34. Adam

34

ADAM

S he’s not leaving.

Reliving this particular chain of events from twenty years ago is always draining, whether it’s with my therapist, a journalist, or a group of men in one of the many rehabilitation sessions I do with current and former inmates.

But none of them are quite as draining as treading that exhausting path, pushing through the chokehold of weeds such as waste and grief and deep, deep regret, in front of my victim’s sister, a woman I’m increasingly mesmerised by and, as luck would have it, a woman who suffers from exactly the same condition as Ellen.

I have to believe the universe is giving me another chance, a chance to care for someone consistently enough that they thrive. I have to believe history isn’t so cruel as to repeat itself.

Natalie isn’t Ellen.

‘Here’s the thing, though,’ I begin haltingly. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for going to Lisa’s that night, but I’ve done enough work on myself to know that’s the most thankless kind of what if. What I did to your brother, though… That was all me.

‘You can rail and rail against circumstance and luck and accidents of birth and shitty parents. But at some point, you have to take responsibility. It was my fists that did all that damage, and I had to deal with the most epic fucking shit-show because of it.’

The awful truth is that I didn’t fully comprehend the graveness of my crimes against Stephen Bennett until I began pre-trial prep with my feisty state-appointed lawyer, because I was far more consumed by the enormous act of self-sabotage I’d committed. That I’d robbed Quinn and Dad of my support, my presence, in the most spectacular fashion and at a time when my family had never needed me more consumed every fucking hour I spent incarcerated.

‘You mean your sister?’ Natalie asks now.

‘Yeah.’

‘Did your dad get to keep her?’ she asks in a voice so soft it’s like she’s terrified of what my answer will be.

‘Yeah. By the skin of his teeth. But it wasn’t pretty. Imagine—me, mum and Ellen all gone. Just like that. The poor girl had a shocker, totally fucked up her GCSEs.’

She winces. ‘Oh God. It’s all so awful. Is she—is she okay now?’

‘She’s doing pretty well. She’s a sculptor—she’s really talented.’

I put Quinn’s life on hold when I went to Lisa’s that night, and I really stomped all over any chance of normality for her when I beat the shit out of Natalie’s brother. That year I was in prison she spent in survival mode, and I’ve spent the past twenty years making amends.

Nat’s silent for a second, leaning into me, her hand on my thigh, her touch showing me that, incredibly, she’s here for me.

‘And what about you?’ she asks.

I frown. ‘What about me?’

‘Well, how did you cope in prison?’ She hesitates. ‘Did you fall apart? Because God knows, it would have been the obvious thing to do. You were grieving and in massive shock.’

I consider the question. I can see why that would be her assumption, but the reality was pretty different.

‘In the beginning, maybe. But I’d already fallen apart, to be honest. I’d say putting your brother in hospital was my lowest low. I was still so fucking angry when they arrested me, but I was probably still in shock, too.’

She bites her lower lip and nods.

I clear my throat. ‘I had this lawyer, Anne. She was probably only forty, but she felt ancient, and she was fucking terrifying. Told me our only hope was to make the judge sympathetic to our case, given the circumstances.’

‘Surely they were black and white? You’d just suffered a horrific loss, and you were basically Quinn’s best option as a guardian. Shouldn’t they have taken that all into account?’

I smile at the moral outrage on her beautiful face and slide my hand around her neck. ‘Hey. You’re not supposed to be on my side, remember?’

She purses her lips disapprovingly but doesn’t argue.

‘I think that worked both ways. The judge didn’t see me as fit to care for her, given the stunt I pulled. He ordered that I get some therapy in prison, but that was about it.’

‘Was it juvie?’

‘Nope. I was eighteen, so I got the full works.’

‘Shit,’ she says faintly. ‘Was it… horrific?’

It was horrific and relentless and inhuman and devastating, but I was so broken by that point, so wracked with guilt, that I barely cared.

‘It wasn’t fun,’ is all I say. It was my cross to bear, and I ruined Natalie’s family as well as my own, so I have no intention whatsoever of allowing her to feel any more sympathy than necessary.

‘So how did you get from’—she waves the hand on my thigh around—‘there to here? I mean, who the hell pulls that off outside of a rags-to-riches novel?’

That makes me laugh, because a journalist once used that very analogy in an article about my so-called meteoric rise.

‘Anne, my scary-as-fuck lawyer, gave me a real talking-to when I got sent down.’ She was utterly furious, and I know she was furious on my behalf, rather than with me, but she sure as hell channelled that fury into a hell of a bollocking.

