The woman behind the desk asked Rachel to take off her watch.
She had known she would have to hand things over. The knowledge hadn't prepared her for the mark beneath the strap, pale skin in the shape of something she'd worn every day for years.
She put it where the woman indicated.
Other items followed. Rachel answered questions, corrected the spelling of Venn once and listened while someone told her what would happen next. She tried to remember the order. It mattered to her to do this properly, an impulse which had survived the courtroom that morning.
Miles had met her outside the courtroom with a folder held against his chest. He asked whether she understood what was listed for the hearing. Sentencing. She had pleaded guilty to perjury. There was no new decision to make which could return her to the pavement at the beginning of all this.
“I understand,” she said.
He waited, and she made herself say what she understood. He didn't tell her that saying it would make it easier.
Inside, she had looked into the public seats. Anna was there, Leonard beside her with a gap between their shoulders. Mae had come separately. There were other people whose faces meant nothing to Rachel. One was arranging a notebook on a knee.
Tess hadn't come.
Rachel had known she wouldn't. Knowing hadn't stopped the looking.
The prosecutor set out the false identification. Hearing the times spoken aloud brought back the officer at the station: nine twenty-six, the light, a face Rachel knew. Those details had gone into a statement with the wrong name. At the trial she had sworn to it. Now someone read the passage in a voice which found nothing difficult in pronouncing Anna Bell.
Rachel gripped the edge of the seat.
The letter was described separately. Written in 2018. Retained afterwards. Examined against Martin's other writing and the surviving case material. The court was not trying a dead man. Rachel had heard that distinction from Miles during the intervening months; it didn't make what was before the court a smaller thing. She had admitted her own deliberate false sworn evidence.
Then Anna's account was read.
Rachel had expected the years. She had been preparing to hear fourteen. Instead there was a sentence about standing beside a kettle waiting for the next chance to speak to her child. The person reading paused at a page turn. Rachel could hear the paper travel against the microphone.
Anna remained in the public seats. Rachel couldn't see her hands.
Miles spoke about the guilty plea, the cooperation after the disclosure, Rachel's circumstances. He did not call her care for Tess compensation for what she had done. Before the hearing she had asked him to leave that out. She could hear how easily the request itself might become something offered in her favour.
The judge asked Rachel to stand.
She stood too quickly and had to release the seat before she could straighten. The words addressed to her were measured. A witness deliberately replacing a person she recognized with an innocent woman's name. The authority of an oath used to keep that account in place. The later admission left in a drawer while Anna remained in prison. The judge did not say that every lost visit was Rachel's act. There was enough which was.
Four years' imprisonment.
Rachel heard its length, then heard Miles repeat it when he was allowed to speak to her. She had understood the number the first time. She needed him to say what happened next.
An officer indicated the door. From the public seats came the scrape of someone's shoe. She looked once toward Anna and found Anna already looking at her. There was no satisfaction Rachel could read, no instruction about how to bear the moment. Leonard kept his eyes down. Mae held a folded tissue without using it.
Rachel went through the door.
Now, without her watch, she could still feel the courtroom's edge beneath her fingers. The hearing was over. It was not in the past in any way that let her be finished with it.
A member of staff asked her to move.
She picked up what she'd been given and followed.
The building had the noises of people living where they didn't choose to live: distant speech, metal, footsteps which stopped abruptly at a door. Rachel found herself trying to identify each sound before the next arrived.
In the room where she would spend the night, another woman was sitting on the lower bed.
“New?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so.”
The woman looked at what Rachel was carrying.
“Put it there. Or you'll trip over it.”
Rachel set the things down.
“Thanks.”
The woman went back to a book whose cover was folded almost in half.
Rachel looked at the upper bed. The bedding was clean and plain. She could make it neatly. There was a small task here which she knew how to do.
She began.
“You can do that later,” the woman said.
“I'd rather do it now.”
“Suit yourself.”
Rachel tucked the corner too tightly and had to pull it out. Her hands weren't steady.
The woman watched for a moment, then returned to the book.
Before the hearing, Rachel had closed the shop. Proper arrangements, work completed or returned, money accounted for, the rooms secured. There had been enough months to do the ordinary things which felt impossible in August. Some customers had stayed. Others had found someone else. Mrs Dawes sent a Christmas card with no message beyond her name.
Rachel had kept it.
Tess's apron was in a box with shop papers, stored with things she hadn't sold. She hadn't sent it to Tess or used the need to deal with belongings as another invitation.
She finished the bed and stood beside it.
The woman closed the book.
“First night?”
“Yes.”
“It's loud.”
Rachel nodded.
“You'll think everyone else knows what's happening. They don't.”
“Right.”
It was kindness, perhaps, or an observation she would have made to anyone.
Rachel sat.
She had thought about Anna all day. At the court, looking at her, she'd seen a woman who could leave when the hearing ended. That had been true because of work other people did and the choices Rachel finally made too late. It had not made the room balanced.
Anna had come into a place like this at twenty-eight. Tess was four then.
Rachel was much older than Anna had been. She could put their ages beside each other and learn almost nothing about what the first night had felt like to a mother imagining a child going to sleep without her.
She knew only how badly she wanted to hear Tess now.
The woman opposite asked whether someone was going to visit.
“I don't know.”
“Better than expecting.”
Rachel looked at her.
“Sometimes,” the woman added.
There were people Rachel could write to. Miles, for practical things. A cousin she'd barely spoken with while Martin was alive had answered a message in February.
She lay back on the made bed without taking off her shoes.
After a moment she sat up and removed them.
Martin had liked her hair loose. That was the memory which arrived, inconvenient and ordinary, while voices rose somewhere beyond the door. She had married him after giving the account that helped send Anna here. Loved him before she knew the murder from his own words, continued loving him after. A dead man's pleasant preference remained capable of reaching her without making him harmless.
She tied her hair back.
Later there was food. A question about something she didn't understand. An answer which had to be repeated because she was looking at the door rather than listening.
By evening she had a headache. The other woman turned another page.
Rachel found the space for writing and began a letter.
Dear Tess,
She looked at the name.
The words she'd been imagining were about music. A show she'd heard had gone well, an ordinary thing she wanted to ask. Beneath them was the wish that Tess would imagine this room and feel something warm enough to reply.
Rachel didn't finish the letter.
She turned the page and wrote to her cousin about the belongings still to be collected, keeping it short because there were only a few facts to give.
When the light changed, she put the paper away.
From elsewhere in the building someone called out a name. Another voice answered. Rachel lay awake and listened, learning which sounds belonged to the room and which carried through it.
Her wrist felt bare.
She touched the pale mark once, then put her hand under the blanket. Tomorrow there would be another day here, and she would have to live it.