going to see Jodi. She’s all by herself, and you shouldn’t be alone when you’ve had a baby. We just aren’t meant to do it.’ Maybe that was a dig about all those years ago, the day Jake was born, when I’d dragged Mike away from the hospital to immediately have sex and try to get my own baby. Had I known, on some level, that Jake was his? Or was I just so selfish I didn’t care? I’d never know. What a store of hurts we had from each other, Karen and me. Like a set of scales that were balanced with stones.
Karen stood up. ‘Will you come with me?’ she said. ‘Will you help?’
‘Of course,’ I said. And I stood up too, and we walked to the door, shoulder to shoulder.
Epilogue
The For Sale sign swung in the breeze that had picked up round the house. The summer was on its way out – in a week or two Benji would start school, and Cassie sixth-form college. Neither of them in Bishopsdean, however. We were leaving the town behind, and hopefully, with the proceeds from the house, we’d be able to buy a more modest flat or terrace before Christmas. For now we were moving into a rented flat in London, not far from the one Cassie had been born in. Benji had grumbled about leaving his friends, but he understood, I think, the need to get away. For Cassie it would be life or death. A chance to start again, to outrun that picture and the pills she’d swallowed. A place where no one knew what kind of family we were.
She came up behind me as I stared out the kitchen door at the sign, past the spot where Karen had been assaulted. ‘Are you sad we’re selling?’
‘Not really. I don’t see how we can live here now.’ My dream house – a pipe dream, one I never truly thought I deserved – was tainted for ever by what happened to Karen here. And Cassie, swallowing those pills. By everything.
I had given up my dreams of Aaron ever being punished for spreading the picture. I knew he wouldn’t have thought he even did anything wrong, and lots of people would agree. Even Cassie wasn’t convinced the whole thing hadn’t been her fault – she’d sent it in the first place, after all. At least if we left town I wouldn’t have to bump into him and his awful mother in Waitrose. The more I thought about it, the more I marvelled that I’d ever lived in a place like this.
Cassie nodded, and let me slip my arm around her shoulders without pulling away. ‘Will Granny come and stay when we move?’
My mother had stayed for a month in the end, and although it was too simplistic to say we’d put the past behind us, she’d grown close to Cassie and Benji, and seemed able to show them affection in a way she never had with me. Guilt, maybe, had shadowed all of our encounters. I didn’t forgive her entirely for never standing up to Dad. But I would try to understand, now I had faced the lengths a person would go to so they could hang on to their life.
Mike had already moved back to London. After the transplant, he’d made a good recovery, and woken up the next day lucid and remorseful, but we’d agreed our marriage was one more thing that could not be saved. Like with the house, there was no way back from everything that had happened. He was living in a flat not far from where we’d be, back at his old job. His boss seemed rather embarrassed that they’d ever doubted him. Karen and Jake were back in Birmingham and I didn’t know when I’d see them next. I’d heard Jake wasn’t getting over the transplant so well, that he’d been in and out of hospital a few times. He was on bail now until his trial, and I hoped his sentence would be light, given what he’d done for us. I tried not to feel guilty.
As for Callum, his trial was coming up in the autumn, not just for the rape of Karen, but for killing Martha too. Since it was a murder charge, he hadn’t got bail and was currently on remand in a London prison. I’d have to see him, and Karen, in court, and I was steeling myself for that. I’d been lucky not to face charges myself,