Page 48

48

I take a final look back at Zoe in the car as I pull my jacket around me, tucking my shaking hands under my crossed arms. The thought of what I’m about to do is so far removed from the romanticized version I’d so often fantasized about.

All this time, I’ve laughingly convinced myself that I would finally be at peace if I could just be honest. But standing here, knowing that the person in the house that I’m now standing outside of deserves to know the truth more than anyone else, makes my heart thump through my chest.

I take a breath, suddenly aware of how deathly silent it is. The hum of the freeway can no longer be heard and even the birds seem to have stopped tweeting—or maybe they know the enormity of what’s about to happen and have flown farther afield, not brave enough to stay and watch the fallout. As I look up at the drawn curtains, imagining the person behind them, I can’t say I blame them.

I close my eyes before lifting the metal door knocker, knowing this is the last chance I have to back out. But I can’t. This has to be done, and if I’m not prepared to face the consequences now, I never will be.

As the door slowly opens and a head peers around it, I almost apologize and start to turn away, knowing that this man can’t possibly be the boy I loved so deeply, so profoundly, all those years ago. His skin is lined and sallow, his hair gray and thinning, and his once razor-sharp cheekbones have been lost in plump jowls.

I can’t help but be taken aback, because in all the millions of times I’d pictured this moment, he has always appeared exactly as I left him. Forever young, having never grown up and aged like everybody else. But it seems that time catches up with all of us in the end, because he can’t see who I am either, no matter how hard he tries, his brow furrowed.

“Can I help you?” he asks nervously, clearly unused to visitors coming all this way into the Hollywood Hills without good reason. I daren’t tell him that I’ve driven two and a half hours just to see him.

“Ben?”

He cocks his head, as if it will help, but his eyes—in which I can see no semblance of his old self—are still unable to recognize me.

“I’m sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong address,” he says, going to close the door.

“Ben, it—it’s me,” I say, putting a hand out to stop him. “Nicole.”

He freezes. “ Nicole? ”

I nod and tears immediately spring to his eyes.

“Can I come in?”

For a moment, he looks as if he might say no, but then the door opens a little wider and he silently beckons me in, his voice shocked into silence.

“I’m sorry to show up like this… I didn’t know how else to—”

“It—it’s OK,” he manages. “I guess there’s a part of me, deep down, that’s always been expecting you.”

“You know why I’m here?” I ask, his revelation only adding to my sense of foreboding.

“I’ve got a good idea,” he says, turning away. “Although you’re five years late.”

I choke at the reference, unable to believe that he’d remember our pact to meet in Los Angeles twenty years on.

“I guess neither of our lives panned out quite how we expected,” I say.

“So, what took you so long?” he asks, as he leads me down the hall.

The living room is in total disarray: paperwork is piled in towering mountains; the mail lies unopened on the sofa, on the table, behind the clock on the fireplace; and vinyl record sleeves form abstract patterns on the floor.

“I was never brave enough,” I offer quietly.

“So, why now?” he asks, going to the sideboard and pouring himself a double measure of whiskey into a tumbler. He knocks it back in one, scowling as the heat of the liquid hits the back of his throat.

“Because I need to tell you something,” I say, before I have a chance to change my mind.

He waits with raised eyebrows, refusing to make this easy for me. I don’t blame him.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am.”

He fixes me with a look so intense that I suddenly see the man I used to know so well. I’m back in that recording studio, our faces so close that our noses are touching as we share the mic, naively daring to believe that the sense of utopia that we’ve inexplicably found, in the music we’re making, could last forever.

“So, finally there’s an apology…” he murmurs, with an air of detachment, as if he’s talking about somebody else’s life. I presume it’s a skill he’s had to employ in order to survive the grave miscarriage of justice that was bestowed upon him.

“It’s been a long time coming,” I say.

“Do you know how many journalists and armchair detectives have come knocking over the years, every one of them looking to unlock the real reason I did what I did?” He laughs falsely. “And yet not one— not one —suggested that perhaps I didn’t do anything at all.”

A viselike grip squeezes my airways, crushing my ribs. “I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have spent all these years being punished for something you had no part in.”

His lips pull thin. “Why are you here, Nicole?”

A single tear escapes and I hastily wipe it away. “Because everything has changed.”

He studies me with suspicion before pouring whiskey into two tumblers and holding one out in my direction. I accept it readily with a shaking hand, needing something, anything , to dull my nerve endings.

“My father passed away…” I start.

His eyes narrow. “I wish I could say I’m sorry,” he says bitterly as he swirls the amber-colored liquid around his glass.

I reach into my handbag. “I didn’t have any contact with him after the trial. I hadn’t spoken to him for twenty-five years before receiving this letter from him this morning.”

