good mother – he’s turning out great, you know that. Please don’t worry. He has us. He’ll always have us.’
Sheriff Bastedo makes his way to the district attorney’s office. He’d had a quick conversation over the phone with the coroner, Yancik, early that morning. They’d discussed the verdict, what it meant.
‘This is messy,’ Yancik said unhappily. ‘How did Mike miss this? It’s making us all look bad.’
Bastedo remembers how sheepish the previous sheriff had looked the day before in court, but isn’t terribly sympathetic. He knows Yancik is feeling defensive; but none of this is making Bastedo look bad. He wasn’t around back then. But he knows what Yancik means. There’s enough pressure on the coroner’s office these days without this kind of fuck-up. And he’s right that it’s messy.
‘The question is what to do now,’ Bastedo said. He’d been thinking about it all night. ‘I’m seeing the DA this morning.’
‘What do you think she’ll want to do?’
‘I don’t know. But I’ll let you know what she says.’
Now, as the sheriff arrives at the district attorney’s office, he sees her nameplate on her door. Aurora Lydia Dominguez. There’s not a lot of crime in their rural community, but this is rather huge. She will want to look at it carefully. She has her own position to consider too. Everyone has their own angle to consider, Bastedo thinks, a little cynically.
‘Come in,’ Dominguez says when he knocks on her door.
She’s in her late thirties. Her dark hair is in a tidy ponytail, and she’s wearing a good suit, sensible shoes. He spots a pair of black heels in the corner. She’s too smart to wear those all day. He trusts her to make the right decision on this. He doesn’t know what the right decision is – he’s hoping she does.
‘Close the door,’ she says.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THE FLIGHT HOME is a nightmare. Stephanie keeps seeing people glancing at her, looking again; they recognize her. The story is in the newspapers this morning, and their pictures too. They have been on TV, clips of them going into and out of the courthouse. Even though she’s put her hair up and is wearing dark sunglasses, people know who she is, because Patrick looks just the same.
When they finally arrive home from the airport and park the car in the driveway, all Stephanie wants to do is drop their things and run across the street to Hanna’s and get her babies. She doesn’t wait for Patrick to accompany her; she’d rather he didn’t. ‘Can you get things ready here, and I’ll bring the twins home? They’ll need to be fed.’
With that, she walks across the street, her heart bursting with anxiety. How have the twins fared without her? She felt so bad leaving them. But she’d left a bunch of breast milk with Hanna for them, and she’d trust Hanna with her babies over anyone else. But now, as she heads towards Hanna’s house, desperate to see her daughters, she falters. How will Hanna react? It wasn’t the verdict Stephanie had said they expected.
A few weeks ago, she’d told Hanna about the impending inquest. She’d gone over to Hanna’s with the babies. She put the girls with little Teddy on playmats on the living-room floor. Stephanie had never said anything to Hanna about it before, but the date for the inquest was looming and she knew she had to tell Hanna the truth about why she needed her to watch the twins for two nights. It would be on the news. She would find out soon enough.
Watching the different emotions on Hanna’s face as she stumbled through the story – disbelief, uneasiness – intensified the acute dismay Stephanie had been feeling over the last weeks. She knew Patrick had had a similar, difficult conversation with his business partner. He’d told her Niall took it well. She wasn’t sure she believed him. But Hanna had been surprisingly supportive, once she’d got over the shock. Now Hanna feels like the closest thing she’s got to a shoulder to lean on. Stephanie wishes again that she had family – that her parents were still alive, that she’d had siblings. She feels terribly alone in the world. The one person she’d come to depend on was Patrick.
Hanna answers the door with a sympathetic frown on her face and immediately reaches out to hug her. Stephanie feels herself sinking into the comfort of Hanna’s arms. The two women separate and without speaking of the verdict – which Hanna must already