‘I was going to ask you why Daddy was crying,’ said Esther, ‘but then I forgot. I had a lot on my mind.’

‘I really don’t think he was crying. He was probably just . . . sneezing, or something,’ said Cecilia. The idea of John-Paul crying in the shower was so foreign, so weird. Why would he be crying, except over something truly terrible? He was not a crier. When the girls were born his eyes had got a shiny quality to them, and when his father had died unexpectedly he’d put down the phone and made a strange fragile noise, as if he was choking on something small and fluffy. But apart from that she’d never seen him cry.

‘He wasn’t sneezing,’ said Esther.

‘Maybe he had one of his migraines,’ said Cecilia, although she knew that whenever John-Paul was afflicted by one of his debilitating migraines the last thing he would do was have a shower. He needed to be alone, in bed, in a dark, quiet room.

‘Uh, Mum, Daddy never has a shower when he has a migraine,’ said Esther, who knew her father just as well as Cecilia knew her husband.

Depression? It seemed to be going around at the moment. At a recent dinner party half the guests revealed they were on Prozac. After all, John-Paul had always gone through . . . patches. They often followed the migraines. There would be a week or so when it was as though he was just going through the motions. He’d say and do all the right things, but there’d be something vacant in his eyes, as if the real John-Paul had checked out for a while and sent this very authentic-looking replica to take his place. ‘You okay?’ Cecilia would ask, and he’d always take a few moments to focus on her, before saying, ‘Sure. I’m fine.’

But it was always temporary. Suddenly he’d be back, fully present, listening to her and the girls with all his attention, and Cecilia would convince herself that she’d imagined the whole thing. The ‘patches’ were probably just a lingering effect of the migraines.

But crying in the shower. What did he have to cry about? Things were good at the moment.

John-Paul had once tried to commit suicide.

The fact floated slowly, repellently, to the surface of her mind. It was something she tried not to think about too often.

It had happened when he was in his first year of university, before Cecilia had begun dating him. Apparently he’d ‘gone off the rails’ for a while and then one night he’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. His flatmate, who was meant to be visiting his parents for the weekend, had come home unexpectedly and found him. ‘What was going through your mind?’ Cecilia had asked him when she heard the story for the first time. ‘Everything felt too hard,’ John-Paul had said. ‘Going to sleep forever just seemed like an easier option.’

Over the years Cecilia had often prodded him for more information about this time in his life. ‘But why did it seem so hard? What exactly was so hard?’ But John-Paul didn’t seem capable of clarifying further. ‘I guess I was just your typical anguished teenager,’ he’d say. Cecilia didn’t get it. She was never anguished as a teenager. Eventually she had to give up and accept John-Paul’s suicide attempt as an out-of-character incident in his past. ‘I just needed a good woman,’ John-Paul told her. It was true there had never been a serious girlfriend until Cecilia came along. ‘I was honestly starting to think he might be gay,’ one of his brothers had confided in her once.

There was the gay thing again.

But his brother had been joking.

An unexplained suicide attempt in his teenage years, and now, all these years later, he was crying in the shower.

‘Sometimes grown-ups have big things on their mind,’ said Cecilia carefully to Esther. Obviously her first responsibility was to make sure that Esther wasn’t concerned. ‘So I’m sure Daddy was just –’

‘Hey, Mum, can I please get this book on Amazon about the Berlin Wall for Christmas?’ asked Esther. ‘Do you want me to order it now? All the reviews are five stars!’

‘No,’ said Cecilia. ‘You can borrow it from the library.’

God willing, they’d have escaped from Berlin by Christmas.

She turned into the parking lot underneath the speech therapist’s office, wound down the window and pressed the button on the intercom.

‘Can I help you?’

‘We’re here to see Caroline Otto,’ she said. Even when she talked to the receptionist she rounded her vowels.

As she parked the car, she considered each new fact.

John-Paul giving Isabel strange, ‘sad, angry’ looks.

John-Paul crying in the shower.

John-Paul losing interest in sex.

John-Paul lying about something.

It was all so strange and worrying, but there was something beneath it all that was not actually unpleasant, that was in fact giving her a mild sense of anticipation.

She turned off the ignition, pulled on the handbrake and undid her seatbelt.

‘Let’s go,’ she said to Esther, and opened the car door. She knew what was giving her that little blip of pleasure. It was because she’d made a decision. Something was clearly not right. She had a moral obligation to do something immoral. It was the lesser of two evils. She was justified.

As soon as the girls were in bed tonight, she would do what she’d wanted to do from the very beginning. She was going to open that goddamned letter.

chapter nine

There was a knock at the door.

‘Ignore it.’ Tess’s mother didn’t look up from her book.

Tess, Liam and her mother were sitting in separate armchairs in her mother’s front room, reading their books with small bowls full of chocolate raisins resting on their laps. It had been one of Tess’s daily routines as a child: eating chocolate raisins and reading with her mother. They always did star jumps afterward to counteract the chocolate.

‘It might be Dad.’ Liam put his book down. Tess was surprised at how readily he’d agreed to sit and read. It must have been the chocolate raisins. She could never get him to do his reading for school.

And now, bizarrely, he was starting at a new school. Just like that. Tomorrow. It was disconcerting the way that peculiar woman had convinced him to start the very next day, with the promise of an Easter egg hunt.

‘You spoke to your dad in Melbourne just a few hours ago,’ she reminded Liam, keeping her voice neutral. He and Will had talked for twenty minutes. ‘I’ll talk to Daddy later,’ Tess had said when Liam had held out the phone. She’d already spoken to Will once that morning. Nothing had changed. She didn’t want to hear his awful serious new voice again. And what could she say? Mention that she’d run into an ex-boyfriend at St Angela’s? Ask if he was jealous?

Connor Whitby. It must have been over fifteen years since she’d seen him. They’d gone out for less than a year. She hadn’t even recognised him when he’d walked into the office. He’d lost all his hair and seemed a much bigger, broader version of the man she remembered. The whole thing had been so awkward. Bad enough that she was sitting across the desk from a woman whose daughter had been murdered.

‘Maybe Daddy got on a plane to surprise us,’ said Liam.

There was a rap on the window right near Tess’s head. ‘I know you’re all in there!’ said a voice.

‘For God’s sake.’ Tess’s mother closed her book with a snap.

Tess turned and saw her aunt’s face pressed flat against the window, her hands cupped around her eyes so she could peer inside.

‘Mary, I told you not to come over!’ Lucy’s voice rocketed up several octaves. She always sounded forty years younger when she spoke to her twin sister.

‘Open the door!’ Auntie Mary rapped again on the glass. ‘I need to talk to Tess!’

‘Tess doesn’t want to talk to you!’ Lucy lifted her crutch and jabbed it in the air in Mary’s direction.