Chapter 30

30

A sliver of new moon filters through the sweep of glass above me as I wander through the house. I walk into the kitchen, the last area to be packed away. Someone has started emptying the drawers, a disarray of plates, mugs and cutlery spill out across the surfaces.

I light a couple of tea lights out on the table and slip into the garden, my mind drifting back to the two memorable occasions I stood at precisely this spot with Nate. After he lost his temper during our interview and again on the night we slept with each other for the first and last time. Our sordid affair began and ended right here, both occasions sealed by the ritual of a final cigarette.

I gaze at the brooding outline of Eva's studio, a shadow through the trees, the dark shimmer of the river beyond. The one space that eluded me in Algos House, that I never got to explore. Forbidden, desirable, risky. I know it will be locked...but still. I follow the gravel path to the bottom of the garden until I make it to the door.

Just as I reach for the door handle, two high-pitched electronic beeps split the silence. I freeze, disconcerted. The alarm is coming from the main house.

I run back up the path. Maybe I disabled the lock when I entered the code.

The sliding doors are still open and I walk in, my eyes adjusting to the darkness inside.

"Nate?" I call.

"Anna."

The ceiling down-lights switch on automatically and suddenly I see him.

"Tony?" My voice rises in shock.

"Surprise," he says from the doorway, swaying slightly. "Aren't you pleased to see me?"

"You shouldn't be here now. You have to go," I say roughly and he makes an exaggerated frown.

"I've only come to say goodbye."

"How did you know I—?"

"Amira," he says, pushing me aside. His eyes have a bright, febrile quality as he glances around the hallway. "I called her, told her I needed to see you before I left. She told me about the book launch, where you'd be. I guessed the rest. It's pretty obvious where you two would meet for your final farewell."

We hover in the kitchen area, facing each other across the marble island. He stares indifferently at the rubble of mess on the surface, contents from the kitchen drawers waiting to be packed up. He sees the glass doors open into the garden, Eva's studio illuminated by the outdoor lights I've left on. He catches my eye.

"You want to go inside, don't you?" His voice is husky, insinuating. "Course you do. Come on."

He grabs my arm roughly and I let him guide me outside, back again down the path. I think of the last time I saw Amira, the state she was in thanks to my brother. It's safer to conserve my energy, pick my battle carefully. He punches Eva's date of birth into the keypad, the same one as the front door, the depth of his familiarity with Algos House slowly dawning on me.

Inside, the air is cold and musty. Floor-to-ceiling windows stare out across the river. Dusty ghost lines frame the walls where pictures hung and there are dents in the floor where a sofa used to be.

I think of Nate discovering her body here. Was it near the sofa, perhaps, or the kitchen area in the far corner? The only reminders of Eva are a few of her last remaining sculptures in the center of the room, bathed in a silvery glow.

"They're part of her final series," I say out loud to Tony, desperately trying to stall until Nate gets here. "Eva's alter ego cast in glass, personifying the goddess Hedone, who embodied pleasure and delight," I muse to myself more than him. Clearly he's in no mood for an art lesson. I slide my fingers over the curves, imagine her hands molding the hips, the sinuous edge of the thighs.

He looks at me for a moment, his features tense, volatile. Disconcertingly I can still see my mother's expressions play across his face, in the way he frowns, the faint raise at one edge of his mouth, his weak chin when he smiles. You can never quite predict how your parents will come back to haunt you.

Tony's eyes cast around the empty space, a lost look in his gaze. For a moment I sense his weakness. "You know this place, don't you, Tony? You've been here before? You were her patient. More than her patient by the end."

Moments pass before he finally nods, his eyes faraway. I open my mouth to tell him about Eva's journal but decide against it. Knowing I have that evidence to hold against him will only make him more dangerous.

He pulls out his phone. "That iPhone I gave you, the one I bought you from New York?" He flashes his screen up at me. "It's on my iCloud, linked to my account. I can read every text, every WhatsApp. The locator app was inspired." He grins at me, head tilted. My stomach twists, incandescent with rage but I don't react. I can't afford to, not yet.

"I'm sorry, Tony. I'm listening now. Tell me. What happened?"

"I loved her," he says, simply. "I really did."

