The Girl I Used to Be(74)

She looked sharply at me. “What did you do that for?”

“I needed to know. I phoned a long time after I heard that he’d died. Years. Of course I thought he’d killed himself and then Caitlin said maybe he’d done it because he couldn’t have the future he’d wanted.”

My mother made a sound then, a kind of Well, he should have thought of that kind of noise.

“But when I spoke to them, they said that as the charge had been dropped, it would be possible for him to practice law. He’d have to declare the charge, but they thought it would be okay.”

“And you’re thinking you would have done better taking it to court, to let him have his say? Gemma, sweetheart, you did the right thing. The only thing,” said my mum. “What would that have done to you? And they could have paid for the best lawyers; you know that.” Her voice wobbled and I could see she was holding back tears. “Think how you would have felt if they’d found him not guilty.”

I knew that would have crushed me, and I knew, too, that that was exactly how I would feel if I were accused and couldn’t have my say, too.

And I thought of the ripples from that one night in August, when everything changed forever for Alex and for me, and for our families, too. We’d all suffered the aftereffects of that night. The pain didn’t just belong to me.

I spoke without thinking. “I met his sister the other day.”

“Alex’s sister? I didn’t know you knew her.”

“I didn’t even know he had a sister until recently,” I said. “I didn’t know anything about him.”

“I only knew because Lauren’s mum told me,” said my mum. “She came round to see me after you and Lauren had moved away.” She grimaced. “I think she wanted to gossip about it. I had to avoid her for a while.”

I knew how she felt. After I’d reported the rape, a few girls from school wanted to talk to me, and I’d felt there was something almost indecent about their interest. After a while I wouldn’t answer the door to them and would get my brother to say I was out when they phoned.

“Their mother died last year,” I said.

My mum was quiet, and then said, “She must have been young. What was the matter with her?”

“She had cancer.”

“Oh, the poor woman. That on top of everything else.”

I wanted to tell her what Rachel had told me, about their mother’s dependency on her, the fact that she’d wanted to die. I couldn’t. Though I wasn’t to blame, I was involved. I would have given anything for that not to be the case. My mum, though, didn’t need to be. She didn’t deserve to hear those things.

“How did you meet her?”

Just then my dad came back and spared me from having to answer that. We chatted then about the quiz and the team that had won, and we didn’t go back to talking about Rachel and her family, though my mum kept looking at me all evening, and I knew the question was preying on her mind.





FIFTY-SIX


    GEMMA


Wednesday, August 16

THE NEXT MORNING I waited until the office was open, then sent Rachel an e-mail through the work system. It was the only safe way to communicate as there was no way David could intercept the messages.

Everything OK last night?

She must have been on her own at her desk, because she replied quite quickly:

I think so. I’m not sure. Who can tell, though?

I winced. Surely she should be able to go to sleep without worrying about someone taking explicit photos of her. And then I thought of myself, in my hotel room in London, and became fired up. I started to type an e-mail, saying:

I’m going to talk to the police when I come back to Chester. You can come with me if you want to but I’m going anyway.

Before I clicked Send, I stopped. David was her husband. Was she really going to wait for the police to come round? Surely she would tell him—or he would guess. That would be worse. Much worse. I shuddered. What would he do if he discovered she knew that and hadn’t told him?

I deleted my message. Instead, I wrote: You shouldn’t have to live like that, and she replied, I know.

There the conversation ended. I went out with my mum and dad to take Rory on the ferry over to Liverpool and spent the day at the museums. Later we went for afternoon tea at a hotel, before going back to our car on the underground train. That was the thing that impressed Rory the most; he hadn’t been on an underground train before and was beside himself. The fact that he was carrying a box of cakes from the hotel only added to his happiness.

Later in the afternoon, back at my parents’ home, we borrowed the paddling pool from the next-door neighbor and she kindly sent her little girl, Evie, in to play, too. I don’t know what it is about water and Rory, but if you want to keep him amused, just give him some water and he’ll be happy for hours. So I sat outside to make sure the children were safe while my mum and dad napped on their garden chairs. Clearly the day had taken it out of them.

I pulled out my iPad and went back to look at the photos that Jack had had on Facebook, the photos of us throughout the two years we’d all spent together. I’d meant to tell Rachel to send Jack a friend request so that she could look at them, but I wasn’t sure whether they would upset her too much. From the comments under the photos it was clear Jack had only recently put them up, and name after name of all the friends I’d had in school popped up to make fun of us all. I wondered whether any of them remembered how that summer term had ended, though they would have known at the time, of course.