“It hasn’t been just Josh,” she said, as she put her purse back in her handbag. “It wouldn’t be fair to make you think that. It’s been me, too.”
Michael stepped aside to let a woman with a pram pass. Samantha watched her push it on down the pavement, a child’s arm hanging from its seat. Out in the light Michael saw how Lucy’s death had etched lines about Samantha’s eyes, her mouth. She turned to him. “I haven’t…” she began, her eyes welling again. “I haven’t been able to forgive him, Michael.” She took hold of his arm. “For what happened. I mean, he was there.” As she said this she squeezed his arm, her fingers pressing into his flesh. “He was there,” she said again, breaking down.
Michael held her as she cried, feeling the stabbing breaths of her sobs, just as he’d felt the spasms of Josh’s back on the Heath. Over her shoulder he watched the child’s arm hanging limp from the pram as its mother pushed it up the street. In reply he saw a flash, as he did all the time, of Lucy’s arm, hanging off the edge of the stair, her other twisted behind her. No, he wanted to say to Samantha as he held her. No, Josh wasn’t there. But I was. This is my fault, everything — your grief, Josh’s leaving, Rachel’s hurt. I watched her fall. I heard her die. Because I was there, in your house. I was there.
But what good would it do? How would his confession help this woman sobbing in his arms? It wouldn’t. It would be for his sake, not for hers. This is what Michael told himself as he gently pulled back from Samantha and, gathering herself, she, too, pulled away from him.
“God,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “I must look a state. I’m sorry.” She took a breath. The storm had been sudden but had passed. “I want to forgive him,” she said, frowning. “I really do.”
“You will,” Michael said. “In time.”
“You think so?” Her eyes held a child’s look of hopefulness, the willingness to be told an adult’s untruth, a lie even, if it would just make it all better.
“Yes,” Michael heard himself say. “Of course you will. It was an accident, Samantha. A terrible accident. No one wanted it to happen, and everyone wishes it hadn’t. But you can’t blame Josh.” Again, he wanted desperately to say more, to tell her. But he had to protect her. “Josh wasn’t able to stop it happening,” he continued. “But he didn’t make it happen, either.”
“I know,” she said. “I just keep thinking of everything we could have done. Everything we should have done.”
“Don’t,” Michael said, holding her by both her shoulders. He bent his head to catch her eye. “You’ve got to look forward now. Think of Rachel, like you said. And yourself. And help Josh, if you can.”
Samantha nodded. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know.” She looked up at him. “That American pilot?” she said, weighing her words carefully. “Have you forgiven him?”
Michael wasn’t expecting the question. Of course not, he wanted to say. Why would I? Just because he broke cover and wrote to me? He thought of Daniel’s most recent letter. How willing he’d been to answer his questions. How he seemed to see himself as another victim of Caroline’s death, not the perpetrator of it. But Michael had to be careful. Samantha was looking to him for a way forward. And yet he couldn’t lie. Not about this. “It’s very different,” he said eventually. “He aimed at Caroline. He had intent to harm. If not her, then someone. So I’m not sure if I have, yet. But,” he went on, seeing disappointment bleed into her expression, “I suppose I’ve come to understand. A bit. That he didn’t mean to kill Caroline personally. That in that way, at least, it was an accident.”
Samantha nodded again. She had no idea that Daniel and his missile had killed her daughter, too. “Thank you, Michael,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers. “Thank you. You’re a good man.”
He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He was sick with himself. He’d secured those false minutes again. For Josh this time, as much as for himself. Perhaps, he thought, this was also to be the breed of his atonement. His contribution to Josh’s healing. A making of his lie into a truth, a blending of their shared lies into one.
Samantha looked at her watch. “I should go,” she said. She extended the handle of her case. “I’ll give you a ring when we’re back,” she said, flashing him another smile, warmer than before. “Bye, Michael,” she said, walking away. “And thanks again.”
“Bye,” he said as she went, raising a hand to wave her off. Samantha waved back, calling over the heads of the crowded pavement between them. “I’ll bring Rachel round,” she said, standing on tiptoe. “I’m sure she’d like to see you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ON THE MORNING of September 16, 2008, news channels across the world showed footage of Lehman Brothers employees leaving their offices in Canary Wharf, carrying boxes of files and belongings. The crisis had been building for weeks, and Josh had known they wouldn’t escape it. His team, and the whole London office, had always remained profitable. But he knew the country of finance wouldn’t be sensitive to such details, or to any concepts of national borders. The bonds bets in the U.S. had failed. Construction work across thousands of hectares of developments on the fringes of Las Vegas and Miami had come to a halt. A few days later Josh had stood on the trading floor along with hundreds of other Lehman’s employees, all of them going silent as they’d watched their stock plummet. From then on the building in Canary Wharf had been coursing with the chatter of exit: heads of teams leaving rooms to make phone calls, younger traders calculating with whom they should align.
When the end came, it came swiftly. Within a week of a meeting with the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York, the bank no longer existed. Josh heard the news on the radio as he was making himself breakfast. He’d expected it to be bad, but not this bad. He hadn’t thought the bank would die altogether. By the time he got in to the office he’d found his colleagues were already vacating the building, walking to cabs or the underground station carrying Iron Mountain data boxes, bin liners, shopping bags, desk plants.
From his office on the thirtieth floor, Josh watched as a crescent of camera crews covered his colleagues’ departures, tracking them like flowers following the sun. If he was going to find another position, he knew he should already be making phone calls, setting up lunches. It wouldn’t be difficult. He was good at what he did, and people knew he was good. It was the bank that had failed, not him. But instead he remained by the window, the phone on his desk unplugged and his mobile turned off.
Eventually Josh turned from the scene below. Checking his drawers one last time, he picked up his briefcase and left his office, asking his secretary, who was clearing her own desk, to courier the box of his personal items to his new flat in Hampstead. Taking a service elevator, he descended through the floors, which just a few days ago had hummed with activity, and left by a side entrance of the building. He didn’t want to give the cameras, or anyone else, the satisfaction. But more important, beyond any professional pride, Josh didn’t want Rachel to turn on the TV and see her father losing his job in the same way she’d already seen him lose her sister, his wife, and his home.
Stepping out into the light, Josh walked west, along Middle Dock. The sun was catching the higher windows of the towers and flexing in brilliant flashes on the water beside him. He thought of the view from Parliament Hill, how from up there these towers, the facets of their pinnacles, sparked from the city like small explosions. Maybe he would go there today. He hadn’t been on the Heath in months. But perhaps today he would. Suddenly he had the time, the space. He loosened his tie as he walked, then took it off altogether. Yes, he’d like to feel the wind up there again. To see it shuffle the trees like a card dealer, to hear it bring the oceans to the branches of an oak.