Page 28

TWENTY-EIGHT FOUR YEARS EARLIER

Amanda stands barefoot in her tiny galley kitchen, stirring a tea bag around a mug that has a picture of a cat on it.

She was always mad about cats, but I never let her have one because I personally don’t like them very much.

I hate how it’s up to them whether they like you or not.

Like you should be grateful for their attention.

It annoys me, the same way that young women annoy me. They make me feel cruel.

“There,” she says, passing the mug to me across the small table shoved up against the bare brick wall. She stares at me as I pick it up and take a sip, and I cock my head.

“What?” I say.

“I’m watching a dead man drink tea,” she says. “What do you think?”

She looks so much older. I might have walked past her on the street and not recognized her.

Maybe I have? I have walked through London quite brazenly in the years since I pretended to have died in a water sports accident in the Philippines.

I didn’t have white hair when I was married to Amanda; it was brown and I kept it long and floppy, kept my chin shaved soft and baby smooth.

I was probably a little heavier then as well, young dad around town that I was, going to the pub with friends after work.

I was less bothered about my appearance then.

And maybe, given my relative youth, I didn’t need to be.

I didn’t need to try as hard as I do these days to stand out from the herd.

“How are you?”

“How am I?” She pulls out the chair on the other side of the table and sits down on it slowly.

I see the crepey skin of her décolletage.

What is she now? Fifty-six? She’s a few years older than me, I think.

She was thirty when we met. She was an interior designer, living in a mews house in Chelsea with the living room upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs, and designed rooms for minor royalty and celebrities I’d never heard of.

Now she lives in Tooting in what appears to be a one-bedroom flat.

She’s made it look very nice, of course she has, but it’s still a big step down from where she was when I found her.

For some reason I thought she had more in her; for some reason I thought she’d thrive without me.

She eyes me with a steely gaze. “How do you think I am, Damian? I mean, really? Tell me?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

“I’m… Jesus Christ. I’m a fucking grieving widow . I’ve spent nearly twenty years guiding our sons through living without their father. Their father who died leaving me with ninety thousand pounds’ worth of debt. I’ve lost everything, the business, everything.”

“This place looks nice enough,” I say, my eyes taking in the kitchen that’s only big enough for one person to cook in at a time.

She groans. “You know, all these years, I’ve wondered.

Thought maybe you’d faked it. It just seemed so…

The timing of it. The way we were then. The weird things that happened to my business.

I thought, Maybe he faked it. I even did some research into it, found out that there are people in the Philippines who do this, that it’s a…

a thing . Y’know? But every time I got to the point of actually doing something about it, I’d just think, No.

There is no way, no way on God’s green earth that Damian would leave his boys deliberately.

He might leave me… but he would not, not ever, leave his boys.

His beautiful, beautiful boys. But…” Her next two words come out as a soft gasp. “You did.”

I exhale loudly through my nostrils. Of course she is going to want to understand.

Of course she is. I lean toward her and eye her tenderly.

“I can assure you,” I tell her, “I didn’t want to.

But, Amanda, I had to. I had no choice. They’d have killed all of us.

You and the boys were in danger. It was the only way out.

I would never have left you all otherwise. ”

“?‘They’? Who the fuck are they , Damian? What, like the Mafia or something?”

“No,” I say, grasping for her hands, which she snatches away from me. “No. Not the Mafia. Of course not. But… I borrowed some money.”

She opens her mouth to interject, to tell me that she knows about my debts because I saddled her with them, and I talk over her forcefully. “I borrowed some money. Remember. Remember back in 2002, when we lost that big project, the development? The one up in Paddington?”

She looks confused, her mouth hangs slightly ajar, her brow furrows. “The—?”

“I can’t remember what it was called. You pitched for it.

It was going to be huge. Seven figures. And you got so close, and I suppose I started…

” I pause and let my head hang for a moment before looking up at her, my eyes glazed over with those magic tears.

“I started to get ahead of myself. I started putting money into…” I sigh again.

“Well, essentially it turned out to be some kind of super-sophisticated Ponzi scheme. But I thought—I really thought it was going to be amazing. I thought it was going to make us rich, pay off all our debts, we’d have enough to send the boys to private school.

