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17

CALIFORNIA, 2011

Brad and I have barely spoken these past two days, the unanswered questions festering between us, working their way under the impervious surface of trust and honesty our relationship was previously based on. While I can’t help but blame myself for the turmoil that my family is being put through, I have to question why Brad would have lied to me about what he did last Wednesday night. And who he was with.

Eva could , of course, have been mistaken. It might not have been Brad she saw; he might not have been with another woman. It might all be a misunderstanding. But try as I might, I can’t get past the possibility that it was him, and he was with the very person I’m trying so desperately hard to protect us from.

The doorbell rings and I’m unusually jumpy, nervous of who it might be. But as much as I don’t want to answer it, hearing Brad’s footsteps cross the landing above me forces me to rush to get there before he does.

“Hank!” My heart goes into my mouth, wondering what news he has, and I instinctively step out onto the porch and pull the door to behind me.

“We’ve got the CCTV from school,” he says. “I thought you and Brad might want to take a look.”

I suck in a breath. As much as I want to see the person who upended our world, there’s a part of me that would rather not know.

“Of course,” I say, reluctantly opening the door and calling Brad down.

In the living room, Hank puts his laptop on the coffee table and lifts the lid. “It’s not the best picture. It’s a little grainy, but you might be able to recognize something about her,” he says.

I chance a glance at Brad and notice that he looks even more nervous than I do as the familiar corridor outside Hannah’s classroom appears on the screen. I thought I’d have to squint to recognize anyone, so I’m taken aback by the clear picture of Freya’s mom as she picks up her daughter’s swimming bag from her peg and forces a smile at the woman behind her.

Hank hits the pause button on his keyboard. “There!” he says, pointing at the face on the screen with a stubby finger. “That’s her!”

I peer in for a closer look and am comforted by the fact that I have never seen her before. With her long, dark-brown hair and indistinct features, she could be any number of people I pass on the street, but she isn’t the woman who came to my house, which is as much of a relief as it is concerning.

But when I look to Brad, I’m sure I see a flicker of recognition cross his face. I chastise myself for looking too hard, trying to find something that isn’t there.

“Have either of you seen her before?” asks Hank.

I look to Brad expectantly, waiting for him to reveal his hand. But all he offers is a half-hearted shake of the head.

“Me neither,” I say.

You could cut the atmosphere with a knife once Hank leaves, disappointedly empty-handed.

“I think we need to talk,” says Brad.

A searing heat overwhelms me as I allow for the possibility that everything that’s happened has been orchestrated by a woman who wants something she hasn’t got. Maybe this is about a woman scorned, an unrequited love for my husband. Did Brad know that his mistress was behind Hannah’s disappearance? Was that why he met with her last week—to warn her off, to tell her she’d gone too far?

Maybe this isn’t about me at all. Maybe it’s pure coincidence that the woman at my door looking to dig up my past just happened to appear on the same day that Hannah was abducted. The idea works its way into my psyche, and I find selfish relief at the thought that this has everything to do with Brad having an affair, and nothing to do with me. I shock myself at the admission.

He looks at me with a deeply furrowed brow, as if waiting for me to bring him bang to rights. Does he know the game’s up? That the net’s closing in? Is he about to beg for my forgiveness, or just waiting for the right moment to tell me that the marriage I thought was rock-solid is over?

I shake my head, unable to believe that we would ever find ourselves in this position… but isn’t that exactly what makes us vulnerable?

“What about?” I ask, needing to be put out of my misery.

“I don’t want to do it here,” he says, looking around the living room at the minutiae of the life we’ve built together. At the dominoes we brought back from Cuba after the locals had taught Hannah the basics. At the picture he commissioned my favorite artist to paint to mark our tenth anniversary. “I thought we could go into town.”

“But we’ve got no one to stay with Hannah,” I say, stalling.

“I’ve asked Barbara across the street to babysit for a couple of hours.”

So, this is premeditated—he knows exactly what he’s going to do.

I suddenly want to backtrack to this being about me, instead of it being the end of us—though I fear that once Brad finds out who I really am and what I’ve done, the outcome will undoubtedly be the same.

“I don’t know…” I say, shaking my head. “What if she wakes up and we’re not here?”

“That woman’s not going to come into our house and take her again,” he says brusquely. If his words are supposed to reassure me, they do the exact opposite. It’s as if he knows for a fact that she won’t. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll meet you in the car in five minutes.”

