'Yes. She got back yesterday.'

'How is she?'

His voice almost broke then, and so did Susannah's heart.

'She's going to be okay.'

Susannah remembered Rob not wanting to talk about Helena, when they were in France. Saying it felt disloyal. She wasn't sure what to say. 'Was she ... badly hurt?'

'Yes.' He sounded like he was fighting back tears.

She wondered who they were for. 'But she's not ... in danger?'

He sniffed, hard. 'No. She's out of the woods.'

Again, silence.

'Thank you for letting me know.' She sounded bizarrely formal.

'I said I'd call. I don't know when I'll be able to call again.'

'I understand.' What choice did she have? 'Rob?'

'Yes?'

'I'm thinking of you. Both of you.'

'Thanks, Susie. Bye.'

The letter came later that week. It was waiting for her when she came home from work, lying among a pile of utility bills and catalogues. He hadn't called. She hadn't slept well lying for hours, hot and wide awake, under twisted sheets, checking her phone every few minutes for a text. A letter felt ominous and important, and she couldn't bring herself to open it straight away. She laid it against the fruit bowl on the round table, and poured a glass of wine, staring at it.

Dear Susie Helena is recovering. We know more now, more about how it happened. It was a classic situation. She was in a helicopter, being transferred between bases, when it was hit by a rocket. Helicopters are noisy targets. It's easier for rockets to hit them and cause damage than to hit the camps where they don't do much, most of the time. I remember that now. The explosion killed three of the people with her, but most of the others were uninjured, including the pilot, thank God. She was pretty badly hit she and the dead guys caught the worst of it, apparently, but she's going to be okay. At first they were worried about how much blood she had lost, but she pulled through. She's got a lot of cuts and bruises. She's lost her right leg. It was blown away at mid-calf by the explosion, but they have amputated to just below her knee. It could have been a lot worse and I know that sounds callous, but loss of limb is one of the most common injuries in this whole war, and they're really well set up for convalescence and rehabilitation. And it's much easier to relearn if you still have a knee. She'll wear a prosthetic, eventually. Walk without crutches, just a limp.

But they always say and I know something about this that the injuries you can't see are the ones to really worry about. She went through a lot out there, and it will be a while before she's okay again. She still can't speak much about it, not yet. They've got her pretty doped up, and she's still quite out of it.

She's in Selly Oak, the forces hospital in Birmingham for the next while, at least. I'm here with her. I've taken leave from work, and I'll be here while she is. Her mum is here, too.

I can't tell her about us now, Susie. I don't know when I'll be able to tell her. Or if. This changes things for all of us. She's my wife, Susie, and I have to take care of her now. What I feel, or what I want that doesn't seem to matter as much right now.

I hope you understand. I hope you can forgive me.

I'll be in touch when I can. Trust me.

I do love you. I always have. I always will.

Rob Helen had brushed Helena's hair, grown longer since she'd seen her. It curled becomingly across her forehead now, and below her ears, at her neck. The gash on her forehead had been restitched at Selly Oak invisible inside stitches held the sides together. Helen had gently wiped away the crusted blood, too, so that there was only a purple line really, about three inches long, with a shadow of yellow bruising running along it. It came perilously close to her left eye. Small red scabs, each about a centimetre across, dotted her cheeks and neck. The doctor said they'd leave only very faint scars they were superficial.

The real wound was beneath the blankets. Rob had made himself look, the first time they'd been alone. There was nothing to see, of course. The stump of his wife's right leg was bound tightly with pristine bandages, rounded and smooth a careful job.

He and Helen were taking turns sitting with her. They had a relatives' room two floors down a single bed they shared, one sleeping while the other stayed with Helena. Helen had arrived before him he'd called her as soon as he knew they were bringing Helena here, and Helen was closer. She was tough, Helen. He'd forgotten or maybe he'd never known how tough. She hadn't cried at least, not in front of him. She fixed each doctor they saw with a steely gaze, asking pertinent questions. She'd asked the nurses to let her wash Helena herself, and she'd done it as gently as if she were washing a newborn.

