The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

the police officers as they approached them again. He looked at Jesse, who winked at him, and at Bridget’s pale, worried face.

‘Just this once … for me,’ she whispered pleadingly.

And so Tom did as she asked.

Twenty-Eight Jill

October 2019

Saturday morning, I heard Robert leave the house and reverse the car off the drive. He tended to go into the college for two or three hours most Saturday mornings. Most of his clients were students and they often preferred a weekend counselling appointment, provided they hadn’t been out partying the night before.

I knew how they felt. I drank far too much last night. I haven’t got a clue how many glasses of fizz I knocked back but I remembered Bridget constantly topping up my glass.

I inched out of bed, visited the bathroom and then slunk downstairs for a badly needed cup of tea.

I hadn’t got so drunk I couldn’t remember crawling into bed and Robert snatching his folded pyjamas from the pillow and then stomping off to the spare bedroom, muttering to himself. I remembered most of what had been said last night, too. Sadly, that was all too clear in my mind. It wasn’t that I regretted saying any of it, but I did feel slightly worried that Tom would be furious with me this morning.

It was too late for regrets. I’d had far too much to drink and it had loosened my tongue, releasing too many home truths.

I finished my tea then sat down at the kitchen table with a notepad, pen and my laptop. I tried to clear my mind of any preconceptions I had about Bridget. Not an easy task, but my aim was to regard her like a stranger might do, to assess her without fury and resentment marring my judgement.

A librarian’s work is methodical and precise by nature. It had been so long since I’d called on those skills but I felt the reliable structure of a calm and thorough process returning to me.

Bridget’s achievements were impressive. From very humble beginnings – a dysfunctional home life including time in foster care when her father left her alcoholic mother – she had struggled for many years while Jesse was growing up. I knew all this, of course, had been a witness to it, but looking at it dispassionately helped.

Over the next hour or so, I catalogued the articles that had been written about her and her son after Tom’s trial and conviction. From the point, in fact, when Bridget had appeared to be courting attention from the press.

Jesse’s death was the watershed. The awful moment when many parents would have slid so fast downhill it would be nigh on impossible to claw their way back again. Conversely, Bridget appeared to flourish.

In less than a year after his death, she had spoken to most of the national newspapers and magazines and begun her zealous campaign for the Young Men Matter movement. She’d provided carefully selected photographs to accompany her words. Jesse looked young and fresh and handsome in all of them. No images of him looking dazed and unwashed, the way he usually did when he’d visited our house. There were also photographs of Jesse with Tom, and in all of them, Tom looked a little shifty. He had dark stubble in one, his eyes half open in another, whereas Jesse looked bright and full of life next to him. Even if you hadn’t read the article, you’d get the impression that Jesse was a shining star whose life had been cruelly snuffed out by his suspicious-looking friend.

I had to stay as detached as possible. I bookmarked the articles as I discovered them and saved the accompanying photographs to a folder on my laptop. It felt good to actually do something.

There were photographs of Bridget, as head of the charity she’d set up, with some pretty high-profile people, including one when she’d met Prince Harry on his visit to Nottingham in 2013 and gained his public approval for her work with grieving families.

Fascinated, I studied her appearance in these photographs compared to a year earlier. There was such a marked change, I wondered if she’d engaged the services of an image consultant. She’d clearly lost weight and, I suspected, had various minor cosmetic procedures: Botox, filler and possibly one of the non-surgical facelifts I’d seen in various magazines and online beauty articles.

She wore more make-up now, but it was skilfully applied, softer. Her nose looked slimmer, her cheekbones more defined, but on closer inspection, I realised she’d used shading and highlighting techniques to good effect. It was astonishing to see, remembering as I did the days not so long before when she had looked tired, hassled and without a smudge of cosmetics on her face. Even more incredible when you realised that this woman had lost her only son – had gone on record as saying that some days she didn’t want to continue living herself.

Of course, there was no crime in pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and rising like a phoenix from the ashes. I’d seen it before: a mother or father, grief-stricken and bereft, who’d found a cause, started a charity or changed a law in the name of their lost child. The grief fuelled some kind of drive for change that helped not only them, but others too. I had nothing but admiration for it. But I’d also seen pictures of those people, and they still looked haunted, like husks of their former selves.

Bridget, though, looked rejuvenated, and that was when I realised what seemed so wrong. There was a glamour about the whole thing. A sort of satisfaction, an enjoyment of the attention she’d garnered in Jesse’s name.

Yet again I tapped my phone screen and brought up their wedding photograph. The scene looked pleasant and celebratory, but that belied the awful truth of their ‘special day’. The setting was a prison! The very place that must remind her what had happened to Jesse.

I zoned out for a moment while I