Faithful Place

22

Ma had pried everyone away from the telly and smacked the Christmas idyll back into shape: the kitchen was crowded with women and steam and voices, the guys were being herded back and forth with pot holders and dishes, the air was hopping with the sizzle of meat and the smell of roast potatoes. It made me light-headed. I felt like I had been gone for years.

Holly was setting the table, with Donna and Ashley; they were even using paper napkins printed with perky angels, and singing “Jingle bells, Batman smells.” I let myself take about a quarter of a second to watch them, just to stash away the mental image. Then I put a hand on Holly’s shoulder and said in her ear, “Sweetheart, we have to go now.”

“Go? But—”

She was openmouthed with outrage, and stunned enough that it was a moment before she could get in gear to argue. I gave her the five-alarm-emergency parental eye-flash, and she deflated. “Get your stuff,” I said. “Quick, now.”

Holly banged down her handful of cutlery on the table and dragged herself off towards the hallway, as slowly as she could get away with. Donna and Ashley stared at me like I had bitten the head off a bunny. Ashley backed away.

Ma stuck her head out of the kitchen, brandishing an enormous serving fork like it was a cattle prod. “Francis! And about bleeding time. Is Seamus with you?”

“No. Ma—”

“Mammy, not Ma. You go find your brother, and the two of yous go in and help your father get out here for the dinner, before you have it burnt to a crisp with your dawdling. Go on!”

“Ma. Holly and I have to go.”

Ma’s jaw dropped. For a second there, she was actually speechless. Then she went off like an air-raid siren. “Francis Joseph Mackey! You’re joking me. You tell me this minute that you’re joking me.”

“Sorry, Ma. I got talking to Shay, lost track of time, you know how it goes. Now we’re running late. We need to head.”

Ma had her chin and her bosoms and her bellies all inflated ready for battle. “I don’t give a feck what time it is, your dinner’s ready, and you’re not leaving this room till you’ve eaten it. Sit down at that table. That’s an order.”

“Can’t be done. Sorry again about the hassle. Holly—” Holly was in the doorway, coat dangling half-on one arm, eyes wide. “Schoolbag. Now.”

Ma clouted me in the arm with the fork, hard enough to bruise. “Don’t you dare fecking ignore me! Are you trying to give me a heart attack? Is that what you came back here for, because you wanted to watch your mammy drop dead in front of you?”

Cautiously, one by one, the rest of the gang were appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her to see what was going on. Ashley ducked around Ma and hid in Carmel’s skirt. I said, “It wasn’t top of my agenda, but hey, if that’s how you fancy spending the evening, I can’t stop you. Holly, I said now.”

“Because if that’s the only thing that’ll make you happy, you go on and leave, and I hope you’ll be satisfied when I’m dead. Go on, get out of here. Your poor brother’s after breaking my heart, I’ve nothing left to live for anyway—”

“Josie!” from the bedroom, in a furious roar. “What the bloody hell is going on?” and the inevitable explosion of coughing. We were neck-deep in just about every single reason I had kept Holly away from this shit hole, and we were sinking fast.

“—and here’s me, in spite of everything, killing myself trying to make a lovely Christmas for yous lot, all day and all night at that cooker—”

“Josie! Stop your fucking shouting!”

“Da! We’ve the children here!” from Carmel. She had her hands over Ashley’s ears, and she looked like she wanted to curl up and die.

Ma’s voice was a screech and still rising. I could practically feel her giving me cancer. “—and you, you ungrateful little bastard, you can’t even be bothered sitting your arse down to eat dinner with us—”

“Gee whiz, Ma, it sure is tempting, but I think I’ll pass. Holly, wake up! Schoolbag. Go.” The kid was starting to look shell-shocked. Even at our worst, Olivia and I had always, always managed to keep the bare-knuckle stuff out of her earshot.

“God forgive me, listen to that, just listen to the language out of me, in front of those children—now d’you see what you’re after making me do?”

Another whack with the serving fork. I caught Carmel’s eye over Ma’s head, tapped my watch and said, “Custody agreement,” in an urgent undertone—I was pretty sure Carmel had watched a lot of movies in which callous ex-husbands tortured brave divorcées by playing fast and loose with custody agreements. Her eyes widened. I left her to explain the concept to Ma, grabbed Holly’s arm and her bag and steered her out of there, fast. As we hurried down the stairs (“Out, get out, if you hadn’t come back here upsetting everyone we’d still have your brother alive…”) I caught the even rhythm of Stephen’s voice above us, calm and steady, having a nice civilized chat with Shay.

