Second Chance - Jane Green [11]
‘I don’t know,’ Judy says as one of the other mothers shouts over. ‘Bodies everywhere. Happened just outside New York. Oh God, we’re bound to know someone.’ And all eyes suddenly turn to Sarah, who finds herself sitting on the ground of the car park, her legs having given way.
‘Sarah?’ A voice, gentle, on a level with her ear. ‘Sarah, are you okay?’
But Sarah can’t speak. These things are not supposed to happen to people like her and Tom, but now it seems they have.
Chapter Two
Holly Macintosh wakes up, as she has woken up every morning since she heard the news, and feels the weight of grief settle upon her chest.
It is all she can do these days to get out of bed, to go to the kitchen and pour herself a coffee with a shaking hand, to sit at the kitchen table lost in a cloud of memories, of things unsaid, of might-have-beens and of missing Tom – the Tom she grew up with and the Tom she will never see again – so very, very much.
She shakes it by breakfast, has to for the sake of the children. Marcus has been wonderful. The night she found out, she collapsed in tears and Marcus wrapped his arms around her, the children looking on from the kitchen table, fear etched in their little eyes.
‘Why is Mummy crying?’ Oliver asked.
‘Mummy’s sad because she’s lost one of her friends,’ Marcus said softly over the top of Holly’s head.
‘Shall I help you find her?’ Daisy said after a pause, and Holly was able to smile through her tears, which only started a fresh round of sobbing.
Just three days earlier, Holly had watched the footage on the news with Marcus. One hundred and forty-seven people dead. She had shaken her head with her friends and said how unbelievable it was, how they lived in a different world; they wondered whether it could ever end.
And then one morning, on the Internet, she’d found a list of names on the BBC News website. I wonder if I know anyone, came the thought. She’d known it was unlikely, and odd, given that tragedies had come and gone throughout her childhood – various IRA bombings, none of them far from where she lived – and never had it occurred to her that someone she knew might be involved, but this time she’d clicked on the article and started to read.
Names. Brief biographies. A banker from Islington, in New York for a business trip; a mother and daughter from Derbyshire, there on a brief holiday; Tom Fitzgerald, a software genius…
Holly had kept reading, then her eyes went back to his name, and she reread it a few times. Tom Fitzgerald. A software genius. Tom Fitzgerald. Tom.
Tom.
But it couldn’t be. How could it be? This happened outside New York. Tom is in Boston. Tom has to be fine.
Confusion had swept over her as she picked up the phone to call Tom at work, but it would be night-time there, and she dialled the home number.
‘Hi, this is Tom, Sarah, Violet and Dustin,’ Sarah’s voice had sung down the phone, lending this phone call a normality that had made Holly think perhaps she was imagining all this; she must, surely, be imagining all this because how could the answerphone indeed be so normal, how could the message still be the same if something terrible had happened to Tom?
And she’d looked back at his name, jumping out at her from the computer screen.
Tom Fitzgerald.
‘Oh hi. Sarah, Tom, it’s Holly.’ She’d spoken haltingly, unsure, Googling Tom’s name as she spoke, looking for more information. ‘Um, I just… I was reading… God. Sorry. But can you call me? Please? I…’ There’d been nothing else to say. Another article had appeared. Tom Fitzgerald, chief executive officer for Synopac, was on the doomed Acela Express on his way to a business meeting…
The phone had been placed back in the receiver in slow motion.
‘Holly?’ Frauke had come into the room, had observed Holly’s trembling back. ‘Is everything okay?’
And Holly had turned to her, stricken. Her face had filled with grief and shock, and when she had tried to speak, nothing had come out in the way it was supposed to.
‘It’s Tom,’ she had managed to whisper eventually.