A sentimental lilt creeps into his voice. His eyes soften and he looks at me like a small boy seeking absolution.

"At first, she told me there were rules. Transference. Countertransference. Meaningless terms really. She was desperate to leave Nate but when she found out she was pregnant, everything changed. She wanted to cool the whole thing down...get rid of it, keep it all a secret. She was really scared of how Nate would react if he found out, how furious he'd be that she didn't want to have it."

And then I see it, the blade of a knife in his hand, his knuckles white as he grips it. With a sickening lurch I realize he must have spotted it waiting to be packed away.

"We need to show him, Anna. Treating you like trash, Eva too. If it weren't for him, if it weren't for how badly he treated her, Eva would still be alive. We'd be together."

I have to let Nate know he's here, I need to warn him, tell him to call the police.

"Tony, please. We'll both leave now. I'll come with you. I'll do anything—" Slowly I reach for my phone in my jacket pocket. There's a thrum of alarm in my chest. Too late. Everything happens so quickly. He's behind me and I register a bolt of white-hot pain as he twists my arm up and behind my back.

My phone skitters to the floor. I shriek and his grip tightens. I twist my head to one side, see the gleam of metal still there. My body slackens in pain. He pushes me hard against the wall as I gasp for breath. I feel him stroke the knife down the side of my neck.

"How do you always manage to do this?" He sighs theatrically. "I'm not sure you really fully appreciate what I've done for you down the years. Keeping your secret for so long. Cleaning up your messes for you."

"No, Tony. Please," I stammer through tears. He leans in closer to me, resting the blade on my cheek.

"You think I wasn't good enough for Eva, don't you?"

"Tony, that's not what I think. You two were in love. I believe you."

I glance toward the open door, the path back to the house. But Tony stands in front of me, blocking any hope of escape.

"You still think he's coming! One fuck and it's true love," he sneers into my ear. I watch him, trying to gauge the volatile cocktail of emotions passing across his face—anger, jealousy, desperation—to protect himself. To survive at all costs. That's all he cares about right now.

He catches me glance at the phone on the floor and as he does, swipes the knife at my cheek. I wince, feel a wetness on my skin.

"You're right," I pant. "I was gullible, stupid, arrogant, probably, to assume it would work out. I wish I'd listened to you. I'm on your side, Tony. We can show him. You and me together?"

For the longest moment he looks at me, wavering. A muscle in his eye flickers like a small bug trapped under his skin.

"Tell me more about you and Eva," I say, softly, hoping to stall him. "Why was she so special?"

He reflects for a moment. "She was the only person who never judged me. She was genuinely moved by my pain, my story. Maybe it took someone as amoral as Eva to understand me. In the end I told her everything about my life, about what really happened that night."

I look away.

"She was scared of him, Anna, that's why she ended it with me. She told me he was capable of anything. You know why he wanted a baby, don't you?"

A slow malevolent smile creeps across his face.

"He longed to be a father?" I falter.

"Yeah, right. The perfect daddy." He looks at me, lets out a thin high laugh that jolts me. "It was all about his work. That's all he cared about. A chance to study Eva's baby, the genetic effects of her condition, all wired up in his pain lab. A rare opportunity to test whether the CIP gene is hereditary, another major breakthrough in his research. Gold dust for him." Before I have time to process this, there is a shiver of movement behind us.

"You're a terrible liar, Tony."

I jump at his voice—Nate, here at last.

Tony swivels round to face him. "I wondered when you'd drop by."

I try to walk toward Nate but Tony stops me. For the briefest moment, it is only the three of us, a dark triad facing each other down. I am frozen, my mind fixed on the blade concealed in Tony's hand behind his back.

"You were with her when she died, weren't you?" He glares at Tony. "It was your cocaine, you brought it round with you. Maybe it was already cut with fentanyl or more likely you—"

"Shut the fuck up, Nate," Tony spits.

"Nate, be careful. He has—"

Tony turns from Nate toward me, eyes glazed, and I fall silent, terrified. I've never seen him in a state like this before.

"Anna, I need you to know, that's not what happened. I swear the cocaine was hers, not mine. She was high when I got there, in one of her moods."