Then we were out of Number 8, in nighttime and lamplight and silence. The hall door slammed behind us.

I got a huge lungful of cool damp evening air and said, “Sweet Jesus.” I would happily have killed someone for a cigarette.

Holly twitched her shoulder away from me and whipped her schoolbag out of my other hand.

“I’m sorry about all that back there. I really am. You shouldn’t have had to be there for that.”

Holly didn’t deign to answer, or even to look at me. She marched up the Place with her lips pressed shut and her chin at a mutinous angle that told me I was in big trouble as soon as we got ourselves some privacy. On Smith’s Road, three cars down from mine, I spotted Stephen’s, a pimped-out Toyota that he had clearly picked from the detective pool to harmonize with the environment. He had a good eye; I only caught it because of the elaborately casual guy slumped in the passenger seat, refusing to look my way. Stephen, like a good little Boy Scout, had come prepared for anything.

Holly flung herself into her booster seat and slammed the car door hard enough that it nearly came off the hinges. “Why do we have to go?”

She genuinely had no idea. She had left the Shay situation in Daddy’s capable hands; as far as she was concerned, that meant it was sorted, over and done with. One of my main ambitions had been for her to go through life, or at least a few more years of it, without discovering it didn’t work that way.

“Sweetheart,” I said. I didn’t start the car; I wasn’t sure I could drive. “Listen to me.”

“Dinner’s ready! We put plates for you and me!”

“I know. I wish we could have stayed, too.”

“So why—”

“You know that conversation you had with your uncle Shay? Just before I got there?”

Holly stopped moving. Her arms were still folded furiously across her chest, but her mind was racing, behind no expression at all, to work out what was going on. She said, “I guess.”

“Do you think you could explain that conversation to someone else?”

“You?”

“No, not me. This guy I know from work, called Stephen. He’s only a couple of years older than Darren, and he’s very nice.” Stephen had mentioned sisters; I just hoped he had been good with them. “He really needs to hear what you and your uncle were talking about.”

Holly’s lashes flickered. “I don’t remember.”

“Sweetie, I know you said you wouldn’t tell anyone. I heard you.”

A quick, wary flash of blue. “Heard what?”

“I’m going to bet it was just about everything.”

“Then if you heard, you tell that Stephen guy.”

“Won’t work, love. He needs to hear it direct from you.”

Her fists were starting to clench on the sides of her jumper. “So, tough. I can’t tell him.”

I said, “Holly. I need you to look at me.” After a moment her head turned, reluctantly, an inch or two in my direction. “Remember we talked about how, sometimes, you need to tell a secret because someone else has a right to know it?”

Shrug. “So?”

“So this is that kind of secret. Stephen’s trying to find out what happened to Rosie.” I left Kevin out of it: we were already several light-years beyond what the kid should have been coping with. “That’s his job. And to do it, he needs to hear your story.”

More elaborate shrug. “I don’t care.”

Just for a second, the stubborn tilt to her chin reminded me of Ma. I was fighting against every instinct she had, everything I had put into her bloodstream straight from my own veins. I said, “You need to care, sweetheart. Keeping secrets is important, but there are times when getting to the truth is even more important. When someone’s been killed, that’s almost always one of those times.”

“Good. Then Stephen Thingy can go bug somebody else and leave me alone, ’cause I don’t think Uncle Shay even did anything bad.”

I looked at her, tense and prickly and shooting off sparks like a wild kitten trapped in a corner. Just a few months earlier she could have done what I asked her to, unquestioning, and still kept her faith in lovely Uncle Shay intact. It seemed like every time I saw her the tightrope got thinner and the drop got longer, till it was inevitable that sooner or later I would get the balance wrong and miss my foothold just once, and take both of us down.

I said, keeping my voice even, “OK, kiddo. Then let me ask you something. You planned today pretty carefully, amn’t I right?”

That wary blue flash again. “No.”

