Sara-Jade looks, as always, thin and otherworldly in a silver bomber jacket and a shapeless pink dress. She is with a bearded man called Tom, who may or may not be her partner. She has thus far introduced him only as her friend. Jackie and Bel sit opposite Laurel, with a twin on either side. The boys are only a couple of years older than Poppy and Laurel has found to her delight that her life is back in sync, once more, with those of her closest friends.
On the seats to her right are Theo’s parents. Mr. Goodman looks old but Becky Goodman still looks unfeasibly young for her age. Laurel sees the drag of skin away from her jawbone and toward her ears and holds the observation inside herself reassuringly.
Elsewhere she sees friends of Hanna’s from her schooldays, she sees Paul’s father and she sees strangers, twenty-somethings in uncomfortable shoes and too much makeup, friends of Theo’s, she assumes, or colleagues from Hanna’s office.
But there are, as at every wedding, people who are not here: ghosts and shadows.
Laurel’s mother finally passed away eight months ago. But not before she’d had a chance to meet Poppy.
She’d clasped her hand and she’d said, “I knew it, I knew there was a reason why I was still here, I knew you were out there. I just knew you were.” A nurse took a picture that day of the three of them. It should have been four, of course, but three was better than two. Ruby died a week later.
Laurel’s hopeless brother is not here either. He’d flown back from Dubai for Ruby’s funeral in January and said he couldn’t make two trips in one year.
And, of course, Ellie is not here.
Laurel hasn’t told Poppy the full truth about Ellie. She said that Ellie ran away from home and then got run over and left in a wood and that at some point between running away and getting run over she’d had a baby and that Noelle had adopted the baby and given her to Floyd when she couldn’t cope anymore.
Neither has she told Poppy about the body in Floyd’s garden. She’d simply packed a small bag for Poppy and brought her to her flat in Barnet for a few days while the big plastic tent was erected over the flowerbed, helicopters buzzing overhead. As for Floyd himself, Laurel told Poppy that he’d taken his own life because he felt so guilty about pretending to be Poppy’s father when he wasn’t. Poppy had swallowed back tears and nodded, in that grim, brave way of hers. “I really didn’t mind, you know,” she said. “Because he was a very good dad. He really was. He didn’t need to feel guilty. He didn’t need to die.”
“No,” Laurel had said, wiping a single tear from Poppy’s cheek with her thumb and then rocking her in her arms. “No. He didn’t.”
The bus pulls up outside the canal-side restaurant where Theo and Hanna will be holding their wedding reception. The party duly dismounts and smooths down its skirts and rebuttons its jackets, adjusts its hair against the sharp wind blowing in off the top of the water. Paul approaches. “Are you OK?” he asks, his hand against the sleeve of her jacket.
Laurel nods. She is OK. Her life is upended in every way. She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life. And she is still, of course, traumatized by the revelations of the last months of Ellie’s life. Some nights when she closes her eyes she is in that basement, trapped inside those pine-clad walls, staring desperately up at a window that no one will ever see her through. But the nightmares are starting to fade.
Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK. Laurel is OK. She really is. Because she has Hanna and she has Jake and now she has Poppy and Theo, too. Her relationship with Sara-Jade has grown deep and strong in the months since Floyd’s death. She sees her frequently, for Poppy’s sake but also for her own. She sees something of herself in Sara-Jade, something important in some way, something to nurture.