This Secret We're Keeping (18 page)

‘Please.’ She downed the last inch of the wine in one and handed it to him. He disappeared into the kitchen.

Resting her head back against the sofa, Jess tried to steady her breathing. Perhaps she should leave now. It was starting to feel impossible to sit across the room from Will and not feel the old emotions come flooding back, not recall the times they’d shared all those years ago. Yet he was now a father and Natalie’s long-term partner, she reminded
herself. He had steadied his life – and here she was, threatening to derail it.

Just as she was wondering if she had the strength of mind to tell him she was leaving, to get up and walk out of the front door, he returned with her topped-up wine glass and she knew straight away that she didn’t.

‘You’re not having another?’ she asked him as he passed her the glass.

‘Better not,’ he said, tipping his head gently up towards the ceiling. ‘With Charlotte.’

He joined her on the sofa then instead of returning to the armchair. Jess swallowed, said nothing.

‘Sonia used to write me letters when I was in prison. Well, it was more like hate mail, actually. She’d say there were people waiting for me to get out so they could finish me off.’ A flicker of bitterness ignited in his eyes as he spoke. ‘It wasn’t enough for her to have done what she did – she wasn’t going to be happy until someone had physically lynched me.’ He thought about it. ‘Or – you know – brought back the death penalty.’

He was so close now she could grasp the scent of him. He smelt of something delicious, familiar (was it by Hugo Boss?), but she took a couple of quick breaths and attempted to focus. ‘And were there? People waiting for you?’ she asked, almost afraid of what he would say.

‘Actually, I don’t know. My cottage was long gone, so I went straight to my sister-in-law’s family’s farm when I got out. Stayed there for a year. Anybody who wanted to get to me would have had to wade through three fields’ worth of cow shit first, so I don’t think anyone bothered in the end.’

She laughed, and then caught herself. ‘Sorry. It’s not funny.’

He smiled. ‘No, please –
please
laugh. I never thought I’d get the chance to find any of this amusing.’

She smiled back at him. ‘Do you still see them?’

‘Katy and Richard?’ He shook his head. ‘Nope. And I have two nephews I’ve never even met.’ He shrugged, almost as if this was to be expected. ‘I think Katy and her parents started to look at me slightly differently after the boys were born. Because obviously I’m a dangerous sexual predator who will naturally be looking to abuse her sons at some point. So they’d rather have me out of their lives for good. It’s neater that way.’ He swallowed. ‘And I don’t just mean for them. I can’t take the risk of Natalie finding out, so … it’s better if we don’t see them. Or my parents. It’s not better for Charlotte, obviously, but –’ His voice cracked slightly.

Jess felt her heart swell with sorrow. ‘You don’t speak to your parents?’

He shook his head. ‘We stopped speaking before I even went to prison. Mum especially. She went through the whole thing – blaming herself, fighting with my dad, becoming a social pariah. They actually threw her out of crochet club. Turned all the lights off and shut the curtains until she went away.’

‘That’s awful,’ Jess said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He shook his head but said nothing further.

‘Why does Natalie think you don’t speak?’

‘Oh, you know – ancient family rift. I told her I caused it, which she can fully believe. She’s never met any of them.’ He let out a breath of contemplation. ‘So Natalie and Charlotte – they’re really all I’ve got now. If you don’t count Natalie’s friends, who I keep at arm’s length. I’m pretty sure they all think I’m a bit odd, as boyfriends go.’

Jess looked down into her lap. ‘That’s horrible What a mess.’

He reached out then and grabbed her hand. ‘Don’t, okay? It’s not your fault.’

She stared at him, feeling his fingers grip hers and touch the edge of the scar across her palm, sending her stomach into free fall.

He turned her hand over gently, laying it flat to expose the scar. She looked up, meeting his eye, and he shook his head. ‘I remember that day so clearly. You just opened your fist and all this blood came pissing out and I was trying to play it cool but I fucking hate blood, Jess …’ He smiled. ‘God, I was trying so hard not to let you see me panic.’

She laughed briefly. ‘Well, you did a good job. I’d never have guessed.’

‘That was mostly down to you, actually. You kept really calm.’

She swallowed. ‘I have something to confess.’

He was still holding her hand. ‘Go on.’

