You Let Me In

by Lucy Clarke

She climbed the concrete steps, pushed open the doors. Disinfectant, stale sweat, reheated food. A reception desk. Plastic chairs. A vending machine.

  Then, later, a windowless room. Two officers, one male, one female. The male officer leant back in his chair, pushing aside a thinning curtain of auburn hair. He looked at her carefully.

  ‘It’s a very serious allegation.’

  In that one sentence, she realised that was all it was – an allegation. Not the truth. Not a lie. Simply an allegation.

  30

  Elle

  Maeve faces me in the dark driveway, her fingers curled around my wrist. ‘You lied.’

  I’m aware of the sea behind us, the flicker of my pulse beating beneath her grip.

  ‘That’s what I thought – that you’d made it up. Wanted the attention.’ Her hand drops away. ‘But I was wrong, wasn’t I?’

  I blink. Her question is distant, as if being pitched from a far-off place.

  ‘When I asked Luke what happened, he looked me in the eye and told me, unequivocally, that he didn’t touch you.’ She swallows. ‘I believed him. He was my husband. His baby was growing inside me. I had our future as a family mapped out. I had to believe him.’

  I hold myself very still. I do not speak.

  ‘And then, days later, you dropped the charges. Left the course. Quit university.’

  I remember the sidelong glances of my course-mates, the hushed whispers within the walls of my student house.

  ‘No one believed me,’ I say at last, my voice thin, a shadow.

  Maeve stares at me.

  ‘I told the police that I thought he’d been following me. That he’d been lurking outside my student house. I told them he’d picked me up once in his car, but he denied it. He had an alibi.’

  ‘Me.’

  I nod. ‘You lied for him.’

  ‘I worked in the humanities library – I saw all the young students flirting with him, trying to impress him. I listened to the whisperings beyond the bookshelves.’ She pauses, eyes fixed on mine. ‘Do you know, I heard you once? You were talking to another girl. I was standing nearby stacking books on a trolley. The girl you were with asked if you’d fuck him.’

  The comment makes me flinch. I remember the day, remember the librarian standing nearby with her back to us. I know every word of the answer I’d given.

  ‘In my mind, you were a girl who’d let her imagination ride wild. I believed so deeply in my husband that I wanted everyone else to have the measure of you.’

  I blink. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I made sure I discussed the situation with colleagues loud enough for students to overhear. I wanted the wind of favour to shift, for people to suspect you. To doubt you.’

  My head shakes from side to side as I begin to understand. ‘You posted an envelope through my student door, didn’t you?’

  Maeve looks at me as she nods. She says the word that was written inside with red lipstick. ‘Liar.’

  I can feel tears leaking from the edges of my eyes. ‘When did you find out the truth?’

  She shifts, gravel crunching beneath her feet. ‘Four years later. A girl came into the library – must have found out I was Luke’s wife. She said, Get your husband to stop stalking me! She told me they’d screwed a couple of times, but he’d become obsessed, kept following her between her workplace and student house. That he’d had her pinned up against a wall.’

  A slick of bile rises in my throat.

  ‘I knew then he’d lied about you.’

  I cup my fingers around my mouth, breathing the warm, moist air trapped in my hands. The ground seems to sway.

  ‘I thought,’ I whisper, ‘that I was wrong. That I had … remembered it incorrectly. No one believed me. Not the police. Not my friends. I didn’t even tell my family. I was scared they wouldn’t believe me either.’

  When I’d gone to the police, I felt like it was my word thrown into question. They had focused on the alcohol and drugs, the outfit I’d been wearing, the flirtatious comments I’d made the weeks before. But not what happened in that room, not the moment I said, No. It had confounded me so deeply, cast such a dark shadow of doubt that I’d questioned myself, my ability to recall the specific details of what had happened, my own culpability.

