by Nina Monroe
Kaitlin nods. “We understand.”
“And Lieutenant Mesenberg has been by already. She’s given us an update on what the children have said. There’s really no need—”
“I’d still like to talk to her,” Bryar says. “So she can hear it from me.”
Peter looks from Kaitlin to Bryar. “I see. Well, I suppose you can try. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. She’s not in a good place.”
“Thank you,” Kaitlin says. “We appreciate it.”
Before Peter guides them into the family room, Kaitlin glances down the hallway and catches sight of Priscilla; the door to Astrid’s room is cracked open. Has Astrid spoken to her mother? Has she told her the truth?
Peter opens the door to the family room. “Take a seat here, I’ll go and get her,” he says.
When he’s gone, Bryar squeezes Kaitlin’s hand. “It’ll be okay, Mom.”
Kaitlin looks at her son, who suddenly seems so much older than the little boy he was, even a few days ago.
CHAPTER
47
8 p.m.
WHEN PRISCILLA WALKS into the family room, Kaitlin stands up. Bryar stands up too and comes to her side.
“How is Astrid doing?” Kaitlin asks.
Priscilla’s eyebrows shoot up. “How’s she doing? She was shot, Kaitlin, how do you think she’s doing?”
“I’m sorry …” Kaitlin mumbles.
“You’re sorry?”
Ben was right, Kaitlin thinks. So was Peter. Priscilla’s not ready to see them—let alone to hear what they have to say.
Bryar takes a step forward.
“I would like to tell you something, Dr. Carver.”
Priscilla’s head snaps up and she looks him right in the eye. He looks back at her, not flinching. “Lots of things happened in the stable—both before and after Astrid got shot. And I’m sorry that we haven’t told you before now. We were scared—”
“You were scared?” Priscilla bursts out.
“Give the kid a chance,” Peter says.
“I know what I’m going to say isn’t going to make what happened to Astrid go away, but I still think you should know and then Mom and I will leave and you don’t have to see us ever again.”
Bryar says it all in one breath, as though he’s worried that if he hesitates, he won’t be able to finish.
Priscilla sits down in one of the chairs. “Okay, but I don’t have long.”
She looks toward the door and Kaitlin knows that she wants to get back to Astrid. If it was Bryar, lying in that hospital bed, Kaitlin wouldn’t want to leave his side either. In the end, they’re both mothers—they share that, and that’s something, isn’t it? More than something. Maybe it’s the most important thing of all.
Bryar sits down in the chair next to her. Kaitlin and Peter take a seat too. And then Bryar starts to tell the story. About how he was the one who took the gun out of the safe and then the ammo too, and how, in the minutes that followed, each of the children, in their own way, made mistakes—or misjudgments. Things that they couldn’t undo. But he keeps coming back to the fact that he was the only one who knew the code to his dad’s safes. That if it hadn’t been for him, the gun would still be in there now. Unloaded. That no one would have gotten hurt. That Astrid would be okay.
Not once does he put the blame on Astrid. He doesn’t talk about how she’d stood in the stable, taunting him, or how she’d turned holding the gun into a big, dangerous game.
Priscilla listens. Or she seems to. Sometimes her eyes drift off, like she’s being tugged back to Astrid’s room. Or maybe she’s just tired. Kaitlin hopes to God that she’s at least taking in something of what Bryar is telling her. Nothing is going to take away the pain of the last few days, but please, Kaitlin prays, please may Bryar’s words make a difference. Maybe even allow her to let go of some of her anger.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Carver,” Bryar says. “I should never have opened the safes—the one with the gun and the one with the ammo. If I hadn’t, then none of this would have happened.”
And then he hangs his head and looks down at the floor, like she’s seen him do a thousand times.
Priscilla sits there, her eyes still far away. Then, slowly, she stands up and walks toward the door.
“Cil?” Peter calls after her.
She turns around. “What?”
“It’s taken a lot for Bryar to come here. To talk to you like this. Say something to the kid.”
