going to dump that on his shoulders just so I can pat myself on the back about having no secrets in my marriage. And”—a cool glance at me—“neither is anyone else.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“You know what, though,” she said, a little farther down the walkway. “Sometimes I think he knows. About Dominic and about that doctor, too. Obviously there’s no way I can ask him, but . . . I wonder.” Another glance at me. “What about Melissa?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “And I’m not going to ask, either.”
“Yeah, don’t. Leave it.”
We had come out of the walkway; after the dimness the sun felt too bright, aggressive. “Hugo’s ashes,” I said. I hadn’t wanted to bring this up around my father. “He wanted them to go in the Ivy House garden. Did you, did anyone—”
“Yeah, your mum said. But”—breeze playing with a curl of her hair, she lifted a hand to tuck it behind her ear—“all our dads, they felt weird about that. After everything. There’s a lake where the four of them used to go for holidays, when they were kids? Up in Donegal? We drove up there, a few weeks back. We scattered his ashes in the lake. Which is probably illegal, but there was no one around. It’s a beautiful place.” A glance at me: “We would have waited for you, but . . .”
“We should go in,” I said. “Our time’s probably up.”
Susanna nodded. For a second I thought she was going to say something else, but then she turned around and headed towards the walkway. We walked back to the building in silence.
* * *
My parents visited all the time, of course, and Sean and Dec, and sometimes the aunts and uncles. Richard came once, but he was so upset that it just made both of us feel worse. He had got it into his head that the whole thing was somehow his fault, that if he had pushed me to come back to work then I would have recovered faster (not true, and I told him so) and, more confusedly, that if he hadn’t been so angry with me about the Gouger thing then I wouldn’t have stayed late at work that night and wouldn’t have crossed paths with the burglars, or wouldn’t have been awake to hear them, or something. That one obviously wasn’t true either, but it came close enough to what a part of me believed that I had a hard time with it, which of course upset Richard even more. After that he wrote me every month like clockwork—scene gossip, descriptions of new artists he had discovered, wistful asides about what lovely things I would have done for the exhibition of found-object sculpture—but he didn’t come back, and I was glad of it.
Leon wasn’t around; he had moved to Sweden, where he was working as a tour guide and from where he sent me postcards of national monuments with a few perky, meaningless lines scribbled on the backs. Melissa didn’t come either. She wrote me long, very sweet letters: lots of funny stories about the shop, like the ones she used to tell me when I was licking my wounds in my apartment; awful Megan the flatmate had finally managed to run her chichi café into the ground, which of course was everyone’s fault but hers, and now she was setting up as a life coach; Melissa had run into Sean and Audrey in town and their baby was completely adorable, the exact same laid-back expression as Sean, they couldn’t wait for me to meet him! In spite of the huge amounts of time and consideration and care that must have gone into the letters, there was something impersonal about them—they could equally well have been written to a classmate she hadn’t seen in ten years—and I wasn’t at all surprised when she mentioned (delicately, not making a big deal of it) that she was going to some concert with her boyfriend. I rewrote my answer half a dozen times, trying to make it clear with equal delicacy that I wasn’t angry, that I wanted her to have every happiness and while I wished with all my heart that I had been able to give it to her, now that that was impossible I hoped she could find it with someone else. Maybe I got the tone wrong, or maybe the new boyfriend was understandably not crazy about the idea of me; her letters didn’t stop but they got further