tess. It was a beautiful old-fashioned wooden compass. ‘It’s like something Captain Cook would have used.’

‘How peculiar,’ sniffed her mother.

As Tess lifted up the compass she saw a small handwritten yellow post-it note stuck to the bottom of the box.

Dear Tess, she read. This is probably a silly gift for a girl. I never did know the right thing to buy you. I was trying to think of something that would help when you’re feeling lost. I remember feeling lost. It was bloody awful. But I always had you. Hope you find your way, Love Dad.

Tess felt something rise within her chest.

‘I guess it’s quite pretty,’ said Lucy, taking the compass and turning it this way and that.

Tess imagined her father searching the shops for the right gift for his adult daughter; the expression of mild terror that would have crossed his leathery, lined face each time someone asked, ‘Can I help you?’ Most of the shop assistants would have thought him rude, a grumpy, gruff old man who refused to meet their eye.

‘Why did you and Dad split up?’ Tess used to ask her mother, and Lucy would say airily, a little glint in her eye, ‘Oh, darling, we were just two very different people.’ She meant: Your father was different. (When Tess asked her father the same question, he’d shrug and cough and say, ‘You’ll have to ask your mum about that one, love.’)

It occurred to Tess that her father probably suffered from social anxiety too.

Before their divorce, her mother had been driven to distraction by his lack of interest in socialising. ‘But we never go anywhere!’ she would say, full of frustration, when Tess’s father once again refused to attend some event.

‘Tess is a bit shy,’ her mother used to tell people in an audible whisper, her hand over her mouth. ‘Gets it from her father, I’m afraid.’ Tess had heard the cheerful disrespect in her mother’s voice, and had come to believe that any form of shyness was wrong, morally wrong, in fact. You should want to go to parties. You should want to be surrounded by people.

No wonder she felt so ashamed of her shyness, as if it were an embarrassing physical ailment that needed to be hidden at all costs.

She looked at her mother.

‘Why didn’t you just go on your own?’

‘What?’ Lucy looked up from the compass. ‘Go where?’

‘Nothing,’ said Tess. She held out her hand. ‘Give me back my compass. I love it.’

Cecilia parked her car in front of Rachel Crowley’s house and wondered again why she was doing this to herself. She could have dropped Rachel’s Tupperware order off at the school after Easter. The guests from Marla’s party weren’t promised delivery until after the break. It seemed she simultaneously wanted to seek Rachel out and avoid her at all costs.

Perhaps she wanted to see her because Rachel was the only person in the world with the right and the authority to speak out on Cecilia’s current dilemma. ‘Dilemma’ was too gentle a word. Too selfish a word. It implied that Cecilia’s feelings actually mattered.

She lifted the plastic bag of Tupperware from the passenger seat and opened the car door. Perhaps the real reason she was here was because she knew Rachel had every reason in the world to hate her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone hating her. I’m a child, she thought as she knocked on the door. A middle-aged, perimenopausal child.

The door opened faster than Cecilia had expected. She was still preparing her face.

‘Oh,’ said Rachel, and her face dropped. ‘Cecilia.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cecilia. So very, very sorry. ‘Are you expecting someone?’

‘Not really,’ said Rachel. She recovered herself. ‘How are you? My Tupperware! How exciting. Thank you so much. Would you like to come in? Where are your girls?’

‘They’re at my mother’s place,’ said Cecilia. ‘She felt bad because she missed their Easter hat parade today. So she’s giving them afternoon tea. Anyway. That’s neither here nor there! I won’t come in, I’ll just –’