“Come on, chickadee. I’m the wrong guy to mess with on this one. This is my job, planning this exact kind of stuff; I know when I see someone else doing it. Way back after you and me first talked about Rosie, you started thinking about that note you’d seen. So you asked me about her, nice and casually, and when you found out she’d been my girlfriend, you knew she had to be the one who’d written it. That’s when you started wondering why your uncle Shay would have a note from a dead girl stashed away in his drawer. Tell me if I’m going wrong here.”

No reaction. Boxing her in like a witness made me so tired I wanted to slide off my seat and go to sleep on the car floor. “So you worked on me till you got me to bring you over to your nana’s today. You left your maths homework till last, all weekend, so you could bring it along and use it to get your uncle Shay on his own. And then you went on at him till you got him talking about that note.”

Holly was biting down hard on the inside of her lip. I said, “I’m not giving out to you; you did a pretty impressive job of the whole thing. I’m just getting the facts straight.”

Shrug. “So what?”

“So here’s my question. If you didn’t think your uncle Shay had done anything wrong, then why did you go to all that hassle? Why not just tell me what you’d found, and let me talk to him about it?”

Down to her lap, almost too low to be intelligible: “Wasn’t any of your business.”

“But it was, honeybunch. And you knew it was. You knew Rosie was someone I cared about, you know I’m a detective, and you knew I was trying to find out what had happened to her. That makes that note very much my business. And it’s not like anyone had asked you to keep it a secret to begin with. So why didn’t you tell me, unless you knew there was something dodgy about it?”

Holly carefully unraveled a thread of red wool from her cardigan sleeve, stretched it between her fingers and examined it. For a second I thought she was going to answer, but instead she asked, “What was Rosie like?”

I said, “She was brave. She was stubborn. She was a laugh.” I wasn’t sure where we were going with this, but Holly was watching me sideways, intently, like it mattered. The dull yellow light from the street lamps turned her eyes darker and more complicated, harder to read. “She liked music, and adventures, and jewelry, and her friends. She had bigger plans than anyone else I knew. When she cared about something, she didn’t give up on it, no matter what. You would have liked her.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Believe it or not, chickadee, you would’ve. And she would have liked you.”

“Did you love her more than Mum?”

Ah. “No,” I said, and it came out so cleanly and simply that I was nowhere near sure it was a lie. “I loved her a different way. Not more. Just differently.”

Holly stared out the window, winding the bit of wool around her fingers and thinking her own intent thoughts. I didn’t interrupt. Up at the corner, a troop of kids barely older than her were pushing each other off a wall, snarling and chattering like monkeys. I caught the glow of a cigarette and the glint of cans.

Finally Holly said, in a tight, level little voice, “Did Uncle Shay kill Rosie?”

I said, “I don’t know. It’s not up to me to decide that, or to you. It’s up to a judge and a jury.”

I was trying to make her feel better, but her fists clenched and she hammered them down on her knees. “Daddy, no, that’s not what I mean, I don’t care what anyone decides! I mean really. Did he?”

I said, “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he did.”

Another silence, longer this time. The monkeys on the wall had switched to mashing crisps in each other’s faces and hooting encouragement. In the end Holly said, still in that tight small voice, “If I tell Stephen what me and Uncle Shay talked about.”

“Yeah?”

“Then what happens?”

I said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and find out.”

“Will he go to jail?”

“He might. It depends.”

“On me?”

“Partly. Partly on a lot of other people, too.”

Her voice wavered, just a touch. “But he never did anything bad to me. He helps me with homework, and he showed me and Donna how to make shadows with our hands. He lets me have sips out of his coffee.”

“I know, sweetie. He’s been a good uncle to you, and that’s important. But he’s done other stuff, too.”

“I don’t want to make him go to jail.”

I tried to catch her eye. “Sweetheart, listen to me. No matter what happens, it won’t be your fault. Whatever Shay did, he did it himself. Not you.”

“He’ll still be mad. And Nana, and Donna, and Auntie Jackie. They’ll all hate me for telling.”

That wobble in her voice was getting wilder. I said, “They’ll be upset, yeah. And there’s a chance they might take that out on you for a bit, just at first. But even if they do, it’ll wear off. They’ll all know none of this is your fault, just like I do.”

“You don’t know for definite. They could hate me forever and ever. You can’t promise.”

Her eyes were white-ringed, hunted. I wished I had hit Shay a lot harder while I had the chance. “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

Holly slammed both feet into the back of the passenger seat. “I don’t want this! I want everyone to go away and leave me alone. I wish I never even saw that stupid note!”

