“You’re absolutely right.” His voice is light, almost playful now. He looks down at me, his hands resting casually on his hips.
“Sorry?” I stop writhing, shocked at his capitulation and the low, nasty undercurrent in his voice.
“Oh, don’t apologize. That’s quite all right,” he says politely, and then he crawls on to the bed, lying down next to my rigid body so that we are side by side in Max’s bed, a parody of a happily married couple chatting together before bedtime. We’re not touching but he’s near enough that every nerve ending in my body screams at his closeness. “After all, it’s true.”
“What is?”
He turns to roll his big, heavy body on top of mine, his mouth so close to my ear that his breath fills it, half deafening me so I have to strain to hear his biting words: “The children are yours, Maddie. But they’re not mine, are they?”
THIRTY-NINE
My eyes burn from staring into the half-light. I grind my teeth together and try to press myself into the mattress, desperate to alleviate the weight of Dom bearing down on me, recoiling from the touch of him on my skin, his hot breath on my face. Memories flash into my mind of him poised above me so many times over the years, his powerful arms braced either side of my head, his hips constricting my legs as he made me wait—a tiger hunched over its prey, taking its time, waiting for the perfect moment to bite.
Crushed beneath him, it takes a huge, bruising effort to draw breath to speak, but when I finally manage to summon up the strength, I find I have no words. I can’t think of a single thing to say.
The twins aren’t his children?
Then in the next instant: Is this another of his tricks?
“I had doubts from the beginning, of course,” he continues, almost conversationally. “I’m always careful. I may take risks in business, but I’ve never taken chances when it comes to fucking around.” I feel his fingers dig into my hip bone and my stomach convulses with an involuntarily shudder. He grinds into me and tears of pain and fear slide out of the corners of my eyes.
“What doubts? Why have you never told me?” I remember Dom’s angry confession that we were almost bankrupt and wonder how it’s possible to be married to someone for ten years yet know so little about what’s going on in their life, their head.
He wrenches himself off me and the feeling of release is so intense that I cough, struggling to get air back into my lungs. My fragile body still aches from the weight of him; my side hurts so much that I wonder if he’s actually cracked a rib. I want to touch them, to find out, but I’m flat on my back, wrists and ankles bound, and all I can do is lie here listening to his deep voice spilling hate into the damp air.
“The twins’ hair was a bit of a shock, for starters. I’m not blind and I’m not an idiot. I saw the sideways looks the midwife gave us. You’re more blonde than redhead, but at the time I just put it down to genetics—maybe your mother or grandmother had red hair, I told myself. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to. You seemed like such a nice, polite, middle-class girl. Growing up on this shithole of an estate, I wanted a piece of that.”
“You make it sound so romantic,” I say in a choked voice, shock still rippling through me.
“Romance? So that’s what you wanted?” He swivels round on the bed to glare at me. “And there was me thinking I was giving you everything you’d ever dreamed of by working 24/7 to support a wife and two kids that weren’t even mine.”
I remember his proposal to me in the Oxo Tower restaurant after we found out I was expecting the twins. I remember my surprise that he was so certain about us getting married immediately. He just wanted what I represented, I realize sadly: a suitable wife, a ready-made family. Perhaps he genuinely believed the twins were his, or perhaps he had doubts. It hardly seems to matter now. By his own admission, he just wanted a piece of that.
And yet he’s never, over the years, given me any indication of his suspicions. We had a good life, a happy marriage, for the first years of the twins’ lives. I know we did. Maybe it was only when our marriage started to flounder that his doubts pressed more heavily on his mind. Maybe when his business started to struggle he felt emasculated, and worries about the twins’ paternity began to consume him.
“But, Dom . . . there’s been nobody else but you. I swear,” I say. “What makes you think that?” I ask in a hoarse whisper, wishing I could see his face, but he’s turned his head away.
