Page 25

25

CALIFORNIA, 2011

The tires screech as I turn the car into the driveway and hit the brakes just as the hood touches the garage door. The house is in darkness, save for the soft glow of the hall lamp, and there’s a part of me that hopes Brad isn’t home. But then I pull myself up, because if he isn’t, I can’t bear to think about where else he might be.

A tremor of panic ripples through me when I call his name and there’s no answer. What if he’s left? What if tonight was orchestrated by him, as his final revenge for living a lifetime of secrets? Would he go that far?

An ice-cold shiver makes me shudder as I stand paralyzed, looking up the stairs. Would he? My instinct is to race to Hannah’s room, such is my sudden desperation to see that she’s there, but I calm my breathing, forcing my overactive mind into submission. Still, every tread feels like a mountain, and I grip hold of the banister for support.

The bedside lamp that Hannah is too scared to turn off casts a glow through the crack in the door, which she likes to have open, though ironically its muted light casts sinister shadows on the walls. I stifle the sob that tries to escape as I gently touch the Hannah-shaped mound under the quilt. Her copper-red hair fans across the pillow, and I brush it away from her face, unable to imagine a world where I’ll never see it again.

I desperately want to climb in beside her and wrap my arms around her tiny body, vowing to keep her safe from harm. But I can’t make a promise I might not be able to keep, and the realization of what I stand to lose makes tears spring to my eyes.

“I love you,” I whisper, leaning down to give her the lightest of kisses.

I pause by the closed door of the spare room, my feelings of resentment and anger matched only by the abject sadness and grief of what Brad and I have lost. I wonder if he’s lying in that single bed, thinking of the woman who seems intent on ruining my life. Because he does know her—of that there’s no doubt.

Is the conscience, which he must surely have battled with, eased now that he knows I’ve betrayed his trust as much as he has mine? Has he spent the past however long mired in self-loathing for what he was doing to our happy family, only to be glad to be given a get-out clause by the secrets of my past?

As I look out of the landing window, I’m blindsided by the thought of Brad parked up outside the house every other Saturday, waiting for Hannah to bound down the path with her Rapunzel backpack over her shoulder; the classic broken family, fractured by lies, crushed by deceit, and who, like everyone else, thought it couldn’t possibly happen to them .

“Where did you think I might have taken her?” asks a voice as I descend the stairs.

“Jesus!” I yelp, scanning the darkened kitchen like a startled animal before I manage to hit the light switch. My fright turns to fury when I see Brad sitting in a chair, nursing a beer.

We stare at each other, jaws fixed, weighing up who’s going to make the next move. I chance my arm, hoping it will give me the upper hand. “Why don’t you put us both out of our misery and just tell me who the fuck she is and what she wants?”

His head tilts and he looks at me as if genuinely perplexed.

“She was intent on ruining me out there tonight,” I hiss, forcing myself to stay calm, more for Hannah’s benefit than Brad’s. If we were on our own, I’d be hurling saucepans at his head around about now.

I look at him, wanting to see something, anything , that might offer an explanation, but his face is like stone, giving nothing away. “Whatever it is that’s going on between you two, why wouldn’t you want to do it behind closed doors? Use discretion, like most people, instead of having your sordid secret being played out in front of the whole city. At least for Hannah’s sake, if not mine.”

He tsks condescendingly and I ready myself, frightened that he’s going to tell me what I already know. That this is some kind of payback for the secrets I’ve held on to for all these years, for never allowing him a glimpse into my past for fear that he’ll see that I’m not the person he thought I was.

But that doesn’t make sense, because Brad didn’t know who I really was until Zoe told him in the bar the other night. Whatever’s going on must have started before Zoe turned up—well before he’d been given a window into my truth—and that’s an even more bitter pill to swallow.

“So that’s the way you’re going to play this?” he says, his mouth pulling into a tight line as if to stop everything he wants to say from spilling out all at once. “You think making this my problem means you don’t have to account for your actions.”

“I would never hurt you,” I manage.