I can’t help but feel grateful that Tino’s is unusually busy. The live band is so loud that customers are having to shout to talk over them. Orders are being called out from behind the bar and glasses are smashing against each other as they’re being cleared from tables. Which all provide a myriad of distractions that I’m hoping will make it difficult for Brad to call time on our marriage.

“Hey, Nic,” a voice calls out over the din of the band as they start up another number.

“Hi, Jules,” I say, smiling and waving to Hank’s wife, who’s sitting in a booth with her girlfriends wearing what looks to be her husband’s Stetson.

“You here for the karaoke?”

I bite my lip, chastising myself for forgetting that Tuesday is open-mic night. The first and last time we’d stumbled inadvertently into the sing-along was a couple of years ago, when I’d unusually had one too many drinks and been cajoled into taking to the stage with a group of moms from school. I’d momentarily lost myself as we hollered out Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and imagined I was back at Dallinger’s in London. I allowed myself to dream for a second that instead of Brad looking up at me from the audience, it was Ben, on that first night when he came in and told me I had something special. I’d sung as if I were singing to him, without realizing that, one by one, the other girls had stopped and had all turned to look at me with their mouths agape.

The music had continued, but I’d immediately clammed up, fearful that I’d revealed more of my true self than it was safe to.

“When did you learn to sing like that ?” Brad asked incredulously when I got back to our table, suddenly stone-cold sober.

“Wh-what?” I said, having hoped he was too drunk to notice.

“You sounded incredible up there,” he said, looking at me with a renewed respect. If he had any idea of the trouble my voice had gotten me into, he’d know his pride was woefully misplaced. “How did I not know you could sing like that?”

“I didn’t know I could,” I’d said blithely, while vowing there and then never to let my guard down again—though that was recently put to the test when Hannah brought home a guitar from school. It had taken all my willpower to sit back and watch her as she clumsily strummed the chords, every fiber of my being itching to teach her how to play properly. But how could I explain why I was able to read guitar tablature and knew the difference between a major and a minor chord, when I’d never mentioned it before? So, I’d patiently listened as she tried to master the fretboard and gently encouraged her to practice her scales, then secretly inhaled the cedarwood to incite nostalgia once she’d gone to bed.

I shake my head, both in response to Jules’s question and to rid myself of the pull to another time.

“Just a bite to eat,” I say, ruefully.

“Well, good luck for tomorrow,” she calls out. “We’ll be there rooting for you.”

“Thanks, I think I’m going to need it.”

The thought of standing up in front of the San Diego community to appeal to their common decency had, up until now, filled me with unbridled passion and pride—nothing was more important to me than the petition to close La Jolla beach so that the seals would be able to thrive in their natural habitat without the constant threat of unwanted human interaction. But in the past week my world has changed on its axis and it’s taking all my energy to keep my head above water, to save the life I had, let alone give the seals the life they deserve.

“So…” says Brad, heading into the shadows of the bar and putting two bottles of beer on a high-top table. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

I tip the beer back, desperate for the alcohol to anaesthetize my brain as to what’s coming.

“I need you to listen,” he goes on. “Before jumping to conclusions.”

Tears immediately spring to my eyes and I grind my teeth together in the hope that it will go some way to stop them from falling.

“It’s that woman on the CCTV, isn’t it? You know who she is.”

His jaw twitches involuntarily and I throw a hand up to my mouth to stop me from calling out. How could he bring me somewhere like this, to tell me something like that? That’s almost as disrespectful as the act itself. How can he have so little regard for the twenty years we’ve spent together as to bring me here to tell me it’s all been a lie?

I can’t look at him, so instead my eyes focus on a woman walking across the bar toward us, with her hair falling around her eyes and an unreadable expression.

I force a tight smile as she gets nearer, sure that I know her from somewhere, though in my heightened state I’m struggling to place her.

“Hello again,” she says, stopping in front of me.

Her eyes lock with mine and I feel like I’ve been electrocuted with a cattle prod. An unfathomable shock runs through me, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. This can’t be happening. She can’t be here.

I look manically from Brad to her, my brain going into free fall as I wait for one of them to determine how this is going to go. But she stands there, on mute, making an already excruciating situation all the more agonizing. But I suppose that’s the idea.

She smirks, as if enjoying my discomfort. “Well, isn’t this a coincidence?”

Isn’t it just?

“I don’t suppose you’ve had second thoughts about what we discussed?”

“Er…” I bluster, feeling my mouth dry up. “I… not really, no…”

Zoe looks to Brad. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says apologetically. “I was just hoping to convince Nicole to help with something.”

“I-I don’t believe we’ve met,” he says, his voice sounding unlike his own.

