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At the end of the road she crosses, then turns right, and then left, feeling her breath frost in the night air. At the junction she stops, waiting for the Walk signal. There is a limousine idling at the lights on the opposite side of the road, two cars back, blacked-out rear windows, and Hannah is just wondering whether it’s a celebrity or a hen party when the rear window opens a crack and someone peers out, wiping condensation from the glass. And Hannah’s heart almost stops.
The woman inside—the woman inside… it’s April.
For a moment Hannah just stands, frozen, staring, and then she realizes that the lights have changed and the green man is blinking in her face, telling her it’s her last chance to cross.
April. April. It can’t be. But it is—surely it is?
“April!” she calls, but the woman has wound the window back up. Her heart racing, Hannah almost runs across the pedestrian crossing. She reaches the pavement and instead of turning right, to Hugh’s practice, she turns left, hurrying up the line of cars to where the limousine is waiting. But before she reaches it, before she can knock on the glass, demand to speak to the occupant in the back seat, there is a revving of engines and the line begins to move.
Damn. Damn.
“April!” she calls helplessly as the limousine shifts into second gear and picks up speed, but it’s too late. The car is gone. As it disappears around the corner, though, she knows. It wasn’t April. It never is. For this is not the first time this has happened—not the first time she’s seen a cropped blond head through a crowd and hurried towards it, her heart pounding, to find a teenage boy or a forty-something woman looking at her in surprise.
It is never April, she reflects as she turns slowly on her heel and retraces her steps back to the junction, back in the direction of Hugh’s practice. It never will be. But she will never stop looking.
* * *
IT’S EXACTLY SIX AS SHE rounds the corner and finds herself in front of Hugh’s practice—a discreetly shiny black front door that could be just a residential address, were it not for the small brass sign that says THE PRACTICE, and underneath it the names of Hugh and his two partners in engraved Garamond font.
She pushes the bell and when a receptionist answers says, into the grille, “Hannah de Chastaigne, here to see Hugh Bland.”
“I’m afraid he’s finished for the day.” The woman’s voice crackles back through the intercom. “Did you have an appointment?”
“Oh, I’m not here for a consultation. This is personal. He’s expecting me.”
“Just one moment,” the voice says, and then the line goes dead. Hannah stands there, waiting, for a surprisingly long time. Just as she is wondering if she should try the front door, or ring again, there is the noise of feet on the stairs inside and the gleaming black door swings open.
It’s Hugh, tall and immaculate in a long camel-hair trench coat, tweed waistcoat, and perfectly tailored herringbone suit. He is smiling, and when he sees Hannah he opens his arms.
“Hannah!”
They hug. Hannah inhales Hugh’s expensive cologne and feels the umbrella he’s holding digging into her back. Her bump presses between them in a slightly disconcerting way. She is still getting used to the baby asserting itself in these situations. She can’t imagine how it’s going to be when she’s eight months. Then Hugh releases her, and they step back, surveying each other in the golden glow filtering through the fan light above the door.
“Well,” Hugh says at last, “no need to ask how you are, I can see you’re blooming.”
Hannah blushes at that, although she can’t put her finger on why exactly.
“Thank you. You look very well yourself.”
“I can’t complain,” Hugh says. He hooks his umbrella over his arm and tosses his fringe out of his eyes. “Where shall we go? I know a nice little bar around the corner, the Jolie Beaujolais. It’ll probably be a bit noisy at this time, but the owner knows me, so he’ll be able to get you a seat.”
“I can still stand for an hour, Hugh,” she says, half-offended, half-touched by his solicitude. “I’m pregnant, not ill.”
“I know you, Hannah Jones,” Hugh says, waving a finger. “You’ll have been standing all day in that bookshop; the least I can do is get you a chair now.”
“Well, thank you,” she says, smiling. “And honestly, the Jolie whatever it was sounds great, I really don’t mind where we go.”
Hugh links his arm with hers and they walk companionably down the street, Hugh matching his stride to hers. Glancing sideways at him, Hannah can’t help but smile. He looks like such a caricature of the English civil servant, straight out of Central Casting for a John le Carré film with his camel-hair coat, suit, hooked umbrella, and horn-rimmed glasses. He’s even wearing his old school tie with the Carne crest. Only a bowler hat could finish the ensemble. But Hugh has always been good at playing a part—in a different way from April, of course, but even at Oxford, he always had the air of someone who was playing at being the quintessential student he had seen in films like Brideshead Revisited or Chariots of Fire.
“How’s work?” she asks, as they round the corner. It is beginning to drizzle, and Hugh opens up the umbrella and holds it above them both with his free hand.
“Good,” he says, smiling down at her. “Profitable. No one’s suing me this year.”
Hannah laughs. Last year a disgruntled client sued Hugh’s practice over her new nose not being sufficiently different from her old one, but she lost, after Hugh was able to produce a recording of their preop discussion where she requested that any changes be “very, very subtle… almost indistinguishable from my current nose.” Apparently she got what she asked for.
“How was Ryan?” he asks in return, and Hannah bites her lip. She should have known this was coming. In some ways she had been hoping for it—it’s the natural way to segue into the subject she really wants to discuss, but this feels too soon. She had imagined bringing up April when Hugh had a drink in his hand.
“He was… good,” she says, after a pause. “Surprisingly good. I hadn’t seen him for a while, I felt really bad when I realized how much time had passed. He said you’d kept in touch?”
