The Girl Before

“Not really. There were a few things I didn’t explain, that’s all.” Not least when I answered the very first question on the application, the one demanding a list of everything essential to my life. When you’ve lost the center of your universe, there’s only one thing that can possibly make you whole again.

I could never have done it anywhere but One Folgate Street. Second thoughts, self-doubts, moral qualms—in the ordinary world, they would have paralyzed me. But in those stark, uncompromising spaces, my resolve only grew and grew. One Folgate Street colluded in my plans, and all my decisions had the clean simplicity of loss.

“I knew something was going on.” Edward has gone very pale. “Housekeeper…There were some anomalies, data that didn’t make sense. I put it down to your obsession with Emma’s death, this ridiculous quest you were trying to keep secret—”

“I didn’t care about Emma, not personally. But I had to know if you could be a danger to our child.” Ironically, it was Simon’s death that finally allowed me to resolve that question. In his blue folder I found the name of John Watts, the site foreman at One Folgate Street. Emma had been given it by Edward’s former business partner, Tom Ellis, but in her usual chaotic way had never followed it up. The foreman confirmed what I was already almost certain of: that the deaths of Edward’s wife and child were just a tragic accident.

“I don’t feel sorry for you, Edward,” I add. “You got exactly what you wanted—a brief, intense, perfect affair. Any man who sleeps with a woman under those conditions should know there may be consequences.”

Was what I did acceptable? Or at the very least, understandable?

Can any woman say that in my shoes, she wouldn’t have done the same?

I feel no guilt about Simon, either. I knew when I closed the lid on Isabel’s memory box that I’d kill him if I could. But by the time the police arrived I’d picked up all the loose pearls, and there was nothing to suggest I’d played any part in his sad, unfortunate death.

“Oh, Jane.” Edward shakes his head. “Jane. How…magnificent. All the time I thought I was controlling you, you were actually controlling me. I should have known you had your own agenda.”

“Can you forgive me?”

He doesn’t reply at first, letting the question hang in the air. Then, to my surprise, he nods.

“Who knows better than me what it’s like to lose a child?” he says quietly. “How you’ll do anything, however destructive or wrong, that seems to numb the pain? Perhaps we’re more alike than either of us realized.”

For a long moment he’s silent, lost in his own thoughts.

“After Max and Elizabeth died I became quite deranged for a while—mad with guilt and grief and self-hatred,” he says at last. “I went to Japan, to try to get away from myself, but nothing helped. And then when I came back I discovered Tom Ellis was planning to finish One Folgate Street and put his own name to it. I couldn’t bear to see the house Elizabeth and I had planned together, our family home, come into existence like that. So I tore up the plans and started again. I didn’t really care what kind of place I built instead, to be honest. I built something as sterile and empty as a mausoleum because that was how I felt at the time. But then I realized that in my madness I’d inadvertently created something extraordinary. A house that would demand a sacrifice from anyone who lived there, but repay that sacrifice a thousandfold in return. There are some, like Emma, it destroys, of course. But others, like you, it makes stronger.”

He stares at me intently. “Don’t you see, Jane? You’ve shown you’re worthy of it. That you’re disciplined and ruthless enough to be One Folgate Street’s mistress. So I’m making you an offer.”

His gaze never leaves mine. “If you’ll give this baby up for adoption…I’ll give you the house. Your house, now, to do with as you choose. But the longer you leave it, the harder the decision will become. What do you really want? A chance of perfection? Or a lifetime of trying to cope with…with…” He gestures wordlessly at Toby. “The future you were always meant to have, Jane? Or this?”

18.

? Give up the baby

? Don’t give up the baby

NOW: JANE

“And if I say yes, we’ll have another child?”

“You have my word on it.” He seizes on my hesitation. “It wouldn’t just be the right thing for us, Jane. It would be right for Toby. Better for a child like him to be adopted now, than to grow up without a father.”

“He has a father.”

“You know what I mean. He needs parents who can accept him for what he is. Not who grieve for the child who might have been, every time they look at him.”

“You’re right,” I say quietly. “He does need that.”

I think of One Folgate Street, the sense of belonging and calm I feel there. And I look at Toby, and think of what’s to come. A single mother, alone with her disabled child, battling the system to get the therapies he needs. A life of turmoil and muddle and compromise.

Or a chance to try again, for something better and more beautiful.

For another Isabel.

There’s a posset of regurgitated milk on Toby’s shoulder. Carefully I wipe it away.

There. All gone.