“Interestingly enough, it was Max who pointed it out to me. My beloved brother.” He stares straight ahead, his back and shoulders rigid. “The evening before the twins’ birthday. We spent most of our lives barely tolerating each other, but I owe him one for that. For opening my eyes to what was going on right under my nose.”
“Max? You’re not seriously going to suggest that Max was the twins’ father. I didn’t even meet him until our wedding. What do you—”
“He’d worked it out. I told you he was clever. Far cleverer than me. I didn’t even see it coming. Meet me in The Bell Inn for a drink, he said. I need to talk to you. So like a mug I bought him half a dozen whiskies and he dropped his little bomb about you two being in love. Idiot that I am, I defended you. You’d never break our family apart, I said. And I told him straight: I would never let you take my children away from me. Do you know what he did? He laughed in my face. Oh, the twins don’t belong to you, little brother. Haven’t you worked that out by now?”
“He was talking rubbish, Dom. Absolute rubbish,” I say passionately. “You’ve never listened to anything he said. Why did you believe him now?”
“I didn’t. Well, not immediately, anyway. I dismissed it all and told him he could rot in hell. But then, you see, I came home and found your suitcase, and I realized he’d been telling the truth. You were planning to leave me. You were betraying me with my own brother. It was hardly a big step from there to believing Max was also right about the twins. That I wasn’t their biological father.”
Just for a moment, my sense of hearing more acute in the dim room, I can hear the old Dom. I pick up on his pain, the unbelievable hurt he must have felt when Max taunted him that Annabel and Aidan weren’t his children. Daddy’s princess; he’s always doted on his little girl in particular. Believing there was no blood tie between them would have been a devastating blow.
“It’s not true. He was trying to upset you. I have no idea why, or what he hoped to achieve. But he was lying. I was leaving you, and I admit I can’t remember whether that had anything to do with Max. But the children are yours,” I say firmly. “Who else could possibly be their father?”
I didn’t even bother trying to speculate. Dom had simply misunderstood his brother; I was sure of it. The twins don’t belong to you . . . Max could just have been implying that Annabel and Aidan weren’t his possessions—or that Dom had lost his family’s loyalty through his aggression. Max had simply been playing games, perhaps in retaliation for the way Dom continually taunted and rejected him. He’d wanted to rattle his younger brother’s cage, and he picked his biggest Achilles’ heel: male pride. I could almost feel sorry for Dom if he hadn’t just kidnapped me and tied me up on his dead brother’s bed.
“Well, my guess is that lecturer guy you were always mooning over.” He turns to look at me, eyebrows raised.
“Shay?” I say faintly, my thoughts suddenly spinning.
“Scottish guy. Curly auburn hair,” he says pointedly. “I was your rebound guy, wasn’t I? You pretended to be so shy and timid, but your lecturer had already taught you more than a thing or two. Hadn’t he?”
“It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t on the rebound. I fell in love with you,” I protest heatedly.
“But then he dumped you. So you settled for me. Hard-working, well dressed, but not quite smart enough, hey? A businessman not an intellectual. And a failing one at that. I haven’t exactly set the world on fire.”
“I’ve always been proud of you,” I insist quietly. “You’re the one who always wanted to conquer the world, no
t me.”
“But Max was devious. He knew how to get what he wanted. He always did, in the end. He could see things were going badly between us, so like the attention-seeker he was, he muscled in on my family. And he couldn’t wait to let me know all about it.”
“The night before the twins’ birthday. When you’d been out drinking,” I recall with a sinking feeling. So that’s what Dom was looking for as he lurched and bumped around our bedroom after midnight. Evidence that what Max had just told him about my infidelity was true. And he’d been convinced he found it . . . my suitcase.
“Drowning my sorrows, I think you’ll find it’s called.”
Part of me is desperate to plead my innocence, tell him he’s wrong, but the other part of my mind is already flying back to that heady week with Shay, after the summer break and before the new university term started. I thought I’d seen the last of him; I had no idea I might have been staring into the beautiful faces of his children every day for ten years. Annabel is so theatrical, so exuberantly animated; Aidan is a big reader, a deep thinker. They both have red hair, but then my hair is strawberry blonde. There are as many differences as there are similarities; I can’t be sure . . .