  If I’d amended the truth – not told them that, Yes, there had been a point at which I was attracted to him; Yes, I’d snorted coke just hours before; Yes, I’d flirted with him in a bar the previous night; Yes, I’d curtsied to him in a lecture hall filled with students – if I’d missed out those details, shaped it into a clearer storyline that pointed more firmly to ‘Truth’, then perhaps I would have been believed.

  I’ve learned in the years since that truth is something varying and slippery, and that lies sometimes help shade in the harder areas of the truth. That knowledge has altered me, caused me to misjudge situations, make wrong decisions – bend a fact so far that it can no longer return to its former shape. Black and white have become layers of grey.

  ‘I thought about trying to locate you, telling you I believed you,’ Maeve says. ‘But I didn’t. I feared dredging it up – for Phoebe’s sake. Then, all these years later, I saw your photo on the back of a book I was unpacking in the library. I couldn’t believe it was you. A bestselling author.’ She pauses, shaking her head. ‘You had turned your life around. He hadn’t robbed you of that.’

  My teeth meet my lower lip, pressing down into the warm flesh.

  She has no idea how he has changed my life.

  ‘I want you to know,’ Maeve says, ‘that the day that second girl visited me in the library, I left him. I packed our things, collected Phoebe from pre-school, and drove straight to Cornwall to stay with my mother. I left Luke a note and said if he came looking for us, I’d go to the police myself.’

  ‘Did he?’

  She shakes her head. ‘We never saw him again.’

  ‘He drowned.’

  Maeve sets her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. ‘It was suicide.’

  My eyes widen.

  ‘I received a letter from him at my mother’s the day his body was found. He wrote that he couldn’t reconcile the two men that lived in him: the father, and the “other” as he referred to himself. I didn’t tell the police about the letter. I’ve told no one, not my mother, not Steven, and certainly not my daughter.’

  She pauses, looking me straight in the eye. ‘I do not want Phoebe to find out who he really was. Ever. In her mind, Luke Linden is a loving father who tragically drowned. That is the story.’ She takes a breath. ‘I know you don’t owe me a thing. But I’m asking you – begging you – to keep it that way.’

  I think about the manuscript saved on my laptop, the story of a girl who wasn’t believed, of a man who misused his position of power. I think of the pregnant wife I’ve written about, the scenes that I’ve laboured over, crafted.

  Lived.

  ‘Promise me,’ Maeve says.

  31

  Elle

  ‘Shift the lens on your characters. Adjust the angle of the lens to reveal – or expose – the truth of their character.’

  Author Elle Fielding

  The sea lies before me, flat and unruffled by wind, glassy in the thin morning light. Behind me, tall fronds of dune grass neither sway nor shiver. Footprints on the sand remain cemented there. A stillness pervades the air and I feel suspended, held by it, as if each moment is stretched.

  I drop my towel and wade forward. The sea parts and folds, enveloping me in its icy embrace. I can’t regulate my breathing and I fight against the cold with jerking uneven strokes and frantic kicks, my muscles contracting, shrinking.

  The light refracts through the water, so my limbs look distant, ghost-white.

  It takes me longer than normal, but eventually I find a rhythm. With each stroke, each kick, my breath begins to regulate. The clarity of my thought becomes centred, sharpens.

  I think of Luke Linden. Out here in the water, this is my space, my terms. I wonder
where life would have taken me if I’d been believed. If I’d believed in myself. Would I have stayed at university, completed my degree? Would I still have met Flynn? Still travelled? Still walked into an abortion clinic? Or would I have had the confidence in myself, in my decisions, to think differently? And what if there’d been no Luke Linden at all? Who would I have been then?

  My mind drifts to my unfinished manuscript. I’ve weaved a story out of the dark places that I’ve never spoken about, of the nineteen-year-old girl and the lecturer in a corduroy jacket.

  I think of Maeve’s request.

  I have no intention of hurting Phoebe. I’ve worked with fake names and locations, a new timeline. It will appear to readers as a work of fiction. Only Maeve and I will know the truth in the pages. After all, this is my story. It is up to me how I tell it.

  I swim to shore with a burst of kicks.

