‘All right, calm down,’ says Luke. ‘How do you know it’s a virus?’
‘What else can it be?’ I delete the email and then go to recently deleted files and delete it from there too. ‘His account must have been hacked. I mean, he’s dead, right? It’s not like he can speak to us from the grave.’
Luke makes the tea and I repeat the procedure on my phone. Tom must have been able to set some sort of time delay on his emails, like a newsletter or something. I’ll have to go through all his files and make sure everything has been deleted and then destroy the hard drive of his laptop, despite what he said about never storing anything on there, I’m not taking any chances. After that, I’ll destroy all the memory sticks. I’m just glad we didn’t hand anything over to the police. After I had been plucked from the sea, Leonard had the foresight to go to Tom’s flat and grab the memory sticks and laptop. He wanted to keep the whole business of Tom stealing money out of the equation. We played it down and put Tom’s death down to an accident. The police seemed happy with that.
I sit down next to Luke and smile. He doesn’t ever have to know or doubt whether he’s Hannah’s father or not. I don’t know for sure and I have no intention of going down the DNA-testing route. What good will it do? Luke is Hannah’s father, biological or not. It doesn’t matter.
‘Love you,’ I say.
Luke leans over and kisses me. ‘Love you too, Babe.’
I hold onto his arms, squeezing them tight around me as I close my eyes in a bid to banish the image of the photograph from my mind and all that it represents.
Sometimes the darkest places are not in the pitch black of the night, when the moon is clouded over. Or when you close your eyes and track the sparks of colour dancing behind your eyelids. Sometimes the darkest places are when your eyes are wide open. When the sun shines brightly and the dust motes float in the beams of light.
THE END