Rob had stood and watched her, touched deeply by her tenderness. 'They said they'd given her a wash in the hospital, after she was born,' she said to him while she worked. 'But she wasn't clean. She still had that stuff that white stuff, you know? all over her. In her ears, all through her hair. They said I didn't need to do anything else. So I waited, until they'd gone. Until they thought we were all asleep. And I took her into the bathroom then, and ran a sink and washed her myself. Washed her properly. Dried her in my dressing gown. Then she was gorgeous. You were gorgeous, weren't you, darling? You were then. You are now.'

Helen did the days. She wanted to be there, she said, when the doctors did their rounds. He was glad she wanted to do that. It left him with the nights. He slept fitfully, restlessly, in the narrow single bed during the day, and sat in the garden nursing endless cups of bad hospital coffee. Sometimes he sat with Helen, and listened to stories about his wife when she was a girl. But the nights were his.

In the beginning they kept her unconscious, and she lay very, very still in the bed. Then, when she was first conscious, she still hardly moved. She groaned a little, and from time to time her eyelids flickered open, but she retreated quickly back into sleep. He watched her face while she slept, watched her eyeballs move from side to side under her closed lids in dreams. He wanted to know what she was dreaming.

She used to have nightmares, sometimes, before this happened. She'd had one on their honeymoon. He'd woken up to the sound of her grinding her teeth, her fists balled by her side, gripping the sheets tightly. He'd worried about waking her, knowing it could be dangerous, but then she'd sat bolt upright, her eyes open in fright. He'd sat up, too, and folded her into his arms while her breathing subsided and her chest stopped heaving and while she recounted the illogical, evil terror of her dream to him and he promised, as though she was a child, that he would protect her and take care of her. It had moved him to see his confident young wife look up at him with gratitude and trust and love in her eyes.

He knew now that what he was feeling wasn't pity. As he drove up the M1 to find her, he had examined his feelings, worried it might be pity after all. But it wasn't. It wasn't guilt either, though he felt that in spades through the long quiet nights. It had nothing to do with her accident, or her pathetic stump, or her long road to recovery. He loved her. Not the way he loved Susannah, he knew. But he loved her.

He was waiting for her to wake up from this nightmare. He was going to be there, just as he'd promised her he would be.

June When the doorbell rang, and Susannah went to answer the door, it didn't occur to her to be surprised to see Lois on her threshold. She wondered if she'd got her address from Rob or had she spoken to Mum and Dad? It didn't matter ... somehow, it felt as if she'd been expecting her. This time, though, there was no encompassing, warm embrace. Lois had lost weight, even since the funeral. She looked slight and old standing there, with no make-up on. Susannah guessed that she knew everything. Or knew enough.

She stood back, and ushered her in. 'How is he? How's Helena?'

'She's going to be okay. She has a fair amount of pain, and she's still a bit confused.'

'Where is she?'

'She's still in Birmingham, at Selly Oak. It'll be a goodish while, I expect. Rob's there, too.'

'Of course. Is he okay?'

Lois shook her head. 'No. No, Susannah. He isn't okay. He's a mess.'

'I'm sorry, Lois. I'm really sorry.'

Lois put her hand on Susannah's arm. 'I didn't come here for that.'

'But I am.'

'It doesn't matter, love. It doesn't help.' She wasn't angry.

'But I can't help, can I? I know that.'

'Oh, but you can. You can. You can stay away from him. Leave him alone. When he got back from France, when he found out he'd been with you, you know, when his dad was taken into the hospital ... when he saw the tube, and he realized he'd never talk to him again ... Well, he was devastated. I'd never seen him so upset.

'And now, he's got all this with Helena to deal with. And that's what he wants to do, and that's what he needs to do.'

'Did he send you to talk to me?'

'No. I daresay he'd be furious if he knew I was here. I'm here because I need you to help him.'