Another slam that rocked the seat forward. She could have kicked my car to pieces for all I cared, if it made her feel any better, but she was going at it hard enough to hurt herself. I leaned around, fast, and got an arm between her feet and the seat back. She made a wild helpless noise and twisted furiously, trying to get a clear kick without hitting me, but I caught her ankles and held on. “I know, love. I know. I don’t want any of this either, but here it is. And I wish to God I could say that everything’ll be all right once you tell the truth, but I can’t. I can’t even promise that you’ll feel better; you might, but you could just as easily end up feeling even worse. All I can tell you is that you need to do it, either way. Some things in life aren’t optional.”

Holly had slumped back in her booster seat. She took a deep breath and tried to say something, but instead she clamped a hand over her mouth and started to cry.

I was about to get out and climb into the back to hug her tight. It hit me just in time: this wasn’t a little kid howling, waiting for Daddy to sweep her up in his arms and make everything all better. We had left that behind, somewhere in Faithful Place.

Instead I stretched out my hand and took Holly’s free one. She held on like she was falling. We sat there like that, with her leaning her head against the window and shaking all over with huge silent sobs, for a long time. Behind us I heard men’s voices swapping a few brusque comments, and then car doors slamming, and then Stephen driving away.

Neither of us was hungry. I made Holly eat anyway, some radioactive-looking cheese croissant thing that we picked up at a Centra on the way, more for my sake than for hers. Then I took her back to Olivia’s.

I parked in front of the house and turned around to look at Holly. She was sucking a strand of hair and gazing out the window with wide, still, dreamy eyes, like fatigue and overload had put her into a trance. Somewhere along the way she had fished Clara out of her bag.

I said, “You didn’t finish your maths. Is Mrs. O’Donnell going to get in a snot about that?”

For a second Holly looked like she had forgotten who Mrs. O’Donnell was. “Oh. I don’t care. She’s stupid.”

“I bet she is. There’s no reason you should have to listen to her being stupid about this, on top of everything else. Where’s your notebook?”

She dug it out, in slow motion, and handed it over. I flipped to the first blank page and wrote, Dear Mrs. O’Donnell, please excuse Holly for not finishing her maths homework. She hasn’t been well this weekend. If this is a problem, feel free to give me a call. Many thanks. Frank Mackey. On the opposite page I saw Holly’s round, painstaking handwriting: If Desmond has 342 pieces of fruit…

“There,” I said, passing the notebook back to her. “If she gives you any hassle, you give her my phone number and tell her to back off. OK?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Daddy.”

I said, “Your mother’s going to need to know about this. Let me do the explaining there.”

Holly nodded. She put the notebook away, but she stayed put, clicking her seat belt open and shut. I said, “What’s bugging you, chickadee?”

“You and Nana were mean to each other.”

“Yeah. We were.”

“How come?”

“We shouldn’t have been. Every now and then, though, we just get on each other’s nerves. Nobody in the world can make you crazy like your family can.”

Holly stuffed Clara into her bag and gazed down at her, stroking the threadbare nose with one finger. “If I did something bad,” she said. “Would you tell lies to the police to keep me from getting in trouble?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I would. I would lie to the police and the Pope and the president of the world till I was blue in the face, if that was what you needed. It would be the wrong thing to do, but I’d do it just the same.”

Holly startled the hell out of me by leaning forward between the seats, wrapping her arms around my neck and pressing her cheek against mine. I hugged her tight enough that I could feel her heartbeat against my chest, quick and light as a little wild animal’s. There were a million things I needed to say to her, every one of them crucial, but none of them would come out of my mouth.

Finally Holly sighed, an enormous shaky sigh, and disentangled herself. She climbed out of the car and hoisted her schoolbag onto her back. “If I have to talk to that Stephen guy,” she said. “Could it be not on Wednesday? Because I want to go play at Emily’s.”

“That’s absolutely fine, sweetie. Whatever day suits you. Go on ahead, now. I’ll be in to you in a bit; I’ve just got to make a phone call.”

Holly nodded. There was an exhausted sag to her shoulders, but as she went up the path she gave her head a little shake and braced herself. By the time Liv answered the door with her arms open, that narrow back was straight and strong as steel.

