The Lies We Told(83)

And that’s when she told me. ‘I pushed her, Beth,’ she whispered. ‘I pushed her.’

I stared at her in shock.

‘I arranged to meet her, I wanted to explain to her that she needed to stop, that she’d never have Oliver, that he was my husband and she had to stop her harassment. But she was so arrogant, so awful, taunting me, goading me, telling me how Oliver had pursued her, that he … that he slept with lots of his students. It was lies, all lies! I lost my head, I don’t know what happened, I just wanted her to stop. To stop talking, stop ruining everything. I thought of my darling little daughter and our lovely life and this girl, this silly, awful girl, was laughing at me, laughing at all of us, telling me I had no idea, that I was deluded, that everyone at the university knew what my husband was really like.’

‘Rose,’ was all I could say. ‘Oh God no, Rose.’ I didn’t want to hear any more, I wanted her to stop, to block my ears from hearing it.

‘I pushed her. Oh, Beth. I pushed her. I wanted her to die, just for a moment, I wanted it. Even as she fell … for a second I was glad.’ She looked at me, her eyes full of horror. ‘Oh, Beth, what has happened … what has happened to me? What am I going to do?’

I could hear Doug and Oliver talking in the kitchen. I had only seconds to decide. ‘Shush,’ I said. ‘Shush, Rose. Stop and let me think.’ She watched me anxiously, her eyes never leaving my face. ‘Rose,’ I said at last, ‘you must never tell another soul about this. No one, not ever. Does Oliver know?’

She shook her head. ‘You’re the only person I’ve told.’

‘OK. Good.’ I could hear the others, about to come back in. ‘She jumped, Rose,’ I said. ‘OK? It wasn’t your fault.’

She nodded, her frightened eyes wide. ‘Yes.’

‘It’ll be our secret, no one ever has to find out.’

‘You’ll never tell anyone? Do you promise?’

‘I promise.’

It’s a detail I’ve always carefully omitted over the years, when I’ve told myself the story of how Hannah came into our lives. Because it casts a rather different light on things, doesn’t it? I wanted Lana for myself, you see. I knew it from the moment Rose appeared on my doorstep that night. If Doug had known the truth behind Nadia’s death, he would have gone to the police, I have no doubt about that. So when I promised Rose I would keep her secret, it was myself I was thinking of, deep down. I can’t pretend otherwise any more, no matter how hard I’ve tried to wipe it from my memory. It was so I could keep Lana for myself. Does that make me as bad as Rose? Yes, actually, I rather think it does.

And so, of course, I did keep the promise I made to Rose that night. I didn’t tell another soul. In fact, neither of us spoke of it again, not even the day Hannah overheard us talking in the kitchen. All she heard was Rose saying she’d been the last person to see Nadia alive, that everyone would think she’d killed her, and Hannah, not wanting to believe her mother would abandon her by choice, put two and two together herself. So for years I kept Rose’s secret – until, that is, the day that Emily found me.

It was seven years after the fire, seven years since Hannah told Emily that she was her sister, and what her father had done. Seven years since the day she disappeared. I don’t know how she found me here in such a remote spot – my old neighbours, I suppose, or perhaps the clinic where I worked passed on my new address. She knocked on the door one afternoon out of the blue. I remember my stomach dropped like a stone to see her standing there – I recognized her immediately from the day I’d followed Hannah to Suffolk, when she was pretending to be ‘Becky’. ‘Emily,’ I said. ‘You’re Emily Lawson, aren’t you? What are you doing here?’ It was as though a ghost had appeared on my doorstep. Deep down I had always believed that, like Doug and Toby, she was dead too, another of Hannah’s victims.

‘May I come in?’ she asked. She had Rose’s clear blue eyes, Oliver’s thick dark hair, such a very pretty girl – or woman, I should say; she was twenty-five years old by then.

She said she knew who I was, that I was the woman who’d brought Hannah up, the woman whose husband and son Hannah had murdered. She told me she was living in France now, scraping by as a waitress in a hotel.

Of course I invited her in, and we sat together in my kitchen. ‘Do your parents know where you are?’ I asked. I had seen Rose briefly after the fire, before I moved up here, so I knew how desperate she was to find her daughter still, though I hadn’t spoken to her since, not once in seven years.

Emily hesitated, and looked down at her hands. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘I haven’t spoken to them since I left.’

‘Aren’t you going to see them? Aren’t you going to tell them where you are? That you’re OK?’

She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I miss them all so much,’ she said. ‘But I felt I couldn’t go back, not after what my father did. I can’t go back and pretend it never happened, that I don’t know about Hannah, that I don’t know how he gave away his own baby. I couldn’t live with it, keeping their awful secret for them, letting my brothers grow up not knowing they had a half-sister somewhere.’

I nodded. ‘But why are you here, Emily? Why have you come to see me after all this time?’