It had been a few days since Layla’s last drink, and she’d been having withdrawals from day one. But she was fighting the demons inside her because she could never remember what she’d done the night or the day before. The one thing she knew for sure was that whenever she woke up the next day, she had a stinker of a hangover and was never in bed next to Donnie. She was always in another room, usually the bathroom. An argument usually lurked in the back of her mind, one that Donnie always insisted that she started when she was drunk. Accusations, verbal abuse, sometimes even physical. No wonder their relationship was at breaking point if she was behaving like that. Layla knew that she couldn’t help herself. As soon as she opened a bottle of wine, she just didn’t know her limits. Then the memories of her sister would flood in, and that’s when her mind would twist and she would turn on Donnie, apparently.
It was coming up to Kerry’s anniversary. Five years to the day when Layla watched her sister die when that car hit her. It wasn’t the car that killed her; it was how she’d landed, hitting her skull on the concrete. Her brain so badly injured, she had died instantly. Blinking away the nightmarish memory, Layla took a deep breath and tried to calm herself.
Heading down to the kitchen, Layla was surprised to see Donnie standing at the window, drinking a coffee and tapping away on his phone. The radio played in the background, and he didn’t seem to notice her presence. Either that or he was ignoring her.
‘Hi,’ she said, trying to sound as casual as possible. ‘Sleep well?’
He glanced up at her with a raised brow, then returned his attention to his phone. ‘Fine.’
Layla’s stomach flipped. He really didn’t want to speak to her and as much as she couldn’t take the tension, she chose not to push it.
Pouring herself a coffee, she decided that the best thing she could do was visit a few of her tanning salons, check on how things were going. She owned six. Well, Donnie owned them, a way of dodging the taxman if he ever needed to. But she was in charge. It gave her something to focus on when things like this happened.
Donnie drained the coffee mug he’d been holding, placed it into the dishwasher and headed for the door.
‘What you got on today?’ Layla called out.
‘Not an affair with lots of women from the pub, if that’s what you’re wondering,’ he replied, before the door slammed and Layla was left on her own in the house that Donnie had bought for them.
‘Shit,’ she hissed. Once again, he was referring to a comment she couldn’t remember making. An affair with women from the pub? Who the hell had she meant? All of them? God knows what she was thinking when she threw that one at him.
Layla made a coffee for herself and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. Her head felt full, like it was going to explode. Layla knew her alcohol intake always increased around the time of Kerry’s anniversary, to help her to block out the pain and the guilt of what happened to her. She blamed herself.
Kerry had expressed her concerns about Donnie from the beginning, saying that he wasn’t to be trusted, he wasn’t good for Layla. But he was Layla’s high school crush. They’d been friends since she was just thirteen years old. In fact, she’d been friends with Donnie and Steff, as well as a few others who’d fallen off the grid over the years. It didn’t matter what people said to her about Donnie, she was just infatuated with him. Always had been. He and Kerry had never got on, and before Kerry died, Layla had accused her of being jealous that she was with him instead of Kerry. And for a while, she’d actually believed that. Why else would her sister say and do whatever she could to make Layla see the bad in everything Donnie said and did? It seemed that from the beginning of their relationship, people wanted to stop them from getting together. Even Mel had warned Layla off Donnie back in the day. But jealously wasn’t the reason for Mel’s warning. Not that anything anyone said would have changed Layla’s mind. She loved Donnie.
When she’d confronted Kerry about it on the day that she’d died, Kerry had denied it. But Layla wasn’t convinced she was telling the truth and had started to argue with her. That was when Donnie had turned up and all hell had broken loose. Kerry had started screaming at Donnie, saying that she knew all about him and his family, and what they did for a living. That he and his brother Steff were sick in the head, especially Steff. That’s when it happened.
Taking a deep breath, Layla pushed the memory out of her head. She didn’t want to remember what happened next, even though it lived in her head every moment of every single day.
Maybe that was why when she was drunk, she would say things to Donnie, accuse him of all sorts. She’d never got to the bottom of her sister’s accusations, never found anything incriminating on Kerry’s phone once her belongings were returned to the family. She’d never dug any deeper. She was too scared of what she might find. Instead, over the course of not only their marriage, but their entire relationship, Layla buried her head, drank enough alcohol to block out the possibility that her sister Kerry was right. Maybe Donnie wasn’t what Layla thought.
Maybe the accusations had some sort of truth to them. Maybe, somewhere inside her head, hidden beneath the alcohol-fuelled blackouts, Layla already knew the truth about her husband. He was using the sunbed shops as a front to launder money. But where was that money coming from? It couldn’t just be from drugs, or a security racket. Surely Kerry wouldn’t have gone off her head for that kind of thing. There had to be more.
Picking up her mobile, she called the only person who would be able to answer her questions.