“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t have any expectations. I know exactly what this is.”
“What is it?” asked Tess with interest.
He paused. “I’m not sure. I’ll check with my therapist and let you know.”
Tess snorted.
“I really should go,” she said again.
But it was another half hour before she finally put her clothes back on.
THIRTY-FOUR
Cecilia went into the en suite bathroom where John-Paul was brushing his teeth. She picked up her toothbrush, squeezed toothpaste on it and began to brush, her eyes not meeting his in the mirror.
She stopped brushing.
“Your mother knows,” she said.
John-Paul bent down to the basin and spat. “What do you mean?” He straightened, patted his mouth with the hand towel and shoved it back on the handrail in such a haphazard way that you’d think he was deliberately trying to avoid keeping it straight.
“She knows,” said Cecilia again.
He spun around. “You told her?”
“No, I—”
“Why would you do that?” The color had drained from his face. He didn’t seem angry so much as utterly baffled and astonished.
“John-Paul, I didn’t tell her. I mentioned Rachel was coming to Polly’s party, and she asked how you felt about that. I could just tell.”
John-Paul’s shoulders relaxed. “You must have imagined it.”
He sounded so certain. Whenever they had an argument about a point of fact, he was always so utterly confident that he had it right and she had it wrong. He never even entertained the possibility that he might be mistaken. It drove her bananas. She struggled with an irresistible urge to slap him across the face.
This was the problem. All his flaws seemed more significant now. It was one thing for a gentle, law-abiding husband and father to have failings: a certain inflexibility that manifested itself just when it was most inconvenient, those occasional (also inconvenient) black moods, the frustrating implacability during arguments, the untidiness, the constant losing of his possessions. They all seemed innocuous enough, common even, but now that these faults belonged to a murderer, they seemed to matter so much more, to define him. His good qualities now seemed irrelevant and probably fraudulent: a cover identity. How could she ever look at him again in the same way? How could she still love him? She didn’t know him. She’d been in love with an optical illusion. The blue eyes that had looked at her with tenderness and passion and laughter were the same eyes that Janie had seen in those terrifying few moments before she died. Those lovely strong hands that had cupped the soft, fragile heads of Cecilia’s baby daughters were the same hands that he held around Janie’s neck.
“Your mother knows,” she told him. “She recognized her rosary beads in the newspaper picture. She basically told me that a mother would do anything for her children, and that I should do the same for my children and pretend it never happened. It was creepy. Your mother is creepy.”
It felt like crossing a line to say that. John-Paul did not take criticism of his mother kindly. Cecilia normally tried to respect that, even though it annoyed her.
John-Paul sank down on the side of the bath, knocking the hand towel off the rail with his knees in the process. “You really think she knows?”
“Yes,” said Cecilia. “So there you go. Mummy’s golden boy really can get away with murder.”
John-Paul blinked, and Cecilia almost considered apologizing, before she remembered that this wasn’t an ordinary disagreement about packing the dishwasher. The rules had changed. She could be just as nasty and snarky as she pleased.