She stares at Peter, incredulous. “You want me to thank him, is that it?”
“Come on, Cil, don’t be like this.”
“There’s nothing to say, Peter. Because nothing’s changed.”
Peter shakes his head.
Priscilla turns her head and catches Kaitlin’s eye. “Has it, Kaitlin?”
Beside her, Bryar slumps into himself. He really believed he could get through to her. Kaitlin would do anything to take away his disappointment, to help him see that, regardless of how Priscilla is responding, what he did today was good and brave.
Priscilla turns to leave. She puts her fingers on the door handle and then stops.
“Where’s Ben?” she says, not turning around.
“Ben?” Kaitlin says.
“Your husband.”
So, this is what this was about: Ben. Maybe it’s what it’s been about all along.
Bryar looks up. “Dad’s at home. He thought it was best …”
Priscilla turns around. “Best?” she asks.
“To give you some space,” Kaitlin says.
Priscilla looks straight at Kaitlin. “Still loves his guns, does he?”
Kaitlin stares back. “Loves guns? No, no. It’s not like that—it’s never been like that. They’re part of his work—they’re—”
But then she isn’t sure what to say. She can’t defend him. Not any more.
Peter stands up and walks toward Priscilla.
“Come on, Cil,” he says.
Kaitlin thinks about how she’s tried to get through to Ben about having firearms in their home—to help him understand how others see it. And how she’s come to see it too. She wants to tell Priscilla that, for the first time in their marriage, it’s created a distance between her and Ben, one that neither of them knows how to bridge.
“It’s complicated for Ben,” Kaitlin starts. “The gun question …”
Kaitlin feels her words bouncing off Priscilla; she’s not ready to hear it.
“So, in other words, nothing’s changed,” Priscilla says.
And with that, she leaves the room.
CHAPTER
48
8.15 p.m.
EVA’S EYES BURN with tiredness. Every bit of her body aches.
And then it comes back to her.
Standing in Yasmin’s bathroom. The cramps. The blood. Yasmin driving her to the hospital.
She brushes her hand over her stomach.
How could she have pinned her hopes on this? She’s over forty. She had Lily eleven years ago and every attempt at getting pregnant since then has ended in a miscarriage. Her body isn’t meant to have a baby—Lily was her miracle. Why couldn’t she just accept that?
The door to her room flies open.
“Mum!” Lily runs over to her bed. “You’re awake!” She throws her arms around Eva.
Will comes in behind Lily. He sits down on the side of the bed and takes Eva’s hand and kisses it. Then Lily draws him into a hug and, for a moment, the three of them hold on to each other and she breathes them in: their hair and their skin and the feel of their breath against her neck.
Will sits back and looks at her in a way that he hasn’t done in ages. Not since the shooting. Maybe not since they left England.
Lily tightens her arms around her.
“I want to go home,” Eva says.
“The doctor needs to run a few more tests,” Will says. “Then we can head back to the house.”
“I don’t want to go back to the house. I want to go back to England.”
<
br /> Lily pulls back. She looks at Eva, her eyes wide and sad. “You want us to leave Middlebrook?”
She nods, her chin trembling. “Yes, my love.”
“But I thought you wanted us to make a go of it here?”
“We don’t belong here, Lily.”
“But Mum—” Lily starts.
Will puts an arm on Lily’s shoulder and then turns to Eva. “Let’s take this one step at a time. You’ve been through a lot, my love, but everything’s going to be okay now.”
“Okay?” Her eyes fill with tears. “How can things be okay?”
“We’re here for you, my love. And we’re going to make this work.”
Eva looks up at Will through blurry eyes.
“Yeah, Mum, Dad’s right. And I’ll help—I’ll be the best big sister ever—”
“And I guess I’ll get used to the idea of being a geriatric dad! Christ, Eva. I could have done with some warning.”
Eva’s heart jumps.
“But the baby—after what happened at Yasmin’s—”
Will squeezes Eva’s hand. “The baby’s going to be fine.”