There’s a noise outside the room and I look up expectantly, first to the door and then to Ben, but if he hears it, he doesn’t react. It suddenly occurs to me that we may not be alone in the house; he could have a wife at home, children…

“Are you OK to have this conversation here?” I ask, hating myself for not having checked before now. How hard has he had to work to build a new world for himself? He’d traveled thousands of miles to leave the past behind, hopefully met a loving wife, surrounded himself with a family of his own… Do they know who he is? What he’s supposed to have done? I go to stand up, in case they don’t. I had a huge hand in destroying his life once; I won’t be responsible for doing it all over again.

“It’s fine” is all he says. “Tell me what’s in the letter.”

I cough awkwardly to clear my throat, as if biding my time, but then I wonder why. He must already know what’s coming.

“He asks for forgiveness,” I start.

“Yours or mine?”

“Both,” I say. “But it’s only yours to grant.”

“Only a coward waits until they’re dead to tell the truth,” he says bitterly.

“I think you’d be surprised at the strength and resilience it would have taken to lie for all these years.”

“ Strength and resilience? ” he cries, his nostrils flaring as he displays his hurt and anger for the first time. “Do you have any idea how much strength and resilience I needed when they stripped me of my belongings, my clothes? When they threw me in a six-by-ten windowless cell for five years? When I remembered the life I had before… That ’s resilience—not some lame confession, twenty-five years too late!”

He paces the room like a caged lion, his resentment palpable.

“And now I’m supposed to be grateful that your father has finally admitted that he lied.”

I bite down on my lip as I picture my dad giving evidence in court: his hollowed cheeks, his empty eyes, his mumbled words as he tried to explain what happened that day…

“I-I went to the hotel looking for my daughter—Cassie…” he’d said. “She was… She’d gone missing… and Nicole… she’d already gone to the hotel… and I thought I should… you know…”

“Mr. Alderton, I appreciate how difficult this trial is for you and your family,” said the prosecution lawyer as she approached the witness stand. “It must have taken its toll.”

My father had nodded his assent.

“So, just take your time,” she said. “Keep your answers clear and concise.”

“O-K…” he said, forcing himself to take a deep breath in and out.

“So, after your younger daughter, Cassandra, had gone missing the day before, following a disagreement—which we’ll come to later—your elder daughter, Nicole, received a telephone call from Ben Edwards to say that Cassandra was at the Savoy hotel.”

“Y-yes, that’s correct.”

“But once Nicole left to find her, you felt that you should go too…”

“Yes, about an hour or so later, when I hadn’t heard anything, I thought I’d feel more useful if… if I were there too…”

“So, when you got to the hotel, what did you find?”

“Well, there were girls everywhere and I didn’t know where to start, so I looked in all the common areas—you know, like the restaurants and the ballroom, where somebody said the press conference had been… I even looked in the toilets, but I couldn’t find her or Nicole and I was getting worried. Cassie was in a fragile state, and I didn’t know what she might be capable of.”

“So, after searching the common areas of the hotel to no avail, what did you do next?”

My father had looked down at the fidgeting hands in his lap. “I took the lift up and walked along the corridors. I don’t know what I was expecting to find…”

“And what did you find, Mr. Alderton?” asked the lawyer.

“Erm, well… when I got to the second floor, I heard shouting…” He brought a shaking handkerchief up to his brow. “And then… then… I saw him .”

The lawyer had snapped her head toward where my father was looking. “By him , do you mean Mr. Edwards?”

“Y-yes.”

“Liar!” Ben had called out from the dock. “He’s lying!”

My father had frozen, like a deer in headlights, his eyes the only thing moving as he peered around the courtroom, gauging whether people were believing him or Ben.

“And where was he, Mr. Alderton?”

Ben had stared at him, silently begging him to change his story.

“Mr. Alderton?” the lawyer pushed, when there was no response.

“He was going into room 245,” my father had said, clearing his throat. “Michael Delaney’s room.”

Now, I look to Ben, whose eyes burrow into my soul, as if he can see the very same flashback. No doubt the scene has been on repeat in his head for years.

“I’m not expecting you to forgive my father for what he did,” I say. “But I can only ask that you try and understand.”

“How do you expect me to do that?” Ben says brusquely.

I think of Zoe sitting in the car outside, me promising I’d bring her in if it felt like the right thing to do.

“Do you have children?” I ask, remembering the dreamscape we’d naively created back when we were together. We were going to have three: two boys and a girl—Stevie, Eric, and Joni, named after our musical inspirations—who we were going to homeschool as we traveled the world on tour. A whimsical fantasy from another lifetime.

Ben shakes his head ruefully—yet another punishment he’s had to endure.

I swallow my regret—not only for what he’s missed out on, but for what we all, in one way or another, lost on that fateful day.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” I say.