The Lies We Told by Camilla Way (epub read online books .txt) 📗

“I found this picture in the flat,” she said, passing it to her. “I thought it might be someone who . . . well, anyway, I didn’t know who it was.”

Rose visibly flinched when she saw it. “Emily,” she whispered, her face stricken.

Oliver came and stood behind her. For a moment the two of them looked down at their daughter’s face in silent anguish.

“The thing is,” Clara said, “I was contacted just after the TV appeal by someone saying they were Emily.”

Their eyes shot to her face. “What?” said Oliver faintly.

“I met with her, or someone who was pretending to be her . . . but I found this picture in Luke’s filing cabinet not knowing that this was the real Emily.”

Rose and Oliver had gone very white. “What did she look like, this woman?” Rose said, her voice little more than a whisper.

“Here,” Mac said. “I have a picture of her.” He passed them his laptop.

Rose began to shake uncontrollably. “Oh,” she said. “Oh dear God, Oliver.”

“Do you know who she is?” Tom demanded.

After a silence Oliver said, “Yes. We know who she is.”

Rose’s voice was suddenly loud. “Oliver,” she cried. “Don’t! Do you hear me? Don’t you dare!”

While the others watched, openmouthed, Oliver sank heavily into a chair. He still held the laptop in his hands. At last he sighed. “Enough, now, Rose. Enough.” He turned back to Tom. “This woman is Hannah Jennings,” he said quietly. “She’s my daughter.”

TWENTY-FOUR

THE LAKE DISTRICT, 2017

When I think of my old life, the one I left behind, it’s our village in Cambridgeshire I picture, the house we lived in for sixteen years—Doug, Hannah, Toby, and I. I sometimes wonder if our old neighbors ever think of us, if they remember the family that used to live between them in that quiet row of cottages below St. Dunstan’s Hill. But of course they do: how could they not? After all, for a while Hannah Jennings was a household name, the Jennings family front-page news. How, after so much horror, could anyone possibly forget who she was, and what she did?

—

In my late twenties, when Doug and I still lived in Suffolk, I worked as a nurse on the pediatric ward at the General, where Rose Lawson was completing her specialist training in pediatric surgery. She must have been around thirty then, but she was already highly regarded in the hospital, and it was clear that all the senior consultants thought she had a bright future ahead of her. It must take a very special sort of person to be a surgeon, I’ve always thought, all those years and years of training, all that ambition and talent and single-mindedness you must need.

On the ward she always remembered our names, would often stop to ask after our families, and chat to us about hers. She’d been married a few years, I think, to her husband, Oliver, and they had a beautiful baby girl named Emily. I remember once, one Saturday morning, bumping into them at the large Sainsbury’s in town. Doug and I were there together doing the weekly shop when I spotted them. Oliver was a tall, very good-looking man and they looked so happy, so close, laughing about something together, and I was struck by what an attractive, perfect-looking family they made. When Rose spotted us and came over, we smiled and introduced our husbands. I knew Oliver was a university professor, and I was a little in awe of him—both Doug and I were—but in fact he was nice, really. You could see he was quite sweet, a little shy even, despite all his success.

We chatted for a while. Rose told us they’d just bought a huge house not far from our own village called the Willows, “a complete wreck,” she called it, and laughed about how they were going to have to spend years doing it up, and how they were both hopeless at that sort of thing. So Doug told them he was a builder and gave them a bit of advice, offered to come out and take a look at it, which they seemed very pleased about.

On the way home I thought about them, about their gorgeous little daughter and how content they all looked. I’d stopped taking the pill not long after Doug and I were married, and the worry, the anxiety, had already firmly set in by then, because month after month, year after year, my period would turn up regular as clockwork, and I suppose, deep down, I knew by then that something was very wrong. So as we drove home, I thought about the Lawson family and closed my eyes and wished and wished with all my heart that we’d be as happy as they were one day.

—

Despite how nice she was, it was still unusual for someone like me to strike up a friendship with someone like Rose. Even though we weren’t very far apart in age, we were poles apart in terms of class and education. But in fact, six months after that meeting in Sainsbury’s, we did become friends, because of a series of events that led us to forming an unusual sort of bond. I suppose it was a case of luck, of being in the right place at the right time—or so it felt back then. Looking back, of course, I’m not sure how “lucky” our friendship really was, when you think about what went on to happen.

—

It began because I was temporarily placed on the maternity ward, due to a staff shortage. Of course, as a pediatric nurse I was well used to working among children, had learned to shut my private longing away in a little box inside myself when dealing with my young patients. But the maternity ward was a different matter. The placement coincided with a brief but unsuccessful pregnancy that had ended in miscarriage. It was the first time I’d actually managed to get