‘I did it myself.’

His smile faded and his fingers slackened slightly. Her gaze rested on his tattoo, the one on his left arm.
It can’t be night for ever
. She couldn’t meet his eye.

‘I cut myself, with my own scissors. I wasn’t trying to get the scissors from Beth. I did it to get your attention.’

‘Fuck,’ he breathed. ‘Why?’

‘I have no idea.’ She shook her head, incredulous as she was every day that she’d done it in the first place. ‘It was stupid. I guess I liked you and I wanted you to notice me. I remember having this thing about Laura Marks, thinking that you were going to fall in love with her.’ She shook her head again. ‘Stupid, obviously.’

‘But now you have this,’ he said sadly. He traced a finger across the jagged shape of bunched-up tissue.

She nodded. ‘It should probably be a reminder to myself not to do any more stupid stuff.’

They were now well beyond the moment when he should
have dropped her hand, but they stayed sitting like that for a couple more minutes, feeling each other’s pulses thudding gently as he continued to explore her palm.

‘Jess,’ he said, pushing his index finger gently across the length of her scar, ‘if we’re doing confessions, I have one too.’

She felt her heartbeat quicken slightly.
Is that what we’re doing? Then there’s something else you should know, Will. Something I never told you.

‘I came back to find you, after I got out,’ he said. ‘More than once.’

‘When?’ she asked him, feeling a strange churn of panic at having missed him, which was slightly irrational given that he was sitting next to her, holding her hand.

‘Not long after I was off licence. On your nineteenth birthday, actually. I’d read about what happened with your mum, so … I knew where to find you.’ He continued to trace her scar with his finger. ‘Anyway, I asked around, but someone said you’d gone to France.’

She stared at him. ‘Only for five weeks. I was doing a course. Pâtisserie,’ she blurted out, unable to bear the thought that while she’d been practising her piping, Will had been in Norfolk looking for her.

‘Well, I was happy for you, Jess. I took it as a sign that you were making something of your life, so I just went back to London. And soon after that I met Natalie. I wanted to try again – just to say sorry, to apologize for everything – but all this time had passed and I kept losing my nerve. Anyway, I finally mustered up the courage to come back on your birthday a few years later, but I bottled it on your doorstep. Same thing happened when I saw you in the pub on New Year’s Day three years ago.’ He let out a measured breath, his forehead creasing slightly. ‘And then on Christmas Eve the year
before last, I finally did it – I knocked. Tried again the next morning too. But you weren’t there.’

‘I spent that Christmas at Debbie’s,’ she said, thinking out loud and experiencing a stronger-than-usual surge of resentment towards her sister. At the same time as Will had been standing on her doorstep, Jess had been curled up on Debbie’s sofa with Tabby and Cecilia, resolutely attempting to watch
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
while Debbie screamed at Ian in the kitchen for failing to pick up the turkey or some other seasonal crime.

‘Then Natalie suggested moving here while we did up the house,’ Will continued. ‘But the idea of being in Norfolk full time with her and Charlotte – that was different to the occasional trip on my own. I was terrified. All I could think about when we got here was whether you’d call the police if you so much as caught a glimpse of me, and if I’d be arrested in front of Natalie and Charlotte for harassing you or God-knows-what-else.’

She shook her head. ‘I wanted to find you too. But I had no idea where you were. I actually wrote to your parents a few times, to see if they’d tell me.’

His fingers squeezed hers. ‘Seriously?’

‘I thought you might be staying with them. They never wrote back.’

‘They moved to Hampshire after my arrest. Couldn’t cope with all the scrutiny. I think finding a pack of photographers hiding out in Dad’s hydrangeas was the final straw. My mum’s sister lives in Winchester, so that’s where they ended up. They’re still there.’ He sighed stiffly and offered her a grim smile. ‘So you reached a dead end?’ he guessed.

‘Well, searching your name was the first thing I ever used the internet for. But I didn’t know you’d changed it. I just assumed you didn’t want to be found.’

He gripped her hand so hard then that she was overcome with the urge to kiss him out of sheer relief that he was finally by her side.

But with great effort she fought it, gently withdrawing herself from him and clearing her throat. ‘Can I use your toilet?’

He nodded. ‘Of course. There’s a cloakroom at the bottom of the stairs.’