I stayed where I was, lit a smoke and sucked down about half of it in one drag. When I was sure I could keep my voice steady, I phoned Stephen.

He was somewhere with crappy reception, presumably deep in the warren of Murder rooms in Dublin Castle. I said, “It’s me. How’s it going?”

“Not too bad. Like you said, he’s denying everything, and that’s when he bothers answering me at all; mostly he won’t talk, except to ask me what your hole tastes like.”

“He’s a charmer. It runs in the family. Don’t let him get to you.”

Stephen laughed. “Ah, God, I’m not bothered. He can say whatever he likes; at the end of the day, I’m the one going home when we finish up. Tell us, though: what’ve you got? Anything that might get him feeling a bit chattier?”

He was all charged up and ready to keep going for as long as it took, and his voice was bursting with brand-new confidence. He was trying to sound tactfully subdued, but deep down, the kid was having the time of his life.

I gave him everything I had and how I had got it, down to the last rancid stinking detail: info is ammo, and Stephen didn’t need any blanks in his stockpile. At the end I said, “He’s fond of our sisters, especially Carmel, and of my daughter, Holly. As far as I know, that’s it. He hates my guts, he hated Kevin’s but he doesn’t like admitting that, and he hates his life. He’s viciously jealous of anyone who doesn’t, almost definitely including you. And, as you’ve probably figured out what with one thing and another, he’s got a temper.”

“OK,” Stephen said, almost to himself; his mind was going flat out. “OK, yeah. I can use that.”

The kid was turning into a man after my own heart. “Yeah, you can. One more thing, Stephen: up until this evening, he thought he was inches away from getting out. He thought he was about to buy the bike shop where he works, dump our da in a home, move out, and finally get his shot at a life worth having. A few hours ago, the world was this guy’s oyster.”

Silence, and for a second there I wondered if Stephen had taken that as an invitation to get his compassion on. Then he said, “If I can’t get him talking with that, I don’t deserve to get him talking at all.”

“That’d be my general feeling. Go for it, kid. Keep me posted.”

Stephen said, “Do you remember,” and then the reception went nuts and he turned into a bunch of disjointed scraping noises. I heard, “… all they’ve got…” before the line cut out and there was nothing left but pointless beeping.

I rolled down my window and had another smoke. The Christmas decorations were coming out here too—wreaths on doors, a “SANTA PLEASE STOP HERE” sign stuck lopsided in a garden—and the night air had turned cold and glassy enough that it finally felt like winter. I threw my cigarette butt away and took a deep breath. Then I went up to Olivia’s door and rang the bell.

Liv answered in her slippers, with her face washed ready for bed. I said, “I told Holly I’d come in and say good night.”

“Holly’s asleep, Frank. She’s been in bed for ages.”

“Ah. OK.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “How long was I out there?”

“Long enough that I’m amazed Mrs. Fitzhugh didn’t ring the Guards. These days she’s seeing stalkers everywhere.”

She was smiling, though, and the fact that she wasn’t annoyed at me for being there gave me a ridiculous little flash of warmth. “That woman always was a fruitcake. Remember the time we—” I saw the retreat in Liv’s eyes and caught myself before it was too late. “Listen, is it OK if I come in for a few minutes anyway? Grab a cup of coffee, clear my head before I drive home, maybe have a quick chat about how Holly’s doing? I promise not to overstay my welcome.”

Clearly I looked like I felt, or at least enough like I felt to push Liv’s pity buttons. After a moment she nodded and held the door wide.

She took me into the conservatory—there was frost starting in the corners of the windowpanes, but the heating was on and the room was snug and warm—and went back to the kitchen to make the coffee. The lights were low; I took off Shay’s baseball cap and shoved it into my jacket pocket. It smelled of blood.

Liv brought out the coffee on a tray, with the good cups and even a little jug of cream. She said, settling into her chair, “You look like you’ve had quite a weekend.”

I couldn’t make myself do it. “Family,” I said. “How about you? How’s Dermo?”

There was a silence, while Olivia stirred her coffee and decided how to answer that. Finally she sighed, a tiny sound I wasn’t meant to hear. She said, “I told him I didn’t think we should see each other any more.”

“Ah,” I said. The quick sweet shot of happiness, straight through all the dark layers that were wrapped tight around my mind, took me by surprise. “Any particular reason?”

