After You by Jojo Moyes Page A

issues.’
    ‘Are they from your … ?’
    ‘They’re not Will’s, if that’s what you’re asking.’
    We sat there in silence. Or as near to silence as it could get when you could hear furious screaming upstairs. There was another thud, followed by an ominous silence.
    ‘Mrs Houghton-Miller,’ I said. ‘Is it true? Is Lily Will’s daughter?’
    She raised her chin slightly. ‘Yes.’
    I felt suddenly shaky, and put my coffee cup on the table. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand how –’
    ‘It’s quite simple. Will and I were together during the last year of uni. I was totally in love with him, of course. Everyone was. Although I should say it wasn’t all one-way traffic – you know?’ She raised a small smile and waited, as if expecting me to say something.
    I couldn’t. How could Will not have told me he had a daughter? After everything we had been through?
    Tanya drawled on: ‘Anyway. We were the golden couple of our group. Balls, punting, weekends away, you know the drill. Will and I – well, we were everywhere.’ She told the story as if it were still fresh to her, as if it were something she had gone over and over in her head. ‘And then at our Founders’ Ball, I had to leave to help my friend Liza, who had got herself into a bit of a mess, and when I came back, Will was gone. No idea where he was. So I waited there for ages, and all the cars came and took everyone home, and finally a girl I didn’t even know very well came up to me and told me that Will had gone off with a girl called Stephanie Loudon. You won’t know her but she’d had her eye on him for ever. At first I didn’t believe it, but I drove to her house anyway, and sat outside, and sure enough, at five a.m. he came out and they stood there kissing on the doorstep, like they couldn’t care who saw. And when I got out of the car and confronted him, he didn’t even have the grace to be ashamed. He just said there was no point in us getting emotional as we were never going to last beyond college anyway.
    ‘And then, of course, college finished, which was something of a relief, to be honest, because who wants to be the girl Will Traynor dumped? But it was so hard to get over, because it had ended so abruptly. After we left and he started work in the City I wrote to him asking if we could at least meet for a drink so I could work out what on earth had gone
wrong. Because, as far as I was concerned, we had been really happy, you know? And he just got his secretary to send this – this
card
, saying she was very sorry but Will’s diary was absolutely full and he didn’t have time right now but he wished me all the best. “All the best”.’ She grimaced.
    I winced internally. Much as I wanted to discount her story, this version of Will held a horrible ring of truth. Will himself had looked back at his earlier life with utter clarity, had confessed how badly he had treated women when he was younger. (His exact words were: ‘I was a complete arse.’)
    Tanya was still talking. ‘And then, about two months later, I discovered I was pregnant. And it was already awfully late because my periods had always been erratic and I hadn’t realized I’d already missed two. So I decided to go ahead and have Lily. But –’ here she lifted her chin again, as if braced to defend herself – ‘there was no point in telling him. Not after everything he’d said and done.’
    My coffee had gone cold. ‘No point in telling him?’
    ‘He’d as good as said he didn’t want anything to do with me. He would have acted as if I’d done it deliberately, to trap him or something.’
    My mouth was hanging open. I closed it. ‘But you – you don’t think he had the right to know, Mrs Houghton-Miller? You don’t think he might have wanted to meet his child? Regardless of what had happened between the two of you?’
    She put down her cup.
    ‘She’s
sixteen
,’ I said. ‘She would have been fourteen, fifteen when he died. That’s an