You know—holidays, a decent car. I did it for us, and I was an idiot, Amanda.

A total idiot. I got suckered into it. And of course it was gone.

Then I had to pay the money back into the company and I took out a loan from a friend of a friend and, well, it turned out this friend was not quite the genial moneylender my friend had led me to believe, and the interest rate was a joke and before I knew it, I owed them half a million. ”

I glance up at her, making my eyes as big and regretful as possible.

“They said they were coming for me, coming for you, coming for the boys. I had no choice, Amanda. I had no choice.”

“Twenty years, Damian! You had twenty years to let me know you were still alive! To say something to the boys.”

“You were all better off without me, don’t you see?”

“No! No, we were not better off without you! We were lost without you! Whatever it was, we could have worked through it. We could have moved away. Together.”

I simply shake my head and turn my hands palms up, as if to express the dead end of the conversation. There is nowhere else to go. What’s done is done. The past is in the past.

“So,” she says defeatedly. “What’s going on? Why are you here?”

“I need somewhere to stay. Just for a few weeks.”

“How did you find me?”

I bat the question away. You have to be actively trying to keep your location secret these days if you don’t want anyone to be able to find you. “I’ve known where you live for years, Amanda. I’ve been keeping an eye on you.”

She shudders, as if a chill has just run through her. “Oh.”

“And the boys. I’ve seen them. Over the years. They look great.”

And they do. Grown men now, of twenty-two and twenty-four.

The older one, Sam, he looks like me. Tall and rangy with great hair.

The younger one, Joel, he’s a bit of a shrimp but has that swagger in his walk that some smaller men have.

I can tell from looking at him that he has no problem finding girls, have seen him once or twice with some very good-looking ones.

The boys are fine. I know they’re fine. They didn’t need me then, and they don’t need me now.

“Oh my God, Damian,” she gasps, letting her face drop into her hands. When she raises her head again, she’s smiling, but it’s a kind of warped smile, like her face doesn’t know what else to do. “This is all too much. All way too much. I can’t deal with this. Where’ve you even been?”

Such a good question. Truly. Where have I been? I’m not even sure myself.

“I’ve been living with a woman,” I say. “Outside London. She has grown-up children. Older than the boys.”

“And?” She eyes me coolly.

“And… she’s trying to kill me.”

She rolls away from me slightly and blinks. “I’m sorry, what?”

“She’s not accepted the end of the relationship.

She’s been stalking me. Threatening to kill me.

She’s changed all the passwords to our bank accounts so I can’t get my money.

She’s conned me out of thousands and thousands.

She’s mad, Amanda. Totally mental. And I have a heart condition—it’s, well, the prognosis isn’t great, and the stress, it’s taking its toll, and today I just knew that it was enough.

It was over, I had to get away. I burned everything, Amanda, everything that could identify me, and I came here. ”

“You came here? With a dangerous woman in pursuit?”

“But that’s the thing. She doesn’t know me by my real name.

I changed my identity. She doesn’t know about you.

She doesn’t know about my past. And I have a new consultant.

For my heart. He’s based at St. George’s.

I can get there so easily from here. And I promise you, Amanda, I promise, it will only be for a few weeks.

Not even that. Maybe even days. But I beg of you, please, please just say yes.

I will pay you back. I will make things right.

Just tell me what you want from me, and I will give it to you. ”

She stares at the tabletop; her fingers are splayed out in front of her, and she ripples them gently as if playing the piano. “I don’t want anything from you, Damian. I just don’t want to ever feel the way I felt when they told me you were dead. Ever again.”

“You won’t. I won’t. Those days are over.

Those people are gone. I’m here now, I’m back.

I can be in your life. We could even…” I shake my head and smile wryly, as if such a thing would never be countenanced.

But it will be countenanced. I know it will.

Amanda was always nuts about me. She adored me.

And I can see it even now, in the way she tilts her head at me, the way her fingers find her hair, the way even now, during this ridiculous conversation that should have her running for the fucking hills, she’s holding in her stomach.