‘Yes,’ she said shortly, her decisiveness surprising her. ‘I rather think I would. It’s not good for one, being cooped up all the time. Nicholas has offered, too,’ she added quickly. She didn’t want Pip to think she had been abandoned by the only bit of family she had left. ‘But he’s always in such a rush. And he doesn’t have that much conversation for an old woman like me.’

Pip smiled as if she understood completely. Yes, Evelyn thought to herself, this had the makings of quite an interesting relationship.

‘So, Pip,’ she said. ‘You haven’t told me why you’re back in Southwold.’

She smiled warmly as she spoke. She had had her turn, opened up and shared a little of her life, and now she could sit back and relax whilst someone else took the spotlight.

Pip turned her head and looked directly at Evelyn, dark eyes seeking out pale ones. She drew in a breath before she spoke and it caught a little in her throat.

‘I killed a child,’ she said simply.

38

38

Pip felt the atmosphere in the room darken. She could have kicked herself. Why had she said that? They had been having such a lovely time, the two of them, and now she had spoiled it all.

She hadn’t even intended to tell Evelyn, not yet at least, and certainly not by blurting it out so baldly. The truth of what she had done wasn’t something she had ever had to voice aloud before. Everyone in her world already knew, and they had been trying to help her by steering clear of the subject. But somehow, despite all her years of training at the bar, all those sentences spoken in court, constructed so very carefully in order to achieve the precise result she needed, when she was asked a direct question, she had replied in the most direct terms possible.

Part of her wanted to pull the words back now, to snatch them from the air between her and Evelyn and bury them deep where neither of them would ever hear them again. What she had done needed to be tempered with softer language, built up to, crept up upon like a sleeping dragon, and not faced head on with all its fiery breath and jagged teeth on display.

Yet the words had been spoken and now it was too late. There was nothing she could do to change that. She resisted the urge to look away and hide her face, and instead kept her eyes trained on Evelyn, waiting for a reaction. It was bound to be bad. Evelyn herself had lost her daughter. She knew exactly what that felt like, how unbearable the pain that accompanied the death of a child was. She had been living it for thirty-five years, making Pip’s last few horrible months a mere drop in the ocean of her tears.