For so long Tony has been an unreliable witness, a keeper of memories that I never really recognized, yet there is something in his tone that rings true, an urgency. Something family just knows.

"Tony. I believe you. Tell me..."

"I was furious with her. She told me she was pregnant and yet, there she was, using in front of me. Watching her do that, ruining this chance we had of a new life...it destroyed me."

I watch him closely, something in his features looks bone-weary, broken. "She racked out another two lines and I couldn't stop myself. I screamed at her, couldn't she see she was destroying everything? Then she broke it to me, she didn't want the baby anyway, and the relationship was over. It was time to move on. It was the right decision—to stay with Nate. Just like that she decided, after everything she told me about him."

I make a sympathetic noise and throw Nate a desperate look, silently pleading with him to stay out of it, knowing that one word from him will break this moment.

"I could feel this pressure building in me, like an iron fist in my gut, watching her head tipped back, laughing, high. It's as if that whole therapy thing was an act, a persona. This was the real Eva, selfish, off her head. I couldn't bear it, being there, her humiliating me."

"So what happened?" I push.

"I watched her, seething. Poor Tony , she kept saying, over and over." His voice cracks. "That was the worst. Her pity. I thought she was laughing, this weird way she kept repeating my name, her voice catching. Then I realized she was gasping for breath, choking. Her head was still tipped back, she seemed scared...confused. I knew she couldn't be in pain but she was holding her chest. She reached out for her phone, told me she had to call 999—"

"And you were really scared, weren't you?" I say, softly, reasonably. "You wouldn't have wanted her to call 999, that would have been too dangerous."

"There was no other option, nothing they could do by then anyway. She was too far gone."

"So you took her phone and...you left her?"

Tony closes his eyes.

There's a glint in his hand as he turns. It's only then I see the blade isn't one he picked up in the kitchen earlier.

It's smaller, almost like a glass cutter.

The one that went missing from Eva's studio.

It was Tony. Before he bolted, he defiled Eva's sculptures in one final vile act, anger, vengeance, grief. Maybe even to make it look like Eva's doing?

"You're a monster," interjects Nate, unable to control himself any longer.

"Fuck you, Nate," Tony says. His tone flips from vulnerable to vicious in a beat.

Nate's eyes are ablaze as he turns toward me. "Anna. I've read and reread Eva's journal, all of it now. In the flap at the back, she'd kept all the old invoices from an A.T . At first, I thought it was you, Anna Tate, until I saw the signature. Anthony Thorpe. Your stepbrother's full name. I wanted to believe you, but until I saw that, I couldn't trust you."

"You're a fine one to talk about trust. You lied about everything in the end. Eva and Priya's affair. Being with Eva on the day she died, that she was pregnant by you. You didn't even want me to be your ghostwriter, it was Priya all along. You both manipulated me."

"When's it going to stop, Nate?" says Tony. "First Eva and then my sister?"

Nate flinches but keeps his eyes on me, his voice urgent and resolute.

"Anna, I was torn. I liked you right from the start."

"Please, spare me," Tony interjects but Nate carries on.

"It was a minefield. This mystery Anthony Thorpe that Eva confessed she had an affair with, then you drop the bomb. Your brother. I couldn't get my head around it." He shakes his head at the memory. "I was horrified but intrigued too. I could have been repelled, I wanted to be. Somehow that would have been easier. But then I fell for you," he reflects, giving me a strange, lost smile.

"Please tell me you're not going to buy this? Nate could never love you, Anna," Tony's acerbic drawl cuts in. "And I'd never let my sister be with you. Eva told me what you were really like. How cold you were. You're incapable of loving anyone. She couldn't bear you anywhere near her."

Still Nate focuses only on me. "I know what happened to your father too. It's all in that journal, once I went back and reread it. Tony told Eva everything and she was seduced by the idea that she could be his salvation. I know what you did that night, Anna, the price you paid, how Tony has held it over you ever since."

Tony opens his mouth but then stops himself. A white-hot energy burns through me as the truth of Nate's words takes hold.

"You're right. I did it for both of us, for me and Tony. I took his inhalers that night knowing there were no spare ones in the house. Tony, you remember the row, I know you do, before his asthma attack. How he dragged me down the stairs, slapping and punching me, turning on you too while I lay on the floor..."