  Now I know exactly how my novel will end.

  This novel, which has tormented and eluded me, which has seeped into my dreams, caused me to tear reams of paper from my notebooks and crush them into pellets – now opens up. I can see precisely how I will draw the threads together.

  I have two days left to do it.

  I hurry upstairs to the writing room, bare feet pounding against wood. Pushing open the door, I don’t even glance out to sea as I move into position in front of my desk, hair still wet, no coffee to prop me up. I feel the burning heat of inspiration. It is like being lit from the inside.

  Somewhere downstairs, I’m aware of my phone ringing. I ignore it. There isn’t room for anything else. Only this story.

  My fingertips fizz with anticipation as I log in to my computer and open my Author document folder, then click on my manuscript. When it opens, a sheer white screen eyeballs me.

  I scroll down – but the entire document is blank.

  I blink, confused. It can’t be. I’d been writing yesterday afternoon. I’d saved my work. This must be a file permission error.

  I snatch a breath. Close the folder, and then reopen it.

  The Word document is there, but once again, when I click on it, the pages are completely blank.

  It’s fine, I tell myself as panic begins to spill through my chest. Everything is automatically saved to the Cloud, and I also have a folder called Errata, where I save previous versions of the manuscript so that I can see the changes throughout the drafting process. I go there first, looking for the most recent draft I’ve saved.

  But when I open the document folder – it, too, is empty. There is not a single version of my manuscript, not even my earliest copy.

  My teeth press into the flesh of my lips as I think of the Facebook Live that had broadcast last night from my empty writing room. As if someone has been in here.

  My palms are sweating as I log in to the Cloud to access the online version of my files, but as I open it up, I have the awful sensation that the manuscript won’t be there either.

  I click on Author, Book 2.

  Blank.

  The back-up of my Errata document folder: blank.

  Everything: blank, blank, BLANK!

  I slam my hands against the desk, making my water glass jump, liquid sloshing over the rim.

  Stay calm, I instruct, fighting against the panic that is ricocheting through my chest. Just think.

  I take several deep breaths, feeling my ribcage expanding. This is a mistake. Just a mistake. My novel will be somewhere. My computer could have a virus and it has spread to my back-up files. I’ve saved my work. Of course I have. It’ll be somewhere.

  At least once a week, I email my manuscript to myself, so that the document stays on a server, not only my hard-drive. It is a failsafe. I probably haven’t done it for a few days, but at the very least, the previous version will be there, tucked away in my archive folder of sent emails.

  I open my email account, ignoring the latest batches of messages that flood in, and go straight to Archives.

  ‘No …’ I whisper as I look at the empty screen. There is absolutely nothing there. Not a single saved email. I click on my Sent folder – but it, too, is empty.

  I’m blinking rapidly as I trawl through my Deleted folder, then my Recycle Bin, but there are no messages from myself in there, either.

  I push away from my desk, standing. I pace across the writing room, hands clenching and unclenching, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing.

  Have I even written a fucking novel? Is this … all in my head?

  I laugh at the sheer lunacy of the thought. Of course I have written it! I was writing yesterday. I’ve lived it. Breathed it. I was sitting right here, adding to it, shaping it, coaxing it nearer to an ending.

  I have written a book. And now it is gone.

  Maeve. Her name appears in my thoughts like a shot being fired.

  I can hear the steel in her voice as she’d warned that Phoebe must never learn the truth about Luke Linden. Would she have deleted the manuscript?

  She was capable of falsifying an alibi, and of sullying my name to protect her husband. What lengths would she go to in order to protect her daughter?

  When I was writing in the library, I’d left my laptop for several minutes – long enough for Maeve to read a scene or two, decide she couldn’t let my manuscript be published.

  I press the heels of my hands hard into my eye sockets, trying to think. I revisit the idea that Maeve had rented this house under the fake profile of Joanna. Was her husband, PC Steven Cart, somehow involved? My thoughts are spinning faster and faster, none of them quite connecting.

