Ex, The

by Moriarty, Nicola

  I grabbed a clean towel, took it in to him, waited at the ensuite door until I heard the water turn on and the shower screen door close, then I ran back out to the living room.

  ‘Now,’ I said to Georgia. ‘Come out now, quickly.’ I reached behind the couch to pull her up and she grabbed hold of my hand. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I don’t know how much time we have.’

  We were hurrying towards the door when Georgia stopped still. ‘Cadence!’ she said, her voice high with alarm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, my purse. I left my purse on the coffee table. Do you think he saw it?’

  I snatched it up and shoved into her hands. ‘Fuck,’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I have no idea . . . but he didn’t act like he’d seen anything. Come on, you just have to go. We’ll have to assume he didn’t see it.’

  ‘What do we do next?’ Georgia asked as I shepherded her towards the door.

  ‘We both pretend we don’t know anything for now. And as soon as possible, we meet up and we figure out what the hell is going on. Hang on, give me a sec.’

  I left Georgia at the door and dashed back to the kitchen bench where I kept a notepad and a pen. I scribbled down my number and then raced back and thrust the piece of paper at her. ‘Text me tomorrow, but not until after 9 am, got it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  I pushed her out the door and closed it behind her, my heart beating so fast it felt like it was pulsing through the walls. I listened. The sound of the shower had stopped already. That had to be the fastest shower he’d even taken. Why so fast? Maybe he had seen the purse? I moved away from the door and positioned myself in front of the open fridge, pretending I was examining the contents to find something for dinner, just as Luke appeared from the bedroom. His hair wet, a towel tied around his waist.

  ‘You say something, Cade?’ he asked.

  I turned around and did my best to look confused. ‘What? Me? No, I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I heard you talking.’

  I pursed my lips and shook my head. ‘Nope. So, what do you feel like for dinner?’

  PART THREE

  Georgia and Cadence

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Georgia

  When she stepped out onto the street she let go of the chest full of air she’d been holding all the way down in the lift. A part of her wanted to giggle at the absurdity of it all. Here she was, running from her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s apartment so that her boyfriend didn’t catch her because apparently, the ex-girlfriend wasn’t an ex at all.

  But it wasn’t funny, it was awful. And the more Georgia thought about it, the more the gravity of the situation crept up on her, forcing her to stop and lean one hand against a wall for support as she tried to calm her thoughts. I’m not doing that again, I’m not going to have another panic attack and I’m not going to hyperventilate. I’m going to keep my shit together and get to my car and drive myself home and pour myself a drink.

  As she walked to her car, she silently thanked the parking gods for the lack of spots available out the front of Cadence’s building when she’d arrived earlier, meaning she’d had to park around the corner. What would have happened if Luke had seen her car right there? Although there was still the chance he’d seen her purse on the coffee table, wasn’t there? But surely he would have reacted if he had, said something to Cadence, right?

  In the car, she turned the radio right down and spoke out loud to herself as she drove towards the turn-off for the Lane Cove Tunnel. ‘What next, Georgia? What do I do now? Do I go to the police? Do I wait? Do I call someone? Rick? Amber? Mum and Dad?’

  She kept her speed at about fifteen kilometres under the limit; she felt as though she couldn’t trust herself to drive any faster, not while her heart was still thudding as if she’d sprinted around an oval.

  Her heart didn’t settle until she’d reached the M2, and it was then that she heard the ding from her phone sitting in the centre console. She chanced a quick glance at the screen. She wasn’t going to pick it up, she absolutely wasn’t. She knew full-well how dangerous, how distracting it was to use your phone while driving.

  But the words jumped out at her.

  It was from Luke, and she could see the preview of the message on her locked screen:

  I know your secret . . .

  Her heart skipped a beat. He knew. He knew she’d been at Cadence’s place tonight.

  There was nowhere on the motorway to pull over. Her windpipe seemed to contract and her breathing became laboured. She reached for the phone. Just a quick look. Just to see what the rest of the message said. She fumbled and the phone slipped from her hand and dropped between her legs. She looked down to see where it had gone. When she looked up again, she realised her mistake too late.

  The car only clipped the barrier in the centre of the motorway, and maybe it would have been okay, but in her panic she over-corrected, wrenching the steering wheel back the other way. The sudden turn was enough to cause the car to lose its grip on the road. And in that moment, she couldn’t understand why the world had started tumbling. It wasn’t until just before she hit her head and blacked out that she realised.

  Oh, the world isn’t tumbling, I am.

  I fucked up.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Cadence

  I’d barely touched my dinner. That didn’t seem to really concern Luke though; he cleared my plate away without asking if I was done.

  ‘I’ve just got to make some work calls,’ he said, ‘so I might hole myself up in the bedroom for a bit, if that’s okay?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay out here and give you some privacy.’

  I wondered what he was actually doing. Calling Georgia? A thought occurred to me then. What if there were others? What if he was cheating with more than one woman? Was that all this was to him? Some kind of conquest to bed as many women as possible? To string us along just because he could? Or was there more to it than that? At this point, anything seemed possible.