“You already have!” he says.

I smart at the rawness of his voice. All I want to do is run, knowing that no good can ever come from this confrontation, but I force myself to stand tall and relinquish the baton.

“It happened long before I met you,” I offer. “You can’t possibly believe it gives you cause to destroy everything we’ve built since? Our home, our family, Hannah… our whole lives.”

“So, you forget to mention that you were implicated in one of the most controversial trials of the century… and somehow I’m the bad guy?”

“I’m not the one who’s broken our marriage vows.”

He laughs hollowly. “Do you honestly think I’m having an affair?”

If I could believe he was as aggrieved as his expression belies, I’d say it was almost impossible, but I’m not going to allow myself to be fooled so easily.

“Well, isn’t that what you were about to tell me last night? Why else would a woman take another’s child, knowing that it would strike the fear of god into any mother? And why else would she turn up tonight, taking a wrecking ball to my reputation?”

He gets up and goes to the fridge, painfully slowly, as if he’s enjoying my unease, even though it should be him who’s feeling the heat searing through his veins. I bat away the same oppressive sensation and chew the inside of my cheek as I wait for him to get another beer, open it, and sit back down again. His calmness unnerves me—it’s as if he’s waiting to reveal the ace up his sleeve.

“So, are you going to tell me who she is, or not?”

The way he looks at me sends chills down my spine. He looks nothing like the man I’ve loved unreservedly for the past twenty years. But then, I imagine I look very different to him as well.

“I met her in a bar in town.”

My mouth immediately dries up, my throat feeling like it’s lined with knives.

“She was on her own, looking for company, so I offered to buy her a drink.”

The irony of his wedding band clinking against the side of the beer bottle, as he taps it thoughtfully, is not lost on me.

“And you somehow fell into bed together,” I sneer.

“Do you want to stop talking and listen for a minute?” he snaps.

For a man who’s been unfaithful, his demeanor is more accusatory than conciliatory. And after twenty years of what I honestly thought was a good marriage, I wouldn’t have believed that he had it in him to behave this way, but I should know better. Because people always show their true colors when their backs are up against the wall.

“So how many times has it been? What does she give you that I don’t? Are you in love with her?” The questions all come tumbling out in a deluge of insecure loathing—for myself as much as him. How had I not seen it? How could he do this to me? To us?

“Jesus! Will you just stop for a second?” he says, putting his hands on his head and turning to walk toward the French doors overlooking the yard we’ve spent our marriage lovingly cultivating. “I’m not sleeping with her.”

I laugh cynically. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”

I watch his back as his shoulders tense against the material of his shirt. “Not if it were true and I wanted out of our marriage, no!”

“So, what is it then?” I ask, confused. “What does she want?”

“I don’t know,” he says, turning to face me. “But she seemed more interested in talking about you than getting into bed with me.”

I shake my head in an effort to sharpen the blurred lines. “Wh-what do you mean?” I dare to ask, as the foreboding sense that my past is coming back to haunt me returns with a vengeance.

“Well, we spoke for a while, passing the time of day with idle chat, and when I went to call it a night, she told me that my wife wasn’t the person I thought she was.”

I allow myself a smirk, as the first ripples of relief edge their way into my veins. “And you took that personally?” I exclaim incredulously. “It sounds as if she was horny, saw the wedding ring on your finger, and would say anything to ease your conscience.”

“Mmm,” he muses. “I thought so, too… until she mentioned your name.”

My fingertips tingle, and I feel lightheaded as a rush of blood and adrenaline flood my body. “A lot of people know my name,” I retort.

He nods, as if that would make sense. “Except she seemed to know more than just that, because she said you couldn’t be trusted.”

“Well, you know that’s not true,” I start, before remembering that I’m no longer living the life I was this time last week.

“And now, I realize that she had a point,” he says, finishing the sentence.

