Chapter 26

26

Nate keeps texting me. I don't reply, press Delete. I can't face either of them anymore, these two men in my life who I should be able to trust, to love, yet now each of them begins to scare me. Who is really lying? Which one of them was there when she died? My mind spins with the scenarios, the endless lies and subterfuge.

The receipt sits on my desk, daring me to act, but I do nothing. A day or so later Priya emails to let me know we have nothing to worry about as far as Kath's threats are concerned. Nate is cc'd in and they exchange barbed comments about Kath, how unreasonable she is being. Factually, the memoir is watertight, she can't sue on the basis that Nate's recollections of Eva sound nothing like the sister she knew.

The subjectivity of memory works in our favor. Don't we remember everyone differently? And, she says, you can't libel a dead person. I stay out of it, leave well alone.

It is the following evening when I'm a little over halfway through editing the final manuscript. There's a ripple of knuckle on the door. My heart plummets. I assume it's Tony until I remember he has Amira's key.

I peer through the spy hole and a convex reflection of Nate's face peers back. My hand springs to my mouth. I dart back into the sitting room, quickly rip down the photos pinned to my board, of Algos House, of Nate and Eva, aware that my professional research could be mistaken for prurience, obsession even. I stash them in the back of my desk drawer, along with Eva's receipt, and fly back to the hall door.

He raps again, with full-fisted urgency.

"Nate?"

I open the door and he pushes past me into the narrow hallway, a wild look in his eyes, as if he hasn't really planned beyond this point.

"We need to talk," he mumbles as I let him walk ahead of me toward the half-light of the sitting room. His eyes dart to the corners. I take Nate in for a moment before the accusations fly.

He briefly scans the books on my shelves, the stacks of memoirs and biographies on the floor. Medics and scientists from the frontline of grief. He stares sourly at two photographs above my desk, Tony and I as children, my mother and father. I watch him absorbing all this, the dimensions of my life that have always been so mysterious to him, trying to work out the shape of me, exactly who I am when I'm not with him. We are strangers to each other now. He could be capable of anything, a ruthless killer standing in my front room.

I inch toward the hallway, wondering if I could make a run for the front door if necessary. I can't help noticing how out of place he seems, away from the opulence of Algos House, pacing up and down the short length of my sitting room. I realize, watching him, how much I rely on degrees of separation to give me an illusion of control, how anxious it makes me when the boundaries dissolve between his life and mine.

"Nate?"

"Please, I have to ask you first." He stops pacing and turns to me. "Why the hell did you do it?"

"Do what?" I struggle to steady my voice, indignant that he's got there first. I should be the one accusing him of dishonesty and deception, worse.

"You went into her room after I left you alone." His tone brims with rage. "You took something of hers, didn't you? Her journal is missing."

I bite my lip, playing for time.

"You waited until I left the house and then you went through her things. How far does this go back? Your obsession with Eva. I thought about that night, how preoccupied you'd been with her room. Your intense interest, I couldn't help noticing, when I joked about showing you around. After you left, I went in to check. I wanted to think I'd misread you." He shakes his head, his eyes ablaze. "Jade told me about your last little visit, making some excuse about finding the cat."

"I guess she told you about how she took one of Eva's rings too?"

"You're accusing Jade of stealing from my wife's bedroom too? A new low, even by your standards."

"Nate, she was wearing—"

"Eva's ring? You think you're some sort of detective and I didn't know that?" His muscles stiffen with anger. "I let Jade have some of Eva's jewelery. Eva gave her gifts all the time. Let someone enjoy it is exactly what she would have said. Jade isn't a thief. You on the other hand—"

"Stop it." I twist away from him. He could be testing me, but he sounds as if he definitely knows this isn't true. His eyes burn into me and I feel as if I've reached the end of the line, all out of options.

"Alright, yes. It was her self-reflection journal, the one she used for work," I say, so quietly I can barely hear myself. "I found it jammed in a space behind one of the drawers."

"You really were thorough, weren't you, turning over my wife's bedroom?" He lets out a bitter laugh. "Fucking hell, Anna, you're a piece of work."

"I'm—"

He holds his arm up. "I don't want to hear it. Just tell me where her journal is." There's a tremor in his voice, a wariness that is new to me.

"So you've read it then? I need to tell you something before I do. About my brother, Tony."

There's a pause as I let his name permeate.

"My half brother. You know exactly who I'm talking about. I know you know about the affair...their affair."

His features harden, his mannerisms brittle as glass. He has reason to be explosive but how much will he take it out on me?

The moment stretches. Outside there is the familiar London sound of suitcase wheels on pavement, the flinty sound of transience and escape. I wish I could be anywhere but here. Nate taps his foot on the floorboards.

"Eva was also Tony's psychotherapist," I say, emotionless. There's no way to soften those words and so I don't bother trying. "That's it. That's all I know. After my telephone interview with her, I remember I enthused about her to Tony, and I suppose it was enough to make him think of her when he wanted to see a therapist."

"Your brother," he echoes, incredulous, more to himself than to me. His voice falls to a low snarl. "Go and get it. Now."

He stands up, moves toward the desk, squints at the photos there of Tony and myself that hang above it. Black dots pepper my vision as I walk across the room and open the drawer.

Nate strides toward me, rips it from my hand, leafs through her entries and reads one. I imagine Eva's smoky tones resonating, curling closer around us as he scans her words with new eyes. He needles his temples with his fingers, looks up at me with a granite stare devoid of emotion.

"My brother was Patient X, not me," I say, evenly. "But, Nate. I didn't know. I only discovered it myself when I read the journal. We got on well and she offered me one session with her. That's all it was. I agreed I could write an interesting piece on it."

"Of course you did," he sneers.