'You just asked me to leave him alone.'

'Same thing, Susannah. I don't know if he can stay away from you on his own. I don't know exactly what's going on between you two but I know it's got him all twisted up.'

'Both of us.'

'But I can't worry about you, lovely. I can only worry about him. He's all I have now. And I may just be an old lady, but I know one thing about him for sure. If he leaves Helena now, if he leaves her for you he'll never forgive himself. And you'll never be able to be happy without that. It can't work. Don't you see?

'Your time the time for the two of you has passed, Susannah. It's gone.'

It was amazing how life went on as normal. Every morning the alarm clock went off, and Susannah got out of bed. She showered. She ate breakfast, watched the news. She got dressed, and dried her hair and put on her make-up. She just never looked herself in the eye in the bathroom mirror. Because it hurt too much. She went to work. Out to lunch with colleagues. To business meetings where she spoke to long tables of listening faces. She shopped for food, but she didn't cook it. At home, at night, she sat in front of the television for hours, though she couldn't have told you afterwards which programmes she watched. The phone rang, and she always leapt for it, but if she saw Mum and Dad, or Amelia on the caller ID, she didn't answer. It took six rings before the phone went to the machine, and she counted them. The last four rings reproached her. She knew they were concerned for her. But she had no energy for conversation. She had never been so exhausted. She felt like the bloke who walked the London Marathon course in a diving suit. A thousand pounds heavier, ten times slower than her normal self. The rest of the world was muffled and distant. She could hear her own heartbeat in her head. All the time. Hear each breath.

Pushing an almost empty shopping trolley aimlessly down the aisle of Tesco's late one evening, she vaguely remembered needing shampoo. In the toiletries aisle she stopped suddenly in front of the tampons and towels. The realization that she'd missed a period cut a streak of vivid lucidity through the fog in which she had been existing. She tried counting backwards in her head, but she got muddled, so she pulled her diary out of her handbag and stood in the aisle, counting days.

It was possible.

She picked up a pregnancy test. It was the second one she had ever bought. Sean's baby that had been the first, and that had been a long, long time ago. She read the back of the box. Remembered.

And her thoughts raced. Faster than she could keep track of them. A baby would be born in the winter. In time for Valentine's Day, maybe. She'd be heavily pregnant for Christmas. A boy or a girl? Twins? Her heart pounded.

She should call him. He had a right to know. She had a right to tell him. Should she tell him she suspected, or should she take the test and tell him once she knew for sure? She smiled to herself. An older lady walking past saw the smile, saw the box, smiled back conspiratorially.

But the daydream died as quickly as it had been born, and she turned her back on the woman. She had no rights. She knew that, even before Lois's visit. Before Mum, and Amelia, and everyone else told her, she already knew. And she couldn't tell him. She couldn't do that to him.

At home, she put the pregnancy test on a shelf in the bathroom cabinet. She wouldn't take it yet. She couldn't bear to.

July Susannah awoke sometime after midnight. She'd fallen asleep on the sofa hours earlier, with the television still on. This was a new, and bad, habit she'd slipped into. She didn't like going to bed the dark and the quiet were perversely stimulating, and she lay there feeling her eyes wide open, unseeing, and her mind racing. She rifled through her memories of Rob, sometimes in date order, more often randomly some vague, some so vivid. So she stayed in the living room, with a side light, and Newsnight.

But on this night it wasn't the television that woke her. It was the familiar, wretched nagging ache low down in her belly. She half ran, half stumbled to the toilet, and switched on the light, her eyes closing involuntarily against the unfamiliar brightness. Sitting down heavily on the loo, she stared disbelievingly at the dark red smear of blood in her underwear.

No baby. There never had been. Just an idea, a dream of a baby.

She sank down to the floor and hugged her knees and sat there in the bright bathroom. She couldn't even cry. She certainly wouldn't have been able to put into words words that made sense, at least how intense her sense of loss was. This was so, so much harder than the miscarriage she'd had when she was married to Sean. She was years and years older. This might have been her last chance. And this baby ... this baby would have been hers and Rob's.