Tony nods, lost in the memory of that night. "I never told a soul, Anna."

"Except Eva," says Nate.

My brain fizzes, folds over for a moment. I'm back there now in my father's house. My head spinning after my fall, stumbling upstairs to the bathroom. I sat on the floor, my cheek against the cool tiles. That's when I saw both of them, on their sides on the glass shelf above the sink. In a dazed state, angry, I grabbed them. I walked downstairs, found the last one I knew he kept in the kitchen drawer too, and stuffed them all deep into the refuse sacks that the garbagemen would take away the next morning.

"You took his inhalers. I took her phone. I guess we're not so different after all. Doesn't that make us level, sis?"

"I never wanted my father to die, I just wasn't thinking clearly," I say to Nate, ignoring Tony's mocking tone. "My greatest mistake was confessing to Tony a few days later because I couldn't bear the guilt. I wanted to go to the police but he wouldn't let me."

It looks premeditated , he'd said. They'd lock you up. I can't let that happen to you.

So I became a prisoner of a different sort. Owned by my brother, the worst sentence of all. Unable to confide in anyone else, I could never move on, ruined by my own actions.

"Tony punished you, held you to ransom, instead of getting you the help and support you needed," says Nate, softly.

"I can see what you're doing," Tony says to Nate. "You lost Eva to me and now you're trying to win over Anna. It's pathetic. Separate beds. How humiliating," he hisses, triumphant, and the ghost of a smile flits across his face. Tony turns. "I swear, Anna, if you forgive him, if you buy this bullshit and go back to him...if you go to the police about me and Eva... I'll tell the police about your father. I won't keep your secret anymore."

"I doubt it," says Nate. "It's only your word against Anna's and who'd believe you?"

"The police. You know I found the inhalers. I guessed what had happened, the state you were in after Dad attacked you. I took them to protect you, Anna. If anyone found out, it's a scandal that could destroy everything you've worked for, your journalism, your promising career."

"Please, no more, shut up," I scream, bursting. Nate swallows hard, features tightening.

"You destroyed Eva, Tony, and I won't let you do the same to Anna."

Tony stares at him, begins inching forward.

"Nate, he's got a knife," I shriek. Too late. Tony leaps toward Nate, the blade cuts through the air. Nate runs at Tony, who trips and falls, taking Nate down with him, and the knife drops to the floor. They struggle, both on the ground, tangled and enmeshed. Tony has split his knuckle open; there's a deep gash on Nate's forehead.

I am briefly immobilized. I hear a crack as Tony's fist connects with Nate's cheekbone. Nate falls back and Tony straddles him, slams his head on the marble tiles. "Do something!" Nate's voice is a strangled growl. The words are like a touch paper, galvanizing me.

I won't let Tony control me anymore.

Nate shrieks, twists his head in my direction, spitting blood on the floor. I run toward the knife and pick it up. Something else catches my eye.

Hedone. There she is, leaning against the wall as if she's been waiting all along. I grab the sculpture.

Her weight is reassuring in my hands, the power and heft of her. Tony howls as he heaves himself up, smacking Nate to the ground. They twist and writhe, Nate caught under Tony. He bends over him, one foot on his stomach, his hands tightening around Nate's neck. I shove the knife into Nate's hands behind Tony's back, but he can't manoeuvre properly.

The veins pulse in Nate's neck, his eyes glistening and rolling back. Tony screeches, provoked even more, and tightens his grip around Nate's neck.

"Anna," rasps Nate. Everything speeds up. I dart behind Tony, swing the statue unsteadily, striking his shoulder at an awkward angle. There's a muted thud of glass against flesh and bone.

"You bitch! You fucking bitch!" he yells, incredulous.

You bitch. You fucking bitch.

I won't hear those words anymore. Not from my father, not from him. The coercion, the lies, it all stops here. I am strong, I can do this. Once more I raise Hedone. For Eva as well as me. High, higher, I swing her above my head, my fingers tight around her, bring her down in one swift and fatal blow. I am lost to the moment, my one chance to vanquish my past. She lands, glass shattering into a million little pieces, glittering in a scarlet sea.