“Don’t let go,” he says softly, a whisper of fear. “I don’t want to…die on my own.”
“Felipe,” I whimper. “I won’t let go.”
Felipe closes his eyes and takes a final breath.
105
Susan
Friday
It’s just after 3 a.m. when Jon finds me in the hospital, in the room they’ve given Bella and me. She’s being kept overnight for observation, though she’s been given the all-clear. Despite everything Venetia did, Bella has escaped with just one cut from the knife in my kitchen and a small amount of bruising from the car crash. The guards think she was inside a bag of laundry. It’s hard to process this—Venetia shoving her into a bag of soiled clothing, but knowing too that this was what protected her.
The gardaí have finished questioning Jon, for now, about where he was the morning Savannah died, partly because he’s been able to show them a text he got from Savannah after he arrived in work that morning, with his assistant and colleagues vouching for his presence. We do not talk about the elephant in the room, the question of why he was at Savannah’s house at all that morning, why he has a text from her. We both know we have to talk about his affair, but Bella’s hospital bedside is not the place for that. Greta will be able to vouch for him too, he says, once she’s well enough for questions, because she called by his office that same morning, saw him there.
Greta. I close my eyes and give silent thanks yet again that she’s alive. That I didn’t kill her. That the ambulance arrived in time.
It wasn’t just the ambulance that saved her, it was Greta herself. An extraordinarily kind doctor came to find me in Pediatrics to reassure me that Greta was going to be OK, mostly because she’d taken a handful of naltrexone just before I injected her. I remember it now: the bag on her lap, the look in her eye as she tried to tell me something, the cough into her hand. Not a cough, a swallow. She took more naltrexone later, helped by Juliette, while they waited for the ambulance.
This left me baffled. How could her Long Covid medicine help with a heroin overdose? Because that’s what it does, Dr. Fitzgerald explained. Reduces the impact of alcohol and opiates. The tablets Greta took protected her somewhat when I injected her, and the extra she took with Juliette saved her.
I tell Jon about Maeve being knocked down, that Leesa is with her, that she’ll be OK, that Samir is flying home. Then I stop. The effort of speaking is too much. I don’t know what I’m feeling. Mostly, I’m numb. Or in shock? Bella is safe. Greta is alive. Maeve is recovering. Felipe is dead.Felipe. Tears flow again. Jon and I don’t speak. He grips my hand and we sit and watch our daughter.
106
Celeste
Friday
It’s four in the morning when Celeste, Warren and Nika get back from the garda station. It’s no longer Thursday night—Friday is dawning, the sky pinkening in the east as they step inside the house.
Quiet, withdrawn, defeated, Nika goes straight to her room. Celeste does not go after her.
Cody, to her surprise, is in the living room, curled on the couch, watching YouTube on the TV. He turns it off when they come into the room, and in a whisper, asks about Nika, what will happen.
“She’s been charged with a Section 3 assault,” Warren says, his voice breaking, and Celeste feels herself crumble all over again. Her daughter, her own flesh and blood, the child she created and raised, appears to have deliberately knocked down another child. Celeste sits beside Cody. She is broken. Warren sits on an armchair opposite, glazed with exhaustion.
“Will she be OK?” Cody asks in a small voice. “Will she go to prison?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been told the courts will do whatever they can to keep a young person out of jail, but it’s pretty serious…”Christ.Nika probablyshouldgo to prison. But no matter what she’s done, Celestedoesn’t actually want that for her. She hates Nika right now, but she loves her too. She wants to slap her, to shake her. But she wants to hug her too. She’s seventeen, but she’s a child. How much of who she’s turned out to be is down to Nika? And how much is her parents’ fault?
“I don’t want her to go to prison,” Cody whispers. He lays his head on his mother’s shoulder. She takes his hand. “Me neither.” She rubs his red-raw knuckles. “Cody, what really happened?”
“I told you, I punched a wall.”
“Why?”
“Because…I don’t know.”
“Please, Cody. I’m worried about you. Why did you punch a wall?”
“Because…I…because I’m dumb. I’m bad at everything. I’m always in trouble. No matter what I do, I don’t get things right. This was something Icoulddo…and I guess it made me feel better. For a minute, anyway.”
“Oh, Cody.”Oh, Celeste. All those red flags for self-harm, and she’d been looking in the wrong direction. She’d even read about it—read that boys hurt themselves differently to girls—punching walls, taking drugs. Busy reading, but not seeing.
“And the knife?”
He pushes his head closer into her, nestling like the baby he once was.