It was slipping away. It was all slipping away from her. She was terrified, and she was sad, and she was powerless to stop it.

Rob He didn't have to tell her. She need never know. He remembered how much Susannah's confession about Matt had hurt him, all those years ago, and he winced physically at the thought of doing the same thing to Helena.

But if he didn't tell her, the rest of their life together would be based on a lie. And he knew he couldn't live with that. Telling her was part of his penance. Part of his route towards forgiving himself for what he'd done because he knew with certainty that if he didn't forgive himself, he'd be forever changed by it, and no one would be able to love him.

And so he told her. He told her on a Wednesday afternoon. She was well enough to be wheeled out in a hospital chair now, and to sit in the fresh air for a while with a blanket over her knees. Helen had bought her a bright plaid cotton dressing gown from Marks & Spencer and she wore that. She had colour in her cheeks again, and the beginnings of a tan.

He sat on a bench beside her and spoke softly and calmly. He didn't tell her about thinking of Susannah as he pushed the wedding ring on to her finger, and he didn't tell her Susannah was in the church while his father's funeral went on. Those two things seemed the most unforgivable, and the most hurtful. He wouldn't lie not about the funeral, at least but he hoped she wouldn't ask.

She didn't ask anything, at first.

Helena had been very calm during her time in Selly Oak. She hadn't once wailed or railed against what had happened to her. And the nightmares he had been waiting for still hadn't materialized. She'd been stoical about her pain, and even joked about the phantom limb syndrome the doctors warned of. She'd started some gentle rehabilitation a few days earlier, and he'd watched her go through her paces with determination and grit. She hadn't said much about the accident she didn't remember much, she said. She woke up in the field hospital, having passed out almost immediately after the rocket attack, and she had no recollection of her friends' bodies lying dead and dying around her. She'd cried a little, telling Rob that one, Justin, was due to marry his girlfriend at the end of his tour, and that another, Steve, had carried pictures of his three young daughters in his pocket and showed them to anyone who'd stand still long enough. But generally she seemed, in the words of the ward doctor, 'fantastically well adjusted'.

He wasn't sure that was how she was when confronted with what he told her. But she was calm. For the longest time an almost unbearable time, for him she sat staring at the trees across the green, saying nothing at all.

Then she asked him. 'Are you leaving me, then, for her?'

He shook his head slowly. 'No.'

'Why not? You love her, don't you?'

'I love her, but I love you, too.'

'And I win on the pity tiebreaker, do I? Lose a leg, keep a husband.'

'It's not like that.'

'What's it like, then?'

'I want to stay with you. I made promises.'

'You broke them.'

'I won't break them again.'

'How do I know that, Rob?'

'Because I know it. And you have to believe me.'

'Why should I believe a word you say?'

'Because I didn't have to tell you, Helena. I'm telling you because I want to make a clean break. I want us to have a fresh start. No lies.'

'You want me to know that you chose me, is that what you're saying? I'm supposed to be grateful, am I?'

'Not grateful. No. I can't tell you what to be. I can only tell you what I want. And how sorry I am. How very, very sorry.'

'But I don't understand, Rob. You can't love two women. Not be in love with them both. You can't.'

Oh, he begged to differ. He cried out to differ.

'I want to understand, Rob. I really do.'

'And I want to make you understand.'

'But you can't.'

'It's as if ... it's as if she's my past. You're my future.'

'And we've both been your present for a while. Boom, boom.' A bitter, tight smile broke out briefly on Helena's face. Then she looked at him for the first time. 'Will you go away now, please, Rob?'

'I can't leave you here.'

'Tell my mum where I am. I want to be by myself for a while.'

'I don't want to leave you.'

She sighed. 'Don't be so bloody melodramatic. I'm talking about leaving me on a bit of sodding grass. Just get lost. Please.'