AARON
I can feel her quaking as I hold her.
“This is it,” I say, wishing it wasn’t. When she lets go I have to fight the urge to pull her back and tell her that she doesn’t need to do this. She doesn’t need Jay.
But needing and wanting are different things. She can pretend that this is about ending the lies, but it isn’t only that, it is because, even after everything he’s done, Hannah still wants Jay.
HANNAH
Mum’s gone into the sitting room to join the others so when we walk in it’s to face all four of them.
“Aaron!” Mum sounds as surprised as she looks. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“Happy birthday, Robert,” Aaron says and hands him a card and a bottle of whisky — good stuff that I reckon he’s nicked from his dad. We both know Robert’s going to need that later.
“Er… thank you.” Robert looks baffled.
All this time I’ve been avoiding looking at Jay, but I can’t hold it off any longer. His lips are pressed so tight together they’ve turned white and with his short hair and stubble he looks dangerous. And he’s looking at me.
AARON
Paula looked at the clock when I walked in and when she turns back to me I can tell that she thinks I’m intruding.
“I didn’t know you were coming over, Aaron. We’re about to go out for dinner…”
“Aaron can come too!” Lola bounces over to hug me, knocking into a vase of flowers, spilling water all over her dress and the carpet. I bend over and right the vase as Hannah’s mum fusses over Lola, telling her to go and get changed whilst she cleans this mess up.
Lola bounds upstairs saying she’ll choose something Daddy would like and I feel Hannah tense as her mum comes back in with a tea towel.
“Honestly, I don’t know what’s got into that child today. She’s been mad with excitement about you coming, Jay—”
HANNAH
“Jay’s the father.”
Oh God, there must have been a better way to do it than that. Mum’s looking at me as if she has no idea what I just said and Jay’s looking at me with nothing but fury in his eyes. I daren’t look at Robert. I daren’t.
I open my fingers and Aaron’s hand is there almost before I knew I was reaching for it. Is he trembling too, or is that just me? It’s me. I’m terrified.
“Hannah?” Mum. Her eyes are pleading when I meet her gaze, as if she’s asking me to take back the words, swallow them as if they never existed.
“Jay’s the father of my baby,” I say again, quieter this time.
“Aaron?”
I just shake my head and feel his thumb brush the side of my hand. We agreed he should stay quiet, he’s here to give me the strength to do this myself.
“Jason?” Robert’s voice. I look up and he’s looking at Jay, who is still looking at me and not at his father. When Jay says nothing, Robert repeats his name. “Jason, what’s going on?”
I look at Jay. Don’t just leave this to me, Jay. Please don’t. Say something, say anything.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
“What?” I hear Aaron’s voice chiming in with mine.
“Hannah’s lying.”
When I said “say anything” I didn’t mean that. The horror of what I’m hearing has sealed my throat and frozen my face. He’s saying I’m a liar? He’s telling them I’m making this up? How can he do this?
I step forward straight onto a soggy patch of carpet.
“Sit down, Hannah,” Mum says, then calls up the stairs to Lola to tell her to practise her birthday dance for Daddy before she comes down. I sit on the second sofa, Aaron next to me, Mum and Robert on the other one and Jay on my favourite armchair. He and I used to fight over it, sitting on one another, trying to crush the other into submission, until we’d give up and squash into it together. Bet I’d win if I sat on him now.
“Why are you saying this, Hannah?” Mum says. I don’t know whether that means she believes me or that she doesn’t.
“Because it’s true. Jay and I… we… and…” I look at her and hope she understands what I’m saying.
“You two slept together.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
I stare at him, but his eyes are narrow and sharp and ready to cut through my soul.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper, the words catching on my tears as they come out.
“Why are you?” Jay says, but there’s no sadness in his voice that I can hear. Just anger.
I have no answer to this and I look at him, tears flowing down my face. Does he know how much he’s hurting me? Can’t he see?
“It’s Dad’s birthday and you’re saying all this. Why, Hannah? Why would you do that to Dad?” Jay’s warming up now and I can hear he thinks this is going to work.
“Jason—” Robert puts a hand on his arm, warning him to stop, then turns to me. “If this is a joke, it’s not very funny.”
Even though I’m dreading it, I manage to meet his eyes. They’re hard and bright, like Jay’s, but they’re not unkind, just lost, disappointed in me for making up such lies about his beloved son.
“It’s not a joke,” Aaron says. Robert and Mum look over at him as if they’d forgotten he could talk. “Hannah slept with Jay and now she’s about to have his baby.”
Jason looks at Aaron with loathing. “You’re not going to listen to him — he’s just trying to worm his way out of it, isn’t he?”
Mum and Robert glance at each other. They might have a hard time thinking Jay’s the father, but they’d have a harder time believing this is Aaron’s idea.
“The due date is the eleventh of June. I” — Aaron glances at me apologetically — “got to know Hannah properly in October.”
“These things aren’t accurate…” Mum says, but she goes out to the kitchen and fetches the calendar, flicking back through the months. I watch when she flips from October to September, but Robert’s not looking at her, he’s looking at me.
“When?”
“Jay’s leaving party,” I say quietly, wanting not to meet his eyes, but knowing I’ve got to.
“She’s lying! Hannah’s slept with loads of boys.” Jay’s almost shouting.
“That’s not true,” I whisper.
AARON
No one else hears Hannah say that it isn’t true. But then she says something that we all hear:
“You were the first.”
And I feel her gripping my hand so tight that my fingers turn cold, but I’m squeezing back, telling her that I’m here for her.
Jay was her first?
I never realized.
HANNAH
All I can feel is Aaron’s hand in mine as I look at Jay struggle to understand what I’ve said. He didn’t know. How could he, when the girl in his bed was pretending, the way she’d been pretending all summer — to her friends in the park, the boys she pulled? The way she’d pretended to her best friend.
“It’s not true!” Jay’s voice is loud with indignation and I want to slam my hands to my ears and shut out the noise. “Tell them about the others.”
No one says anything. We’re all looking at Jay, who’s looking at me and at Robert and Aaron, across at Mum. Beside me, Aaron says quietly, “‘Others’, Jay?”
Robert looks at Aaron and then at Jay, his face pale as Mum walks back over to me, the calendar open on September, finger resting on the nineteenth, the night of Jay’s party, eyes wide with a question she doesn’t want to ask.