"Listen, I went along and...it didn't work out. As you can imagine, I hated talking about myself, digging up the past. I was there for around forty minutes and I left, never saw her again. I swear it's the truth."

Nate ignores my protestations, begins to read.

"Patient X: I wasn't very—I mean, I struggle to be open, to talk about myself, what I've really been through. That's what people tell me." He lets out a deep sigh. "It just sounds an awful lot like you, Anna. Almost as if that first therapy session she offered you may have led to many others?"

"If you keep reading that journal, it's obvious. She even writes that Patient X had a younger sister."

"Is it?" he cuts in. "If it's Tony, have you told him about it?"

"God, no. I was too scared to tell him." I laugh, a little unhinged, as the words hang between us. "I swear it's not me in that journal. I was never Eva's patient, and I didn't go into her room looking for it. It's unforgivable that I went behind your back. I wanted to find out more about her, to get closer to you, find out if I stood a chance, I suppose. If I could ever measure up."

"Working with me gave you the perfect opportunity to dig around for any dirty secrets you could find to sell to the papers, didn't it? The way you lit up that day when I said you'd have the afternoon to yourself," he muses. "You probably cased her bedroom then, didn't you? That night, everything before that, was a means to an end."

"You're not listening, Nate. What do you want me to say? You meant nothing to me?"

"At least it would be more honest."

"You really think I could have spent all this time with you as part of some bizarre plan to expose your past for the sake of my career? The evening you drove me home, at the Rosen? The other night?" I glare at him, blood rushes in my ears. "You think I'm that person?"

He shrugs. "Nothing would surprise me. You've spent the last few weeks insisting that honesty is everything, no more self-deception, open up on the page. All the time you've been a liar."

"It was so wrong of me, I'm sorry. Really I am. But I couldn't help feeling there were answers in her room, answers you weren't telling me. I think Tony went to see Eva after I did because maybe he was worried about something I'd tell her. If he started seeing her himself, there was a chance he could find her notes from my session, or rewrite the narrative to protect himself? I don't know, Nate. It's a theory but—"

"A theory," he mimics. "And what terrible thing could you have told Eva about that he'd fear so much?"

"It's beside the point. You're such a hypocrite. While we're talking about lies, what about you? If you're so innocent, why didn't you tell me you were with Eva on the day she died? Why didn't you tell the inquest?"

I watch as confusion clouds his expression. "You know I wasn't with her that day—I was in Manchester."

"Were you? Look at me and tell me honestly that the day you came home to find the pregnancy test wasn't the day she died?"

Something in his expression crumbles, hollows out. In the sunlight slanting through the blinds, his complexion looks ashy, strands of his hair stick up at right angles. He looks vulnerable in a way I hadn't allowed myself to notice before, shattered, utterly alone.

"I have the receipt for it," I say levelly. "That was in Eva's bedroom too. It's how I know you know about her and Tony. You came back, found the pregnancy test and you fought about it. You left her in a terrible state, vulnerable to using again and lied about it afterward. That's the truth, isn't it? And the fentanyl—"

"I was there that lunchtime," he cuts me off, voice cracking. "I didn't tamper with the drugs she took that evening, if that's what you're insinuating. She confessed her affair with an Anthony Thorpe . We rowed and screamed at each other. She ran at me, swore in my face. I know there's no excuse but—" He inhales to steady himself. "I guess I gripped her too tightly, the fingermark bruising on her arm was me. I felt terrible but we talked afterward, I apologized over and over. By the time I left, we'd made up and then I drove up to Manchester."

"But somehow you forgot to tell the inquest about it. You've lied all along, left stuff out when it suits you. You've known since Dungeness that she was having an affair with my brother."

"Look, I should have told you when you mentioned Tony at the lunch. It was only then the name fell into place, the surname that was different to yours."

"I could tell you were thrown but you improvised pretty quickly and lied yet again, making up that affair between Priya and Eva to distract me."

"I was weak, I realize. I liked you. If you'd discovered the truth about Tony at that point, it would have thrown the whole project into jeopardy. There was no way we could have carried on... I didn't want that to happen."

"Agreed. Very weak," I say, bitterly.

"I was scared too. I knew how damning it would look for me: the vengeful scorned husband, discovering his wife is pregnant with another man's child the exact same day she dies? I didn't plan to lie to you, but I had to cover my tracks to look as if it happened three months earlier. I knew it was too early in her pregnancy for it to show up in the autopsy, and there was no reason for them to do a pregnancy test. Surely the important thing is I had an alibi that evening. Plenty of people saw me at the conference in Manchester around the time she died. There's no way I could have been with her."

He sits back down at the table facing me, the journal gripped in his hand.

"But we can't really know that you didn't lace the drugs. On the scale of deceit, yours is way worse than mine," I say, realizing how suddenly frightened I am that it could be true. "I think the police would agree with me."

He shifts in his seat, looks at me. We are so close, his hand an inch away from mine. A sense of self-preservation takes over me, my survival instinct. I know how quickly his temper can turn. I could call the police.

"You must know I'm innocent. Look at me, Anna." His voice drops to a soft murmur. "I've devoted my life to trying to help others, trying to cure their pain. I'm a good guy. I'm not guilty of anything."

"Aren't you?"

"Well, aren't you?" he echoes back at me.

"I've never harmed anyone," I say, emphasizing each word.

"Really? I wonder." A savage glint shines in his eyes. "The harm you've both done. You and Tony. The pair of you. Destroying my marriage, tainting our lives. You're both... damaged. How could you think we had a future together? You and I never stood a chance."

The contempt in his tone is a final twist of the knife.

"Please, just go," I almost whisper, turning away. A moment later the door slams.

It's only when he is gone, I realize he took the journal with him.