  As Luke picked up his computer and his phone and headed for the bedroom, I pushed my hands into my pockets and my fingers touched the bottle of tablets I’d shoved in there earlier. I remembered Georgia’s comments as I’d taken the Serenity pills.

  Those aren’t Serenity.

  She’d said it with absolute certainty. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the jar, then unscrewed the lid and poured a few into my hand. I went to my computer, which was set up on a desk in the corner of the living room, and tapped the keys to wake it up. I copied the name of the medication from the bottle into Google and hit image search. The screen filled with various pictures — some packets, some bottles, and some of the actual pills. None of them looked like the large oval-shaped pills I was holding in my hand. I sat still for a minute, my hands shaking, and then I felt a rage swell up inside of me and slammed my hands down on the desk, sending the pills flying everywhere.

  ‘You all right out there?’ Luke called from the bedroom, a note of irritation in his voice.

  I swallowed then called back, ‘Yep, fine, sorry.’ I didn’t bother trying to come up with an explanation. I had no idea what I would say, I couldn’t think clearly. Thankfully, he didn’t pursue it.

  I stood up and strode into the kitchen, yanked open the door of the small cupboard above the microwave where I kept all my medications, and grabbed out the other packets and bottles of tablets Luke had been giving me over the course of our relationship. The Vit-a-Peace that was supposed to be a fully natural remedy. The multivitamins. I took them back to the computer and did more searches.

  More lies. Not one of the images I found matched up with the corresponding tablets Luke had given me. I picked up one of the tablets and tried putting a description of it into the search engine to see if I could figure out what the hell I’d been taking: Large, white oval tablet, shiny coating. There were hundreds of results and none of them seemed to match the ones I’d been taking. It was too generic. I tried another one. Squa
re tablet with rounded edges. Pink. I added the numbers that were imprinted on the side: 54 883.

  A website appeared in the search results, called ‘pill identifier’. I clicked through to the site and filled in the drop-down boxes.

  One result: methadone.

  Methadone? He’d been giving me methadone? Wasn’t that for people trying to come off serious drug addiction? I opened another tab on my browser and searched ‘Methadone tablets side effects’. A list appeared. Common side effects included anxiety, nervousness, restlessness, weakness . . . the list went on. More serious side effects were hallucinations, dizziness and confusion.

  I tried entering the details of another one into the pill identifier site.

  Shape: Round

  Colour: Blue

  Scoring: one line

  Markings: A 51

  Fourteen results. I scrolled through them and spotted an image that matched the tablet. Oxycodone. A narcotic pain reliever. Side effects included dizziness, sleeplessness, itching. Do not stop taking this drug suddenly without talking to your doctor.

  My hands were shaking. I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or scream. What had he done to me? What had I been putting into my body? And how much? How close had I been to overdosing when I blindly took as many tablets as he told me to, believing they were perfectly safe? I thought back to that day I’d stepped out in front of that bus. I thought of the weeks I’d spent trapped inside my own home, afraid to go out because my anxiety was crippling me. How dare he? Was any of it real? I’d always had issues with anxiety, before I’d even met Luke, but it had never been like this before. I thought back to all those times he’d convinced me I was sleeping badly and it had seemed so odd because I thought I was sleeping fine. It was because I really was sleeping fine, wasn’t it?

  And why? What was Luke’s motivation here for giving me these tablets? For lying to me? For keeping me on the hook while he went off and started a new life with a new woman?

  I remembered the time in the lift when I’d been afraid he was going to hurt me. I’d convinced myself he would never be capable, but then he did, didn’t he? He’d swung out and he’d hit me. If I confronted him about all of this, if I forced his hand, how was he going to react? How bad might it get?

  So, what to do next? It wasn’t like I could run away, this was my home. If there was a chance he could be dangerous, then I needed to be smart about this, I needed to be careful. I wouldn’t flush the tablets away, I’d pretend to keep taking them. But at the same time, I was going to need to figure out what the hell was actually going on. I needed to know what he wanted from me, I needed to know what his endgame was.

  I needed to know why he’d made me fall so deeply in love with him only to break my heart.

  And in the meantime, I had to talk to someone — a doctor. I needed to find out what damage had been caused by this concoction of tablets he’d been feeding me. And whether I could stop or if I had to wean myself off them.

  Which meant tomorrow I was going to have to pull myself together and leave the apartment. That was going to be easier said than done. And who could I see to ask these kinds of questions without being questioned myself? I didn’t really have a regular GP; if I needed to see a doctor, I just went to the medical centre and asked for the first available.

  Actually, maybe what I needed was a chemist. That would be less official than a doctor’s appointment, right? And they should know their medications, shouldn’t they? There was an old school friend I’d stayed connected with through Facebook who worked as a chemist in St Leonards. I decided to send her a message right now, asking if I could come and see her tomorrow, before I backed out.

  Hey Michelle, I know this is out of the blue, but I was hoping I might be able to ask a favour of you? Could I come and talk to you for some advice about some medication I’m on?

  I was relieved when the messaged showed up as ‘read’ immediately. That meant hopefully I could get this all arranged before Luke came back out of the bedroom.