  I need to speak to Maeve. It can’t wait.

  I hurry downstairs, shove my feet into boots, yank my coat from its hook. As I am pushing my arms into the sleeves, pulling the collar to my neck – that is when I feel it. Something solid, yet fragile beneath my fingertips.

  I glance down.

  Then scream.

  I tear at the coat, ripping it from my body, pulling my arms free. I wrench open the front door and fling it out of the house. It collapses on my doorstep, deflated, inanimate.

  I slam the door, then stand in the hallway, hands clasped to my throat, heart skittering.

  A dead moth, its powdered wings sealed against its body, has been pinned to my coat.

  A guttural cry leaves my throat.

  I press myself back against the wall. My legs are shaking, threatening to buckle.

  I hear a noise, spin around. But it is just my own breath, ragged and uneven.

  I catch sight of myself in the mirror – I am ghost-white. The balance of my face seems altered: my cheekbones are too prominent, my eyes sunken. I press my palm against my forehead as if checking a child for a temperature – but the skin there is cool to touch.

  I think of Maeve taking my coat at book club last night, hanging it on her wooden stand. Has she done this? Or someone else who was there? The whole book club knows about my mottephobia.

  I screw my eyes shut. Maybe it is all in my mind. Other recent mistakes spread like heat in my thoughts: the missing author talk notes; the bathroom tap I left running; the funeral I missed; my utter conviction that I’d been locked in my writing room.

  I open my eyes, instructing myself to move. My fingers grip the door latch. I open it, heart hammering. My coat lies puddled on the step. I inch closer, as if expecting it to lurch awake. The collar is obscured. With my foot, I nudge the material. I need to be sure.

  I peer down.

  There it is. A dead moth attached to the collar. Its wings dusky brown, its body barred with pink and black. A safety pin pierces its abdomen, pinning it in the exact place of my missing brooch.

  This isn’t in my head.

  It is real.

  32

  Elle

  ‘Can you come over?’ I whisper into my phone.

  There is no hesitation. No question. ‘I’m on my way.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Fiona is standing on the front step, my coat dangling from her hand.

  ‘Having a clear-out?’
/>   I step back. ‘Look at the collar.’

  Fiona pulls the material closer – then her face screws up. ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘Someone pinned it to my coat.’

  ‘You are bullshitting—’ She stops when she sees my expression.

  ‘Leave it outside,’ I instruct.

  I pull my sister into the house, hurriedly telling her about the deleted manuscript. I’m aware my explanation sounds surreal, breathless, as words spill from my lips.

  Eventually Fiona holds up her hands. ‘I need to see it. Let me look at your computer.’

  Fiona peers at the screen, her brow furrowed as she examines the blank documents where my manuscript should have been.

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  I feel vindicated that she is witnessing this, too.

  Fiona’s head shakes from side to side as she says, ‘I just don’t see—’

  ‘How this could’ve happened?’

  We go downstairs.

  Daylight has faded into dusk, but the kitchen feels overly bright, everything too vivid, the sound of my footsteps beating against wood, the tick of the clock, the roar of waves through the open window.

  I talk, pace, talk.

  Fiona watches me, saying nothing.

  ‘My deadline is tomorrow. There’s no book to deliver – not even part of one.’ My head shakes as I race through the implications. ‘The novel is scheduled for release next summer. The copy editor is booked. The production plans are in place. The design team are poised and ready to begin work on the jacket. All that wasted time, wasted money. They’ll drop me. The contract will be void. I’m going to lose this house. Lose everything.’

  Fiona goes to the fridge and I watch her take out a pint of milk. Then she finds a pan in a lower cupboard. She is, I realise, going to make hot chocolate. It is what our mother always did when we were girls.

  ‘Sit.’

  I park myself on a kitchen stool. There’s something vaguely comforting about my sister clattering around the kitchen, sprinkling chocolate powder into the pan, searching out a wooden spoon.

  ‘What do you think is happening?’ I ask.