‘She told me that I’d already proven to myself and everyone else how royally I could fuck up an already terrible situation with my actions, so I’d better make sure every action from now counted.’

I remember she said I could choose to be a victim or I could choose to be proactive. She told me my sentence could be a spectacular waste of a year of my life or a period of readjustment. Reprioritisation. A time I could use to lay the foundations for not only the kind of life I wanted for myself, but the kind of man I wanted to be.

The kind of man I wanted to be.

Her anger, her vehemence, was probably the biggest compliment I’d received at that point in my life. Her insistence that I counted, that my future and my potential counted, was the seedling I needed—tiny, but with potential buried somewhere deep inside its DNA.

In the same way that a humble acorn carries within itself a universe of promise, the ghosts of future metre-wide trunks and scalloped leaves, of shelter and abundance equally, so did this exhausted, terrified, angry kid carry in himself that kernel.

Anne, God bless her, was the first person to plant that seedling, to suggest that betting on myself was the smart thing to do.

She was also the first person to thrust a metaphorical mirror in front of me and demand that I acknowledge my own agency. My actions had consequences—I’d proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt—and if I wanted to change those consequences, it was down to me to act accordingly.

Less philosophically, but more urgently, I knew the day I got out was the day I’d start making it up to Quinn and Dad. And I didn’t want to waste a minute.

‘Well, you clearly made your actions count,’ Natalie says now. ‘And it’s all very well to have people say these things to you, or even to believe them, but you made things happen. That’s a big deal.’

I shrug at that, because there were people who found me, who helped me, who dragged me out of that pit of despair, even people who should have walked away.

‘You know I met Anton when I was in prison,’ I say, stopping to laugh at her horrified expression. ‘ He wasn’t in prison—I was. At the time, he ran this kind of entrepreneurship programme at the place I was in and at a women’s one. I signed up because I was bored out of my brain and I’d already wrecked my chances of sitting my A Levels.’ I shrug. ‘It was something to do, and I fucking loved it.’

Understatement. That programme put a fire in my belly like nothing else had, even before I’d got myself banged up.

‘You’re kidding me! You’ve known him all this time? My God, he must be so proud of how far you’ve come. ’

‘He was until his wife got mad that her husband’s protegé had beaten up your brother,’ I tell her with a smile, and she grimaces.

‘Yeah. I can’t imagine incurring Gen’s wrath is fun for anyone, even the mighty Anton Wolff.’

I shudder as I think of how pissed off she was that evening, how utterly outraged on Natalie’s behalf. ‘Tell me about it. You’ve got a badass woman in your corner there.’

‘She won’t believe it when I tell her I spent another night at yours—willingly, this time. But go on, tell me about this programme.’

I grin at the memory. ‘It was a theoretical case study about this failing packaged consumer goods company—it was a Harvard Business School one, if you can believe it. I think that was probably part of his plan: giving us an HBS case study was his way of saying he believed in us.

‘Anyway, I was the youngest person there, and definitely the keenest. I got some flack about it from the others. But I was fucking obsessed. He gave us each a folder and it had all sorts—P&Ls, balance sheets, qualitative stuff, sector themes, everything.

‘We had to come up with a plan for their board to vote on. Their financials were really shaky. Everything was on the table—raising equity, taking on more debt, divestments… whatever we thought would stem the outflows. He came back once a month, and I had more questions every time he showed up.

‘I spent hours and hours analysing the financial statements, trying to work out what the fuck all the acronyms meant, trying to understand how they flowed, reverse-engineering them. In the end, he brought me more accounting textbooks, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time with them, too.’ I glance up and halt at the expression on her face. She’s staring at me with so much emotion, and, from where I’m sitting, none of it looks like hatred. ‘What?’

‘I’m imagining eighteen-year-old Adam in a prison cell with just a pile of textbooks for company, and I’m trying really hard not to lose it,’ she whispers, her hand sliding up my neck so she can scratch at my beard with her fingernails.

‘Hey.’ I lean my forehead to hers. ‘I deserved everything I got. Your brother lost an eye because of me, remember? And besides, it was the best thing they could have done for me. I came out of that place with a handful of people who believed in me and a sound understanding of the basics of business and finance. If I’d stayed at school, there’s no way I would have pulled it together enough to get my A Levels, and God knows what I would have done.’

She’s still scratching softly at my beard, and it feels so good. ‘How did you get a job, if you didn’t have any A Levels?’

I smile against her mouth. ‘Anton took a chance on me,’ I say, and then I kiss her.

There’s a time for talking.

There’s so much more to say.

But it can all wait.