  Michelle responded with the obligatory platitudes: Cadence! How are you? How long has it been? Etc. etc. But then she got to the point.

  Of course you can come and talk with me! I work 8 till 6 Monday to Thursday and 10 till 4 on Sundays. Although honestly, I’m sure any pharmacist could assist you. Or else your GP, of course.

  I came back quickly: Can I come and see you tomorrow? I knew she was going to think it was weird, but I needed to be locked in.

  Her response came back within a minute or two: Yeah, tomorrow works. Listen, why don’t you come by around 12 pm and I’ll take a break so we can grab a coffee together. Will be good to see you.

  Now I had no excuses. I absolutely had to leave the building tomorrow.

  *

  ‘Come and sit with me,’ said Luke. ‘There’s some stuff I need to talk with you about.’

  It was later that night and I was feeling weirdly wired. Obviously, I hadn’t taken any more of the tablets since the two I took earlier when Georgia was here, before I knew that they weren’t harmless vitamins. I wondered if they were the reason I was feeling wide-eyed and jittery.

  Luke took me by the hand and guided me to the couch. He had his laptop tucked under one arm. He sat down and I moved to the other end of the couch, wanting to be as far away from him as possible. Then I panicked as I realised that would probably seem suspicious, and I quickly shifted along to sit beside him.

  Luke opened up his laptop and tapped at the keys. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I know I told you we’d be right with money while you took some time off, and that I was back on top of things now that the renos are all done. But it turns out I fucked up a bit with my budgeting. Here, take a look at this.’ He turned the screen towards me so I could see a spreadsheet with figures and dates and a list of bills like rent, electricity and groceries.

  ‘I know you might not be able to cope with the extra stress right now, but I thought it was important to be honest with you. We’re in a bit of trouble. See, look here.’ He pointed at a cell in the spreadsheet with a red minus figure. ‘Right there, we go under after these bills are paid. Now I’ve actually got some savings that could cover it, but they’re tied up in term deposits at the moment and I can’t access them for four more weeks. So, we just need to sort something out to get through until then.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, wondering where he was going with this. He couldn’t want money from me, he knew I didn’t have any right now. He was the one who’d pushed me into giving up the Collins Street exhibition. ‘Well, like I said, I’m definitely improving, so I can get back to work —’

  He cut me off. ‘No way. You have to focus on getting better. But I was thinking, maybe there’s some things we could sell.’

  His eyes strayed to my art equipment that was stacked in a corner of the room: my custom-made oversized easel, my canvases and Mijello paints. My heart jumped. He wouldn’t ask that of me, would he?

  My voice stuttered as I responded, ‘I–I don’t know if I have anything worth selling.’

  He chuckled. ‘It’s okay, babe. I’m not going to ask you to sell your gear. I know how precious it is to you.’

  For the first time, I could hear the patronising tone in his voice. Had that always been there? How had I never noticed it before?

  ‘No, I was thinking more about any assets the both of us might have. I don’t know about you, but I picked up some shares from an old job that I reckon I can sell for a bit of extra cash.’

  My stomach dropped. He knew. Somehow, he knew about my safety net. About the small fortune I had set aside for later on in life. The shares I kept a careful eye on, while simultaneously trying to pretend they weren’t there because I didn’t want to ever become complacent with my work, or get too excited about how much they were worth and sell them and squander the money on something frivolous.

  Or at least that’s what I told myself. The truth was, the real reason I hadn’t been able to bring myself to sell them was because they were my connection to my
mother. To the company she’d created from the ground up.

  But then again . . . how could he know? No one knew about those shares.

  They were already worth quite a bit when my mum signed them over to me, but last year, something had happened. Her company had merged with someone else’s. The value of the shares went up, a lot.

  I spoke carefully. ‘Umm, I don’t think I have anything like that.’

  ‘Are you sure? You might have picked some up somewhere along the line. Some companies include shares as part of their salary package, for instance.’

  I wrinkled my nose as I pretended I was thinking hard. Think Cadence, think. Does he know? Or was this some sort of wild coincidence? But that seemed unlikely. Should I continue to play dumb, or fess up to the fact that I did indeed own shares? The problem was, if he really did know and I lied, then he was also going to know I was onto him, wasn’t he?

  He was giving me a funny look now. I was waiting too long. And maybe he could see it in my eyes. I made a decision.

  ‘Yeah, actually, now that you say it, I do remember getting some shares transferred over from my parents a while back. But they weren’t worth a lot so I didn’t really pay them much attention. I’d have to really search to find out how to even access them now.’

  He shrugged. ‘Hey, could be worth checking out. When you first received the shares you probably would have been set up with some kind of trading account. Do you have a standard password you usually use?’

  ‘Not really. I use lots of different passwords.’

  ‘That’s okay, don’t stress. Why don’t you let me look into it for you? I don’t want you to have the extra worry right now of trying to track down some old login. Just tell me some of the passwords you’ve used in the past.’

  ‘Okay, sure,’ I said. ‘Umm, sometimes I use the name of the dog I had when I was little. His name was Cactus.’

  ‘Cute. Right, Cactus — what else?’