She headed out of the room and into the hallway. Hesitating at the foot of the staircase, she glanced upwards.

She had only meant to be a minute. She had only meant to look. But, of course, as soon as she pushed open the door to Will and Natalie’s bedroom, the temptation to trespass became irresistible. She had been denied so many details of his life for so long that she was curious just to see how he spent the first and final minutes of every day (though admittedly the overwhelming scent from a bowl of bright purple potpourri on the windowsill made her think that staggering to and from the en suite with a damp flannel clamped across his face was a very definite possibility).

Lined with fitted wardrobes, drawers and a vanity unit in oak-effect MDF, the room was plain and functional, almost entirely lacking the efforts at personalization that had been made downstairs. In fact, the space felt so clinically sparse, it could easily have passed for the budget tariff option at a mid-end B & B, the sort that served only dusty cereal for breakfast and still went in for shower curtains. There was a plastic alarm clock and a copy of
Generation X
on one bedside table; on the other, a lipstick-stained glass and a bottle of hand sanitizer. The only other evidence of life, aside from the potpourri, Natalie’s straightening irons and a make-up bag, was propped up on a chair beneath the window – a
single cushion screen-printed with Charlotte’s beaming face (thrown in, Jess supposed, if you’d purchased a big enough canvas).

She thought sadly back to Matthew’s old bedroom at his cottage – to the plump, dark bed linen that had always seemed so seductive, the dimmed lighting, the stereo rotating Morrissey, the Stone Roses, Nirvana. To their discarded clothes, the giant plastic replica whisky bottle that collected his spare coppers, the wobbly pile of travel guides to all the places he dreamed of visiting one day – Italy, Spain, Panama, Amsterdam.

But other than the single dog-eared paperback, there were no hints at all in this room as to who Will was when he was with Natalie. Jess began to feel a strange compulsion to open drawers and rifle through their things for clues like a contestant hunting cardboard points on a low-budget game show, so in an effort to resist, she sat down heavily on the edge of the bed instead.

The room was too hot now, humid. For a moment she considered throwing a window open, but she was too afraid of making a noise – not to mention the fact that she was struggling to recall what had even possessed her to come up here in the first place.

Shaking her head, she got up to leave, just as Will appeared in the doorway.

‘Fuck,’ she breathed. ‘I’m sorry.’

He leaned against the door frame and regarded her quietly for a few moments.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, hot and embarrassed.

To her relief he smiled, and offered her an easy shrug. ‘It’s all right. It’s not exactly a sacred space.’

They stood there silently for a couple of seconds. Jess felt uncomfortably conscious of the flush on her neck.

Will took a step towards her then that seemed instinctive, his eyes bright, and for a moment they just looked at one another, on the brink – she knew this – of touching.

It seemed that one of them would need to diffuse the charge in the room, so Jess exhaled slowly, a controlled breath, and momentarily averted her gaze to break the spell of his. ‘So, what’s your place in Chiswick like?’

His smile slipped slightly. ‘It’s … very well put-together.’

Just like Natalie.

‘Well, that’s good,’ she said, though she sensed Will’s feelings towards Chiswick might actually be lukewarm. ‘I always really hoped everything would work out for you.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, putting a hand to the back of his neck in what seemed to Jess to be a small gesture of frustration. ‘I mean, it’s a nice house.’

‘Chiswick’s lovely,’ she said, strangely unable to let go of the idea of it, speaking with firm positivity like a mother persuading her child that moving up to high school was going to be fun.

‘Lovely, yes,’ he said simply, because that was a given. ‘But it’s not Norfolk.’

Jess knew that someone like Zak would guffaw sarcastically at such a remark. But she understood exactly what it meant to Will, and all at once she felt indescribably sad.

He spoke abruptly then, his words spilling into the space between them. ‘Do you ever think about us, Jess? I mean, if they hadn’t found out and we could have just carried on?’

Staring at him, she saw that his eyes were swimming with regret. She felt it too, right down to her toes.

‘Yes,’ she confessed, only just stopping short of adding,
I do, I think about that all the time
.

He nodded, seemingly relieved he wasn’t alone. ‘It’s just a
bit bloody ironic, isn’t it? Standing here like this today … a ten-year age gap means nothing.’