Chapter 14

"No." It came out immediately, without calculation. "No. I know what I did. I know there's no excuse for any of it. But I need you to let me — I need you to let me try to—"

"There's nothing to try for," she said. She was not angry. That was the strange thing. The anger had been spent a long time ago, somewhere between the cliff and the fishing village. What remained was something clearer and simpler: certainty. "You were wrong. You know you were wrong. That doesn't undo it."

"Lily." His voice broke, just slightly, on the word. "I was in love with you. I didn't know it. I know how inadequate that sounds. I know—"

"One sentence," she said, "doesn't give me back my son. Or the year. Or the version of myself that existed before all of this."

He stopped.

She looked at him for a moment. At the exhaustion in his face, the genuine wreckage of him. She understood it. She even, in some complicated way, felt for it.

"I stepped in front of that knife," she said, "because no one should have to watch a child die. Any child. Even hers. That's all that was." She looked at the bandage on her ribs. "What happened to me because of Celeste's actions is your fault. Not because you planned it — because you created the situation that made it possible." She paused. "That's the last thing I have to say to you about any of this."

Damian's hands were pressed over his eyes. She could see his shoulders moving with his breathing.

After a while he lowered his hands. His eyes were red. "All right," he said. His voice was wrecked. "All right."

Julian's firm handled the paperwork. It moved very quickly.

The morning the decree was finalised, she stood outside the solicitor's office with the document in her hands and tipped her face up to the grey London sky and felt something shift, finally and completely, into place.

Hello, she thought. Let's try again.

Damian gave a second press conference.

It was briefer than the first. He said, clearly and on record, that he was pursuing his ex-wife and that he intended to wait as long as necessary. "I made every possible wrong choice when I had her," he said, to a room full of cameras. "I'm aware that I don't deserve another one. I'm choosing to wait anyway."

The internet had thoughts about this, as the internet had thoughts about everything.

Lily watched the clip on her phone with a cup of tea and rolled her eyes so thoroughly that Julian, from across the room, asked if she was all right.

"Fine," she said. "Just this man." She turned the screen off.

Julian settled into the armchair across from her and looked at his hands.

"You know," he said, "I did tell people we were married. At the school. At the firm events."

"I know."

"I didn't—" He stopped. "I was never not aware that it was wrong. I want you to know that."

She looked at him properly. Julian Hartley, who had found her on a beach in Cornwall when she had nothing, not even a name, and brought her back to herself. Who had driven four hours in the middle of the night to reach that fishing village. Who had slept on the floor of her room for three weeks because she'd asked him not to leave, in the early days, when waking up alone in an unfamiliar place still triggered something that didn't have a name yet.

Who had never touched her as anything more than a friend. Not once. Even when they'd shared a flat in Paris for eight months and she hadn't known who she was.

"I'm not angry," she said. "I know why you did it."

He met her eyes. "I should have told you the truth when you were well enough to hear it."

"Probably." She shrugged slightly. "But I might not have been well enough to hear it as quickly as you thought."

A silence.

"Julian," she said. "I've been thinking about what you said."

He waited.

"I don't know how to do slow," she said. "I've never been particularly good at slow. But I'm willing to try." She tilted her head. "Is that enough to start with?"

He looked at her for a moment. The expression on his face was something she'd seen before, in that old photograph from the garden — fond, unguarded, not quite managing to be subtle.

"Yes," he said. "That's plenty."

Eleanor Hartley had been waiting since Tuesday.

When the door opened and Lily walked in — wearing a red dress, the same kind of red she'd apparently always favoured, moving with that particular quick energy that Eleanor had first noticed in a five-year-old who couldn't sit still — Eleanor stood up and couldn't say a word for a moment.

Then Lily crossed the room and walked directly into her arms and said "I've missed you."

Eleanor held her very tightly and thought about the years, and how much could happen in them, and how sometimes things could still come back.

"Sit down, sit down," she said, when she could speak. "I've made dinner. Everything you like. Come and tell me all about Paris."