“It is?”
“You had a placental abruption. You lost a lot of blood. And you’re going to have to take it easy—bed rest from now on.” Will’s eyes go glassy. “But the doctor is confident that we’re finally going to have that sibling for Lily.”
“I guess I’ll have to forget those lectures you gave me about only children rocking the world.” Lily looks from Eva to Will, smiling.
“Big sisters rock the world too,” Will says.
Lily and Will’s words fly around Eva’s head. She still can’t quite take in what they’re saying.
“So, the baby’s okay?” she asks again.
“Yes, my love, the baby is okay.”
Eva touches her stomach again. When she woke up alone in the hospital room, she’d felt it—the dark, empty space in her womb. She was sure that the baby had gone.
She looks out of the window and thinks about the last few weeks. The move to America. Trying so hard to be part of this community. Putting up with the horrible brown bungalow. The party at Woodwind Stables. The terrible accident—and then what happened afterward. And all the time, keeping the baby a secret from Will and Lily.
“I still want to go home,” Eva says.
“But Mum—”
“I don’t think I can live here, Lily. Not with everything that’s happened. I don’t understand how life works here.”
Will takes her hand in his. “None of us understand how life works, my love. It doesn’t matter where we’re from. The best we can do is to be there for each other when things get hard.” His voice chokes up. “And that’s where I messed up. I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you more.”
“But Astrid’s still fighting for her life …” Eva says.
Lily exchanges a look with Will. “Astrid woke up, Mum.”
It takes a while for Eva to react; her brain is too foggy to take in this news.
“She’s going to be okay,” Lily says.
Something in Eva’s heart comes loose. Thank God.
“And there’s something else too, Mum.” Lily takes a breath. “We told the truth about what happened,” she says. “Like you wanted us to.”
A vague memory comes back to Eva. Lily sitting next to her and talking to her in the middle of the night. She’d wanted to answer her but she had felt too weak.
We were all to blame, Mum …
There’s a light knock on the door. Will stands up to open it.
Yasmin walks in.
“I’m sorry, I can come back later,” she says.
“No … no, come in,” Peter says. “I’ve been meaning to call you to thank you for bringing Eva in.”
Yasmin steps forward.
On the way to the hospital, Eva had told Yasmin about the pregnancy. And it had felt like such a relief—sharing it at last. And then so unbearably sad because she’d been certain that she’d lost the baby.
“The baby’s going to be okay,” Eva says, reaching out her hand for Yasmin.
Yasmin rushes forward. “Oh, Eva.”
The two women hold hands and look at each other. Eva thinks about the graffiti on the mosque and the things Priscilla said about her children on the TV show. They’re both outsiders here.
“Why don’t we leave Mum and Mrs. Sayed to have a chat,” Will says. “We’ll go and find one of the nurses and let them know that Mum’s awake. They’ll want to come and check on her. And maybe we can go and grab a bite to eat.”
Eva looks over at Will and gives him a grateful smile. Something has changed between them. He’s listening to her again. And not just to her words: he sees her.
Lily comes over and gives Eva a kiss on the cheek and then goes out of the room with Will.
Yasmin pulls up a chair.
“Will’s right,” Eva says. “Thank you for taking care of me. If you hadn’t got me here so fast, I don’t know—” She chokes up again.
Yasmin puts her hand on her arm. “You’d have done the same for me, Eva.” She pauses. “You’re my friend.”
Eva nods. She grabs another tissue and blots it against her face. “I can’t stop crying.”
“Crying is good, Eva. You should cry as much as you want,” Yasmin says.
Eva props herself up against the pillows. “I want to go home, Yasmin. I want to raise this baby in a country I understand.”
Slowly, Yasmin takes Eva’s hand again. “Bad stuff happens at home too, Eva.”
“I know—but at home we’re not outsiders. At home, we understand the rules.”
“Do we?”
“I think so, yes.”