I wonder if that’s why all my memories of Shay came back to me in the bright-dark, haunting my unconscious mind, and I question myself whether, deep down, I’ve always had a suspicion that I’d fallen pregnant after sleeping with him—that there had been a perfectly logical explanation behind the confusion about my due date. Had I suspected as much even when Dom proposed to me? He clearly thinks I’m capable of the worst kind of deception, and I’m beginning to feel like I don’t know myself at all, or what I’m capable of.
A sudden thought flashes through me: Shay moved to Brighton. . . Was it Shay, not Max, I was running to?
I remember taking the twins there; I remember my sense that there was someone I was supposed to be meeting. Had I finally decided that Shay was the twins’ father and made contact with him? I wait for more memories to surface, but nothing comes. I can picture his face, recall his theatrical charm, but I can no more imagine rekindling my old affair with Seamus Jackson than I can envision starting a new one with Max.
“But you don’t have any proof,” I say, struggling to believe any of this is really happening.
“What makes you so sure? DNA tests are easy, these days. Swab of saliva, pop it in the post, Bob’s your uncle. Or not, as the case may be.”
“So have you had one done?” I ask breathlessly. “They’re still your children, Dom,” I say when he doesn’t reply. “In every way that counts, you are their father.”
“Oh, don’t throw that ‘it’s just biology’ crap at me. If I’m not their real father, I don’t give a shit about them—or you.” He swings his legs off the bed and stands up.
“I don’t believe you.”
“More fool you.”
Yes, I am a fool. I’ve believed every kind word, every tender touch, since he came to the hospital. I was so busy beating myself up for my own guilt that I never thought to question his. But he’s known about all of this since that first visit, I realize. I remember Professor Hernandez telling me how the nurse needed help to pull Dom off me, how he’d been consumed by distress, shaking me to try to wake me up. He wasn’t trying to wake me up, I see now; he was trying to make me to stay asleep—for ever.
My life is going to end in this dark place. I feel it in every trembling part of me. Hope deserts me for long moments until I think of Annabel and Aidan, my babies—always my babies even though they are grown children now. I have to get back to them.
“So what happens now? You can’t keep me locked up here forever. We can start again; we can work things out . . .” I begin to panic as awareness creeps over me that our discussion is coming to an end. I feel like Dom has finally said his piece; he’s spilled out his grievances, and if the twins really aren’t his children, he has absolutely no reason to care about me any longer—or them.
My children are in serious danger; everything he’s told me crys-talizes into this one certainty. I shake my head back and forth, frantically rocking my body to see if I can dislodge the cords restraining me.
“That’s good,” he drawls, moving closer, and then I feel one big hand landing on the center of my chest, pinning me down. “I’m glad you’re feeling stronger. So you’ll be in a fit state of mind to know exactly how it feels to lose everything that really matters to you.”
“No—please. Please don’t hurt my children! OK, I was leaving you, Dom. That much I believe is true. But you have to understand, I was scared. Of the rows, the bruises. I needed to get out. I wanted to feel safe again. I wanted to know that the children were safe.”
“The children? Or just Aidan?” His voice is ice on glass.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve always wondered, you see. No favorites, that’s what you always said. Always the perfect mother, but such a flawed wife. You deserved punishment for your infidelity alone, for making a fool of me all these years. But that wasn’t quite enough. It’s not enough for me to win, you see. You have to lose. Everything.”
“I’ve never said I’m perfect. And I don’t have favorites. I love them both . . .” He was digging the knife into the deepest, darkest core of my shame. Taking me back to the heart of my guilt, my self-loathing: the choice I made. He’d always picked on me about favoring my son; he was never going to let that go, even now when he believed that neither of the children were his.