The ground feels like it’s falling away, the rock-solid foundations that I’d painstakingly built now crumbling around my ears. The years that I’d spent trying to be the best version of myself—the one I was always meant to be, until Ben —fall by the wayside, as I’m forced to admit that what happened back then was the real me. The good wife I’ve strived to be, and the perfect mother I’ve endeavored to mold myself into, is an imposter who has been hiding in plain sight. The realization crushes me.

“I’m still me,” I offer. “I’m still the woman you fell in love with…”

Brad tilts his head to one side, looking at me as if questioning the validity of the statement.

“And who is she ?” he hisses, scathingly. “Because she’s certainly not the same woman that’s all over the internet.”

He laughs, as if berating himself for being so stupid, and it breaks my heart. “I mean, how could I not have known that my wife of twenty years was a redhead?” He shakes his head. “It’s those secrets you kept from me that hurt the most. I thought we knew everything about each other, yet here I am, all this time later, with a wife who felt it necessary to hide her natural hair color from me.”

“Brad, I wasn’t hiding it from you , I was hiding it from myself. I didn’t want to be constantly reminded of the person I once was.”

“ And who were you, Nicole? ”

My jaw spasms involuntarily as I force myself to look at him. “Look, we can sit down and go through everything that you’ve read.”

“It’s not what’s written about the case that I’m interested in—it’s what’s not written that bothers me. Because it seems that, despite you supposedly telling ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ in court”—he floats speech marks in the air with his fingers—“the media didn’t believe you.”

“ I wasn’t the one on trial,” I snap, unable to stop the barrage of images from battering my senses—the salacious headlines, the annihilation of my character in the courtroom, fans protesting, calling for justice.

“Well, maybe you should have been, because if you’re able to keep secrets this easily…” He leaves the sentence there as he raises his eyebrows questioningly.

“You have no idea what happened,” I hiss.

“I know that you were there that day—that you were treated as a suspect!”

“And quickly eliminated.”

He shrugs his shoulders, but nothing about his body language is blasé. “I need to know what I’m dealing with,” he says.

“Meaning?” I say, unable to believe the shift in the conversation. How am I being made out to be the villain here? Maybe because you are , a voice says in the back of my head.

“I’ve got Hannah to think about,” Brad goes on.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” I spit, restraining myself from taking the beer bottle from the side and smashing it over his head. Maybe he’s got a point.

“I just need to make sure she’s safe,” he says, pushing me to my limit.

“She’s as safe now as she’s ever been,” I seethe. “Nothing’s changed apart from you finding out why I really left England.”

“And so it has nothing to do with the tragic death of your sister?”

I eye him warily, unable to predict where he’s going with this. “Well, of course, that didn’t help. It was a lot to take on, and it all happened within a matter of months.”

He attempts to display a sympathetic expression, but its sincerity falls woefully short.

“It must have been so very hard for you,” he says.

His tone has a biting iciness to it, and I shrug nonchalantly to offset the toxicity that’s permeating the charged atmosphere. But inside, I feel like a fox being chased by hounds, and I almost want to give myself up so that I can be put out of my misery.

“It was,” is all I feel safe saying.

Brad nods and puts his hands on his hips. “So, that’s it? I know all there is to know; there’s nothing more you need to tell me…”

My heart stops. This is it. This is my chance to put it all on the table, to be honest with the man I love so that I can stop running from the truth.

His eyes burrow deep into my soul, urging me to do the right thing, even though he can’t possibly know if I don’t.

Just tell him , I say to myself, taking a deep breath to bolster my wavering resolve.

“Well…?” he implores, his impatience testing him as much as my abject fear is testing me .

I go to open my mouth, fully intending to tell him everything he doesn’t already know, except… “That’s it” comes out instead.

Brad’s nostrils flare and his eyes blacken, turning his features into somebody I don’t recognize.

“I gave you the chance to be honest.”

“I have been!” I exclaim. “There’s nothing more to tell!”

He glares at me as if I’m a stranger or, even worse, someone he’s grown to hate.

“So, can you please explain why the very sister who supposedly died twenty-five years ago has just been on the phone wanting a reunion?”