“I’m Zoe,” she says, reaching across the table with an outstretched hand.

I want to snatch it away, not wanting the man I love to be tainted by my past.

“You’re English?” observes Brad.

Zoe nods. “Just visiting for a week or two.”

The stilted silence that follows begs to be filled, but I don’t trust myself, my brain unable to think fast enough to justify this woman’s presence.

Brad looks to me, the cogs turning as he no doubt attempts to second-guess our relationship. I’m not surprised he’s struggling; I’d not spoken about anyone from “back home.” Over the years, I’d sporadically thrown in an occasional mention of a Gina or a Caroline, both of whom I knew at school, though not well enough to remember their surnames; but they’d given me a footing in the past, an anchor on which to hang a superficial history that went some way to convince Brad that the woman he’d chosen to spend his life with had had a perfectly normal upbringing in England.

And I suppose I had, up until a point. But then it had all got turned upside down and the “normal” I’d taken for granted was destroyed, so that nothing was ever normal again. The life I’d had “before” was forcibly wiped from my consciousness, with no trace left of the person I’d been and the life I’d led.

Brad had often tried to get me to revisit the trauma that had so suddenly descended upon our unsuspecting family, even though he had no concept of what had really happened and how deeply scarred it had left me. “Perhaps if you went back to England, with me by your side, you could put the bad memories to bed once and for all,” he’d say, believing that it was the death of my sister that was responsible for the cavernous wound that had left me hollow.

“You’ll have your own family with you this time,” he’d said in his efforts to convince me to face my demons. “And nobody can ever take that away.”

I couldn’t help but blanch at the empty promise. The people you love can always be taken away.

“We could visit your old haunts,” he’d said during his latest attempt. “Give Hannah a sense of your life before us.” He’d looked at me hopefully. “Perhaps we can even show her your sister’s resting place?”

His naivety was dangerous.

“No!” I’d snapped, as the truth sat heavily on my chest. “I’m never going back there.” I’d meant it both literally and metaphorically.

“What are you so afraid of?” he’d said, letting out a heavy sigh of resignation.

This , I answer silently now, as I look at Zoe, unable to believe that everything I’ve spent years running away from is about to catch up with me. Here, in this dirty, windowless bar.

“I’m writing a book,” Zoe goes on, slowly and painfully perforating the life I’ve spent years building. “And I was hoping Nicole might be able to help me with my research.”

“There’s no one on this island who knows more about the seal colony than Nicole,” says Brad, looking at me proudly. I glow in his pride for a split second, before remembering it’s gravely misplaced.

“It’s not about the seals,” says Zoe.

“Oh?” says Brad, looking perplexed.

This is it. The weight of what she knows bears down on me, making it difficult to breathe.

After all the years I’ve had to tell Brad the truth, my truth, someone else has got there first. If his confession wasn’t about to put a dagger through our marriage, this will surely be the death knell. My hand shakes as I struggle to hold on to my beer bottle, my clammy fingers feeling it slip.

“It’s about the rise and fall of the biggest band of the eighties.”

“Oh…” says Brad, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “You don’t look old enough to remember it.”

Zoe offers a wry smile. “I wasn’t there myself, but I’ve always been interested in eighties culture, and this story has truly earned its place in folklore.”

“So, who were they?” he asks, his interest piqued, or maybe he’s just relieved that he can hold off what he was about to say to me for a couple more minutes.

“A band called Secret Oktober,” she says, making me flinch, even though I knew it was coming.

“Oh yeah, I remember them,” says Brad, as if it’s of little consequence to him. It isn’t. Yet .

“They would’ve gone on to become the biggest band in the world,” Zoe goes on, even though every part of me is willing her not to.

Brad throws me a look, knowing that we’re on uncharted territory. But, as if sensing that it might not be a comfortable place for me to be, he swallows the question he looked set to ask. For a moment, I’m relieved, but his reticence only opens the floodgates for Zoe to continue.

“If it hadn’t all ended in such tragic circumstances, of course…”

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?” asks Brad.

“Well, technically it was manslaughter,” says Zoe matter-of-factly.

I can feel Brad’s eyes on me, burning like lasers into my skin. “So, what’s any of that got to do with you ?” he says, his curiosity getting the better of him.

It’s as if the whole bar has been put on pause and a single spotlight has picked me out, blinding me with its beam, as it waits for an answer I’m not prepared to give. My mouth dries up as I look at Zoe, imploring her not to light the fuse of the bomb she’s about to detonate.

“Well, your wife was a suspect,” she says.