“But I knew, you see. You saved Aidan once, and I knew you’d do it again. You’re a terrible mother. The very worst. I knew it, and I wanted you to die knowing it. I wanted you to go to your grave knowing you were capable of saving one child and sacrificing another. I wanted you finally to choose one. Bitch.”
PART FOUR
FORTY
My breath rasps in my throat and there is a tonne weight of fear crushing my chest as I hear the words I will never forget—because suddenly I know that I’ve heard my husband say them once before. On a sunny morning at the end of May, the perfect day for a pool party. The twins’ tenth birthday.
Choose one, bitch.
And, finally, I remember . . .
* * *
I remember it was the day before the twins’ birthday and I was as nervous as a cat about to have kittens. My suitcase was packed and tucked away in the back of the wardrobe. Dom was working late—so he said. I knew he was out drinking, as he was most nights; I knew he would be home later, expecting to exert his conjugal rights, followed up with a punch if he wasn’t completely satisfied.
I remember Max had stopped by with a new DVD. I’d invited him to stay and watch it with us, but he seemed jittery and said he was meeting someone for a drink. So I left the twins watching the film and trailed nervously around the house, checking a cupboard here and a bookshelf there, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything they would miss. For myself, I could have walked away with just the clothes I stood up in: I was leaving Dom, taking the children to a place of safety, and I didn’t care if we were flat broke for the rest of our lives, as long as we were free.
I hadn’t told Annabel and Aidan that we’d be leaving after their party. I didn’t want to spoil their birthday—and I also knew how impossible they’d find it not to give something away. Dom would pick up on their nervous anticipation, and all would be lost. But he would be going to the train station straight after the party, heading up to Manchester for a meeting, then all I had to do was smuggle the kids and our suitcase out of the back gate, where I’d walk down the alley to meet the taxi I’d arranged to wait for us at the end of the road.
I checked my purse for the hundredth time: I still had the key to Lucy’s holiday cottage in Brighton. It was unbelievably generous of her to let us stay there for a while, but she’d insisted it was no problem. She’d bought the cottage a couple of years ago, after inheriting money from a great-aunt, and she’d been renting it out to tourists. It was going to be the place she retired to, she sai
d—since leaving Devon, she’d never stopped yearning to live by the sea again—but as she had to make some more money out of the deli first, she was more than happy for me and the kids to use her cottage as a bolthole.
I’d already met the managing agent in Brighton a couple of times, under the pretext of taking the twins for a seaside day trip, and everything was sorted: train tickets booked, accommodation arranged, taxi to arrive half an hour after the last party guests left . . .
Annabel and Aidan would be upset, though; I was worried about that. I’d always taken great pains to hide any bruises, and although I knew they were much quieter around their father than they were around me, I’d put that down to his being that much louder. Most people faded into the background around Dom; it didn’t mean the twins were frightened of him. Or did it? I couldn’t be entirely sure, and that was the biggest part of my reason for leaving . . . I would never let anything bad happen to my children: I’d given them life, and they were my life.
I remember looking for something to hide in the suitcase to comfort Annabel on our first night. I slipped into her bedroom and quickly looked around for anything that would bring a smile to her face. She’d been growing up so fast, lately, abandoning teddies in favor of teen magazines, but she was devoted to Panda. I couldn’t pack him in the case, though; she slept with his soft, furry body clutched against her every night, and she would definitely miss him at bedtime. It had to be something else—a toy she’d perhaps forgotten about, and would be happy to see again. So happy that it would take her mind off the fact that we were runaways . . .
I remember reaching under her bed, my hand sweeping around in search of something, anything. I remember the shock as my palm made contact with the sharp, pointed corner of a hardback book. I remember scooping the book out from under the bed and smiling at the picture on the cover: white roses. I’d bought the diary for Annabel as somewhere for her to write little stories about her life, but I had forgotten all about it. She probably had too, I thought, deciding to have a quick peek inside.
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