Elegant little shrug. “I didn’t think we were well suited.”

“And did Dermo agree with that?”

“He would have, soon enough. If we’d been on a few more dates. I just got there a bit faster.”

“As usual,” I said. I wasn’t being bitchy, and Liv smiled a little, down at her cup. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Ah, well. You win some… What about you? Have you been seeing anyone?”

“Not recently. Not so you’d notice.” Olivia dumping Dermot was the best present life had given me in a while-small, but perfectly formed; you take what you can get—and I knew if I pushed my luck I would probably smash it to pieces, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Some evening, maybe, if you’re free and we can get a babysitter, would you fancy going for dinner? I’m not sure I can swing the Coterie, but I can probably find somewhere better than Burger King.”

Liv’s eyebrows went up and her face turned towards me. “Do you mean… What do you mean? As in, a date?”

“Well,” I said. “Yeah, I guess so. Very much as in a date.”

A long silence, while things moved behind her eyes. I said, “I did listen to what you said the other night, you know. About people wrecking each other’s heads. I still don’t know if I agree with you, but I’m trying to act like you’re right. I’m trying bloody hard, Olivia.”

Liv leaned her head back and watched the moon moving past the windows. “The first time you took Holly for the weekend,” she said, “I was terrified. I didn’t sleep a wink the whole time she was gone. I know you thought I’d been fighting you for the weekends out of sheer spite, but it had nothing to do with that. I was positive you were going to take her and get on a plane, and I’d never see either one of you again.”

I said, “The thought had crossed my mind.”

I saw the shudder go across her shoulders, but her voice stayed steady. “I know. But you didn’t go through with it. I don’t fool myself that that was for my sake; partly it was because leaving would have meant giving up your job, but mainly it was because it would have hurt Holly, and you wouldn’t do that. So you stayed here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well. I do my best.” I was less convinced than Liv that staying put had turned out to be in Holly’s best interests. The kid could have been helping me run a beach bar in Corfu, turning brown and getting spoilt rotten by the locals, instead of having her head cluster-bombed by her entire extended family.

“That’s what I meant, the other day. People don’t have to hurt each other just because they love each other. You and I made each other miserable because we decided to, not because it was some kind of inevitable fate.”

“Liv,” I said. “I need to tell you something.”

I had spent most of the car ride trying to find the low-drama way to do this. It turned out there was no such thing. I left out everything I could and toned down the rest, but by the time I finished Olivia was staring at me, huge-eyed, with trembling fingertips pressed to her mouth. “Sweet Lord,” she said. “Oh, sweet Lord. Holly.”

I said, with all the conviction I could find, “She’s going to be all right.”

“On her own with a—God, Frank, we have to—What do we—”

It had been so long since Liv had let me see her in any mode but poised and glossy, perfectly armored. Like this, raw and shaking and wild to find a way to protect her baby, she cracked me wide open. I knew better than to put my arms around her, but I leaned across and folded my fingers around hers. “Shh, hon. Shh. It’ll be OK.”

“Did he threaten her? Frighten her?”

“No, honey. He had her worried and confused and uncomfortable, but I’m pretty sure she never felt like she was in any danger. I don’t think she was, either. In his own incredibly fucked-up way, he does care about her.”

Liv’s mind was already zipping ahead. “How strong is the case? Will she have to testify?”

“I’m not sure.” We both knew the list of ifs: if the DPP decided to prosecute, if Shay didn’t plead guilty, if the judge figured Holly was capable of giving an accurate account of events… “If I had to put money on it, though, then yeah. I’d bet she will.”

Olivia said, again, “Sweet Lord.”

“It won’t be for a while.”

“That’s beside the point. I’ve seen what a good barrister can do to a witness. I’ve done it. I don’t want it done to Holly.”

I said gently, “You know there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ll just have to trust her to be OK. She’s a strong kid. She always has been.” For a needle-stab second I remembered sitting in that conservatory on spring evenings, watching something fierce and tiny bounce off the inside of Olivia’s belly, ready to take on the world.

“She is, yes, she’s strong. That doesn’t matter. No child in the world is strong enough for this.”

“Holly will be, because she doesn’t have a choice. And Liv… you already know this, too, but you can’t talk about the case with her.”

