‘But it isn’t good?’

Jason’s eyes slide to the side. ‘I mean – look,’ he says, his gaze turning directly towards me and locking on to mine. For a moment, my heart seems to spasm and I think he’s going to tell me that none of this is good, that everything is over, that we’re done for. ‘Joe has disagreed with your version of events.’

I close my eyes. It’s funny how, even in estrangement, I still feel close to Joe. We might no longer live in those beautiful, tiny cottages with their mullioned windows and stone floors, work at the vets’ together, hang out every night. I might be here, in a lawyer’s office, and he in his own, and yet … I feel I could reach out to touch him, my brother Joe.

‘How bad?’ I say. The statements were taken separately, as they have to be. Maybe, maybe, maybe there are just small inconsistencies. Maybe our recollections are only slightly different. Maybe it’s nothing.

But, like everything that followed Verona, the best-case scenario just simply doesn’t materialize. It is a run of bad luck, like throwing a one on a dice a hundred times in a row.

‘It’s very different,’ Jason says plainly. He reaches for the file marked ‘R. v. Plant – File 1’, and, as it sleets outside in random flurries, he starts to explain it to me, and we get to work. With fixing it. With fixing the mess we all made. I stare as the sleet becomes rain as it hits the dirty glass in Jason’s office. Of course we are done for, I think. It was foolish to have hope.

I blink as I look back up at Jason, underlining a section of Joe’s statement. The crime is done, and now to the punishment.

36.

Then

Cathy

Cathy gets out of her car, her feet submerging immediately into the puddles that surround it, and walks up to Frannie’s front door instead of her own. She barely saw her today, at work, and she has decided to speak to her after she saw her wandering the country lanes with Joe. They need to clear the air, and Frannie is an easier person to do that with than Joe.

Cathy has exchanged numbers with Tom but hasn’t yet heard from him. As they parted, he’d touched her shoulder, and Cathy’s body moved towards his like it was no longer within her control. Other than that, though, the coffee date ended like many dates have before. A half-hearted promise, an intended plan. It will be cancelled by him, she assumes, a new plan made, cancelled again, the potential dying off like snow that falls but doesn’t settle.

Frannie answers the door with their parents, who have their coats on. Frannie is wearing a colourful headscarf and holding Paul, who’s in one of those towels with a hood. His eyes are dark brown, framed by straight, wet lashes. He smells of lavender and biscuits and milk. Paul startles at her, surprised to see her, then hides his face for just a second, a game he often plays.