Playing Nice

As for my own slipups, I don’t see any need to confess those to Pete. I guessed that was what Miles was telling him, of course, when we collected Theo after the hearing. I was waiting for Pete to say something to me, or for Miles to follow it up with some evidence—a witness statement through the letterbox, an affidavit pinging into Pete’s inbox—but he never did.

He had nothing, I eventually realized. Perhaps it was never much more than a shot in the dark in the first place. Perhaps Don Maguire had picked up some gossip, one of those rumors that float around a busy office like mine. If he’d had more, the Lamberts’ barrister would surely have found a way to use it at the hearing. Then I’d have been accused of perjury on top of everything else, and the balance between us and the Lamberts would have tilted yet again—and who knows what the judge’s decision would have been then? So gradually, I realized my secret was safe, and with that grew my resolve not to tell Pete. It would only hurt him at a time when our relationship needed rebuilding, not undermining.

Sometimes I find myself wondering what, in the end, the difference is between pretending to be nice, the way people like Miles and, I suppose, I do, and trying to be nice, the way Pete, Lucy, and, it now seems, many other people as well do. Perhaps, I think, it isn’t so much about what you actually do, but why. Those like Pete whose hearts are pure—the fundamentally decent, honest, loyal ones, the ones Miles would dismissively sneer at as the meek—they’re living, somehow, in a bigger, richer way. Psychopaths are like tone-deaf people at a concert, mocking those who cry at the beauty of the music as fools.

So I will try. I will hum along and study the score, and perhaps one day I will hear it—properly hear it, the way my partner does.

And yet, and yet…It’s struck me there’s still a small gap in Lucy’s account of how Theo and David got switched. Effectively, she said she’d gone along with Paula’s mistake. But how had Paula come to make such a mistake in the first place? She might be brusque, but she’s a very competent nurse. Is it possible someone had already changed the mobile incubators around, or positioned them in such a way that a nurse might reasonably take the wrong one?

But then I glance over at Pete, so lean and handsome in his wet suit, and think how ridiculous that is.

He’s crouching down now, showing Theo how to smack the surface of David’s rock pool gently, making the ripples catch the sunlight so David will laugh. Theo’s getting the hang of it; and, what’s more, is actually resisting the urge to jump in and make the water explode all over David’s face. It looks as if he might even be enjoying making David chortle.

At the end of the day, I decide, you have to let suspicion go, to trust those you love. To do otherwise is to walk in Miles’s shoes, and who would want to live that way?

Although it’s good to know that, if it ever becomes necessary again, I can wear those shoes for a time. To protect my family.

I look again at Pete. Sometime on this holiday, I think, I’ll ask Lucy to mind Theo for a while. Pete and I will go for a walk, up on this beautiful headland. Perhaps it will be just as the sun is setting, a golden yolk bursting into the sea. And there on the cliffs, with the wind twisting our hair into crazy shapes and the spray salty on our lips, we’ll start a conversation about marriage.