“Jesus Christ,” she said softly to herself, as all the physical symptoms of her new disease came rushing back: the nausea, the headache. She had to get up. She had to somehow escape from it. She went to move to throw back the covers and felt John-Paul’s arms tighten around her.
“I’m getting up,” she said, without turning to face him.
“How do you think we’d cope financially?” he said into her neck. He sounded hoarse, as if he had a terrible cold. “If I do go to . . . without my salary? We’d have to sell the house, right?”
“We’d survive,” answered Cecilia shortly. She took care of the finances. Always had. John-Paul was happy to be oblivious to bills and mortgage payments.
“Really? We would?” He sounded doubtful. The Fitzpatricks were relatively wealthy, and John-Paul had grown up expecting to be better off than most people he knew. If there was money around, he quite naturally assumed it must emanate from him. Cecilia hadn’t deliberately misled him about how much money she’d been earning the last few years; she just hadn’t gotten around to mentioning it.
He said, “I was thinking that if I’m not here, we could get one of Pete’s boys to come around and do odd jobs for you. Like clearing the gutters. That’s really important. You can’t let that go, Cecilia. Especially around bushfire season. I’ll have to do a list. I keep thinking of things.”
She lay still. Her heart thudded. How could this be? It was absurd. Impossible. Were they actually lying in bed, talking about John-Paul going to jail?
“I really wanted to be the one to teach the girls how to drive,” he said. His voice broke. “They’ve got to know how to handle wet roads. You don’t know how to brake properly when the roads are wet.”
“I do so,” protested Cecilia.
She turned around to face him and saw that he was sobbing, his cheeks crumpled into ugly grizzled folds. He twisted his head to bury his face in the pillow, as if to hide his tears. “I know I have no right. No right to cry. I just can’t imagine not seeing them each morning.”
Rachel Crowley never gets to see her daughter again.
But she couldn’t harden her heart enough. The part of him she loved best was the part that loved his daughters. Their children had bound them together in a way that she knew didn’t always happen to other couples. Sharing stories about their children—laughing about them, wondering about their futures—was one of the greatest pleasures of her marriage. She’d married John-Paul because of the father she knew he would one day be.
“What will they think of me?” He pressed his hands to his face. “They’ll hate me.”
“It’s all right,” said Cecilia. This was unbearable. “It will be all right. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to change.”
“But I don’t know, now that I’ve actually said it out loud, now that you know, after all these years, it feels so real, much more real than ever before. It’s today, you know.” He ran the back of his hand across his nose and looked at her. “Today is the day. The day I did it. I remember every year. I hate autumn. But this year it seems even more shocking than ever. I can’t believe it was me. I can’t believe I did that to someone’s daughter. And now my girls, my girls . . . my girls have to pay.”
The remorse racked his whole body, like the worst sort of pain. Her every instinct was to ease it, to rescue him, to somehow make the pain stop. She gathered him to her like a child and whispered soothing words. “Shhhh. It’s all right. Everything is going to be all right. There couldn’t possibly be new evidence after all these years. Rachel must be mistaken. Come on, now. Deep breaths.”
He buried his face in her shoulder and she felt his tears soaking through her nightie.