“I don’t think knowing the rules makes it any easier. In fact, it can make it harder. There’s something to be said for being on the outside. It helps you see things more clearly.”
“But those awful things Priscilla said about the twins—and what’s happened to the mosque—doesn’t that get to you?”
“Of course it gets to me. But look at what Priscilla said about True and Kaitlin—and Ben and their kids. She’d have found a reason to blame us, even if we were American. It’s not about where we’re from or whether we belong. We’re all as guilty or innocent as each other.” She pauses. “There is no them, there is only us.”
“Maybe.” Eva looks out of the window. The sky is gray. Thick raindrops hit the windowpane. “But don’t you miss home?” Her eyes well up again. “Even the rain feels wrong here.”
Yasmin follows Eva’s eyes to the window. “Missing things is a kind of gift,” she says.
“It is?”
“You get to appreciate the life you had: it becomes part of you in a way that it never would if you still lived there.” She pauses. “And being somewhere else means that you get to start over. And that’s a gift too.”
Eva thinks about this. Yasmin’s right. Being away from it all—the cool grass under her feet; the white roses nodding their heads over the door at her parents’ cottage in Dorset; the way the traffic moves around London; the rain—it feels more real since she’s been away from it. And more beautiful too.
But she’s not sure about starting over. She tried that, hadn’t she? To make a place for herself and her family in this town—in this country. And it had all gone wrong.
“And you know what else?” Yasmin goes on, as if sensing Eva’s questions. “We get to live two lives. We get to remember and we get to become part of something new. And here, we can decide who we want to be. It’s taken me a while to realize that. For a long time, I thought that I was locked into a role here: that Ayaan got to determine who we were going to be as a family—who I was going to be as a wife and a woman; that I had to show the world that I came from Pakistan; that I had to wear my heritage and my religion like a badge; that doing anything else would be some kind of betrayal. But you know what the greatest betrayal is? It’s not having the courage to be the people we want to be. No one gets to decide that but us, Eva. You, a
nd me. All this—” Yasmin sweeps her hands through the air. “Everything that’s happened in the last week—it’s made me realize that: we get to decide.”
Eva looks at Yasmin. She’s never heard her say so many words at once. Or so confidently. She can see it in her body too—the way she sits up straight, her eyes lifted and shining, the jeans and the sweatshirt and the sneakers: something’s changed. She hasn’t been broken by what happened, she’s stronger.
“I wish I could see things like you do,” Eva says. “But I’m not as brave as you are, Yasmin.”
Yasmin squeezes Eva’s hand and leans in. “Yes, you are. You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. You go out into the world and you try to make it better. That’s the bravest thing a person can do.”
A nurse knocks gently on the door and comes in. “Is it okay if I check your vitals now?”
Eva nods.
The nurse wraps a blood-pressure cuff around Eva’s arm.
Yasmin puts on her raincoat.
“Call me as soon as you’re back home,” Yasmin says.
Home. The word makes Eva’s heart lurch. She doesn’t know where that is any more.
Yasmin walks to the door.
“Thank you—for bringing me to the hospital. For being there for me,” Eva says.
Yasmin smiles. “Like I said: we are friends, Eva.”
And then she leaves.
Eva lies back against the pillows. Friends. She feels herself welling up again. It’s what she’d longed for most when she came here: to meet women she could share things with—be mothers with. Wasn’t that why she’d wanted to help Kaitlin with Bryar? And why she’d persuaded Yasmin to bring her twins to the party? What Yasmin said was right: Eva had always prided herself on helping people, on being a good friend, on making a difference. But that’s all it was, wasn’t it? Pride. Because look at what happened. Everyone had turned against each other. The kids and their families had been attacked by the media. People in Middlebrook had betrayed each other.
Priscilla saw this. And she saw Eva even more clearly than Yasmin. She’d announced it on public television: that Eva had done nothing but cause trouble. That what she thought was kindness was in fact naivety—a naivety that put a child in hospital.