Olivia’s hand whipped out of mine and her head went up, ready to defend her young. “She’s going to need to talk about it, Frank. I can’t begin to imagine what this has been like for her, I’m not having her bottling it all up—”

“Right, but you can’t be the one she talks to, and neither can I. As far as a jury’s concerned, you’re still a prosecutor: you’re biased. One hint that you’ve been coaching her, and the whole case goes out the window.”

“I don’t give a damn about the case. Who else is she supposed to talk to? You know perfectly well she won’t talk to a counselor, when we separated she wouldn’t say a single word to that woman—I won’t have this damaging her for life. I won’t have it.”

The optimism of her, the faith that the job hadn’t already been done, reached right inside my rib cage and squeezed. “No,” I said. “I know you won’t. Tell you what: you get Holly to talk as much as she needs to. Just make sure no one ever finds out about it. Including me. OK?”

Olivia’s lips tightened, but she said nothing. I said, “I know it’s not ideal.”

“I thought you were so passionately against her keeping secrets.”

“I am. But it’s a little late for that to be top priority now, so what the hell.”

Liv said, and there was a grating note of exhaustion at the bottom of her voice, “I suppose that translates as, ‘I told you so.’”

“No,” I said, and meant it. I caught the surprise in the quick turn of her head towards me. “Absolutely not. It means that we both fucked up here, you and me, and now the best thing we can do is concentrate on damage limitation. And I trust you to do a pretty impressive job of that.”

Her face was still wary and tired, waiting for the twist. I said, “No hidden meaning this time. I promise. I’m just glad the kid has you for a mother, right now.”

I had taken Liv off guard; her eyes flickered away from mine, and she shifted restlessly in her chair. “You should have told me as soon as you got here. You let me put her to bed as if everything was normal—”

“I know I did. I figured she could do with a bit of normality tonight.”

She moved again, sharply. “I need to check on her.”

“If she wakes up, she’ll call us. Or come down.”

“She mightn’t. I’ll only be a moment—”

And she was gone, hurrying up the stairs as quietly as a cat. There was something weirdly comforting about this little routine. We used to go through it a dozen times a night, back when Holly was a baby: one squeak on the monitor and Olivia would need to go make sure she was still asleep, no matter how often I tried to reassure her that the kid had a fine set of lungs and was well able to let us know if she wanted us. Liv was never afraid of cot death or of Holly falling out of bed and hitting her head or any of the standard-issue parental boogeymen. All she worried about was that Holly might wake up, in the middle of the night, and think she was all alone.

Olivia said, coming back in, “Fast asleep.”

“Good.”

“She looks peaceful. I’ll talk to her in the morning.” She dropped into her chair and pushed her hair out of her face. “Are you all right, Frank? I didn’t even think to ask, but my God, tonight must have been—”

I said, “I’m fine. I should be heading, though. Thanks for the coffee. I needed that.”

Liv didn’t push it. She asked, “Are you awake enough to drive home?”

“Not a problem. I’ll see you on Friday.”

“Ring Holly tomorrow. Even if you don’t think you should talk to her about… all of this. Ring her anyway.”

“Course. I was going to.” I tossed back the last of my coffee and stood up. “Just so I know,” I said. “I assume that date is out of the question now.”

Olivia watched my face for a long time. She said, “We’d have to be very careful not to get Holly’s hopes up.”

“We can do that.”

“Because I can’t see much chance that it would go anywhere. Not after… God. Everything.”

“I know. I’d just like to try.”

Olivia moved in her chair. The moonlight shifted on her face, so that her eyes vanished into shadow and all I could see was the proud delicate curves of her lips. She said, “So that you’ll know you’ve made every possible effort. Better late than never, I suppose.”

“No,” I said. “Because I’d really, really like to go on a date with you.”

I could feel her still watching me, out of the shadows. Finally she said, “I’d like that too. Thank you for asking me.”

There was a tumbling split second when I almost moved towards her, almost reached out to do I don’t know what: grab her, crush her against me, go on my knees on the marble tiles and bury my face in her soft lap. I stopped myself by clenching my teeth so hard, I almost snapped my jaw. When I could move again, I took the tray out to the kitchen and left.

Olivia didn’t move. I let myself out; maybe I said good night, I don’t remember. All the way out to the car I could feel her behind me, the heat of her, like a clear white light burning steadily in the dark conservatory. It was the only thing that got me home.