Page 208

The question hung in the air like an axe ready to fall. Even now, my automatic reaction was to protest any slight against him. To say‘Of course not! Alfie would never do anything wrong to me!’But I couldn’t lie to myself anymore and I refused, flatly refused, to ever lie to Keira again. I slumped back into my chair and tried to figure out how to explain something even I didn’t understand.
“I’m scared of his power over me. I don’t know which way is up anymore. I don’t know which are his words and which are mine.” I rubbed the back of my hand over my eyes. I was so tired.
“Do you love him?” Keira asked, her voice surprisingly gentle. It was a question I didn’t need to answer.
I could feel myself rocking back and forth. I needed him. Every nerve ending in my body cried out for him. I was an addict, my very nervous system suffered without him.
‘Do you love him?’The question brought pain crashing down on the thin glass of numbness that protected me. It swung down like an anvil, beating me until my heart was bruised and torn. Each breath hurt as I thought of him, as I thought of what hehad done. I pressed one hand to my stomach, over what might be growing there. Another crash and my shield cracked. Pain washed in, drowning me in tar. I choked and sobbed, trying to breathe as wave after wave of relentless agony bore down on me.
“How could he do this to me?” I sobbed, my voice cracking.
“Lo…”
“Why would he? It doesn’t make sense.” The first night we’d slept together,
he’d committed a felony to make sure I got my birth control. To go to such lengths to rob me of it now, the pieces just didn’t match up. Alfie had never so much as breathed a word about wanting a baby.
“Because he’s crazy. Getting you pregnant…Lo, that’s the ultimate control.”Control.Everything with Alfie had always been about control, about power. Is that what this all came down to? No love, just one big power trip? “Can you imagine having his child? You’d never be able to leave him. If you tried, he could strangle you with lawyers and paint you as an unfit mother in an instant. He could threaten to take your baby if you didn’t stay with him. Lo, you’d be trapped.”
“He wouldn’t…” The falsehood died in my mouth. Yes, he would. Alfie, my Alfie, was capable of anything.
‘You still seem to not understand that I’m ruthless in getting what I want.’
I hadn’t listened. He had told me, warned me, that he was capable of bad things, and I hadn’t listened.
“I feel broken, Keira.”
“Broken things can be mended.” Her words dug so deep, but right now I couldn’t see a future where I could breathe without pain. I stared at the floor as another tear rolled down my cheek. Keira was silent for a while but I could feel her thinking, deciding how much I could handle. I tried to brace myself, but when her question finally came, I still wasn’t ready for it.
“Do you really think he could be responsible for what happened to Adam?”
Adam.Adam was dead. It didn’t seem real, none of this did. I wasn’t sure what I felt about his death. Guilt? Sadness? Or worst of all, relief?
If itwasAlfie, what had he been thinking? Did he think I wouldn’t find out? That I wouldn’t care? Adam deserved to be in prison for what he had tried to do to me, but he didn’t deserve to die. I couldn’t sanction that. It wasn’t my right, but for Alfie, everything was his right. Everything was within his power. He wanted something and he took it. But murder? Was he really capable of that?
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. He isn’t who I thought he was, and now I don’t knowwhathe is.” I looked up at my best friend, begging her to help me make sense of my mind and, as always, she understood and didn’t fail me.
“I think he’s a very damaged man that was trying to be a good one. But he failed and that failure might have cost you big.” She eyed my stomach. “You’re late?” she asked and shame burned over me again. I nodded. I’d been so stupid.
“I have a test.” It had been waiting at the bottom of my bag for days now. It could give me a result within three days of conception.Conception.Had I conceived? Had it been three days? I counted back. We’d last had sex on Tuesday night, after our fight over Angie. The scene of that night played over in my head. I wanted to press stop, to eject the reel altogether and set fire to it, but I couldn’t. It played anyway. He’d been so determined to get inside me that night and the look on his face when I’d pulled him out of me and forced him to spill on my stomach instead…What was that look? Anger that I’d foiled his plan? Anger at himself for what he was doing?
Alfie…
My stomach roiled, revolted at what we had become. I made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up again. My stomach was empty. All that came up was bile-ridden heartbreak and dry-heaving misery.
I flushed the toilet and leant back against the wall to catch my breath. A glass of water appeared in front of my face and I took it, washing my mouth out and spitting. Keira sat on the floor next to me as I rinsed and drank. My hands shook. I couldn’t make them stop.
“You’re in shock,” she said, her voice soft. “You trusted him and he violated you.”He violated me.Alfie, my Alfie, had violated me. And I’d let him.
Keira handed something to me and I looked down to see the pregnancy test in her hand.
“Are you ready?” No. I wasn’t. But I couldn’t look away from reality anymore. I took the test from her. She stayed on the floor, not bothering to leave as I pulled my jeans down and peed on the stick. It was clumsy. I’d never done this before. Keira was uncharacteristically silent as I fastened my jeans and washed my hands.
I felt the numbness set back in as if my brain was trying to protect me from what was coming. I was grateful for it and welcomed it like an old friend, because an old friend it was. I’d felt it before. I’d held the numbness close as I’d cared for my dying gran, and when my mum died it had been weeks before I’d broken. Weeks of waiting for the glass to shatter, and when it finally had I’d been here, on Keira’s bathroom floor, with her hand holding onto mine.
I resumed my seat on the pale blue tile and stared at the test. Two minutes. Two minutes was a fuck of a long time.
“You have options, Lo. No matter what that says, you have options.” Her hand slipped into mine, letting me know that she had my back whatever I chose to do.