Chapter 17: Alistair, After

Alistair's POV

"She's telling the truth," I said. "I said it."

I had no microphone, and I did not need one.

Four hundred clients and colleagues heard it in complete silence, and no one in that ballroom looked at me.

Verity looked at me, from the step, with her eyes quite dry.

"I told her to handle it," I said. "A doctor's office rang me about my pregnant wife, and I said handle it, and I went back to my emails."

Two men from the hotel took Bryony by the elbows, and she let them.

She stopped at the door and turned her head.

"I did every bit of it for you," she said.

"No," I said. "You did it for you. I just never looked."

Then she was gone, and the room began to talk, and I walked off the stage in front of all of them.

I did not go home.

At six on Sunday morning I was in the waiting room at St Mary's, in my dinner jacket, on a plastic chair bolted to the floor.

The vending machine hummed. A man across from me was asleep with his mouth open.

I had never been in the building before.

It had taken my wife six minutes to get here in the back of an ambulance, and it had taken me a month.

A nurse came through with a clipboard and slowed down.

"You're Mr Wrenfield," she said.

I looked up. She was fifty or so, with reading glasses pushed into her hair.

"You were on the news," she said. "I was the one on shift that Tuesday."

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