You had to weigh up the greater good. Life wasn’t black-and-white. Confessing wouldn’t bring back Janie. It would achieve nothing. It would hurt Cecilia’s daughters. It would hurt Cecilia’s parents. It would hurt John-Paul for a mistake (she hurried over that soft little word “mistake,” knowing that it wasn’t right, that there had to be a bigger word for what John-Paul had done) he’d made when he was seventeen years old.
“There’s Esther!” Cecilia startled as Mahalia nudged her. She’d forgotten where she was. She looked up in time to see Esther nod coolly at her as she walked by, her hat stuck right on the back of her head, the sleeves of her cardigan pulled right down to cover her hands like mittens. She was wearing an old straw hat of Cecilia’s with fake flowers and tiny chocolate eggs stuck all over it. Not Cecilia’s best effort, but it didn’t matter, because Esther thought Easter hat parades were a waste of her valuable time. “What does the Easter Hat Parade actually teach us?” she’d said to Cecilia that morning in the car.
“Nothing about the Berlin Wall,” said Isabel smartly.
Cecilia had pretended not to notice that Isabel was wearing mascara this morning. She’d done a good job of it. Only one tiny blue-black smudge just below her perfect eyebrow.
She looked up to the Year 6 balcony and saw Isabel and her friends dancing to the music.
If a nice young boy murdered Isabel and got away with it, and if that boy felt very remorseful and turned out to be a fine, upstanding member of the community, a good father and a good son-in-law, Cecilia would still want him jailed. Executed. She’d want to kill him with her own bare hands.
The world tipped.
She heard Mahalia say from a very long way away, “Cecilia?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Tess shifted in her seat and felt a pleasurable ache in her groin. Just how superficial are you? What happened to your supposedly broken heart? So, what, it takes you TWO DAYS to get over a marriage breakup? She was sitting at the St. Angela’s Easter Hat Parade thinking about sex with one of the three parade judges, who was right now on the other side of the school yard, wearing a giant pink baby’s hat tied under his chin and doing the chicken dance with a group of Year 6 boys.
“Isn’t this lovely?” said her mother beside her. “This is just lovely. I wish . . .”
She stopped, and Tess turned to study her.
“You wish what?”
Lucy looked guilty. “I was just wishing that the circumstances were happier—that you and Will had decided to move to Sydney and that Liam was at St. Angela’s and I could always come to his Easter hat parades. Sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry,” said Tess. “I wish that too.”
Did she wish that?
She turned her gaze back to Connor. The Year 6 boys were now laughing with such crazy abandon at something Connor had just said that Tess suspected fart jokes must be involved.
“How was last night?” said Lucy. “I forgot to ask. Actually, I didn’t even hear you come in.”
“It was nice,” said Tess. “Nice to catch up.” She had a sudden image of Connor flipping her over and saying in her ear, “I seem to remember this used to work quite well for us.”
Even before, when he was a young boring accountant with a nerdy hairstyle, before he got the killer body and the motorbike, he’d been good in bed. Tess had been too young to appreciate it. She thought all sex was as good as that. She shifted again in her seat. She was probably about to get a bladder infection. That would teach her. The last time she’d had sex three times in a row—and, not so coincidentally, the last time she’d had a bladder infection—was when she and Will had first started dating.