I sit on the train, wondering what I’m going to say to him. Power stations and fields flicker by. Commuter towns and rural stops come and go.
Every speech I prepare in my head sounds wrong. And I know the more I rehearse it, the more fake it’ll get. Better to speak from the heart and hope he listens.
I don’t text him until I’m off the train and waiting for a taxi. Coming to see you. We have to talk.
The taxi driver refuses to believe my destination even exists—There’s nothing there, luv, the nearest house would be in Tregerry, five miles away—until we turn down a farm track to discover an encampment of prefab work cabins and chemical toilets surrounded by mud. All around us are open fields and woods, but across the valley trucks pass on a distant road and I can see how this might indeed be a whole new town one day.
Edward strides from a cabin, his face dark with concern. Emma, he says. What’s wrong? Why are you here?
I take a deep breath. There’s something I need to explain, I say. It’s really complicated. I had to tell you in person.
The cabins are full of surveyors and draftsmen, so we walk beside the woods. I tell him what I told Amanda—that I was drugged and forced into sex by one of Simon’s friends, that he sent me a video he’d made of it as a way of threatening me and the police assumed it was Deon Nelson, that I’ve had to accept a formal caution for wasting police time but really none of it was my fault. He listens carefully, his expression giving nothing away.
And then he tells me, very calmly, that it’s over between us.
No matter whether I’m telling him the truth now or not, I’ve lied to him in the past.
He reminds me we agreed this would only continue for as long as it was perfect.
He says a relationship like this is like a building, that you have to get the foundations right or the whole thing falls apart. He thought our relationship was built on honesty when actually it was built on deceit.
He says that all this—he gestures at the fields—only came about because I told him I was attacked by Deon Nelson in my own home. He says this town is now being built on a lie as well. He’d been trying to design a community in which people looked out for and respected and helped one another. But such a community can only function on trust and now it’s tainted for him.
He says goodbye, his voice empty of emotion.
But I know he loves me. I know he needs our games, that they answer some deep-seated hunger in him.
I was wrong, I say desperately. But think what you did. How much worse was that?
He frowns. What do you mean?
You killed your wife, I say. And your son. You killed them because you didn’t want to compromise your building.
He stares at me. He denies it.
I spoke to Tom Ellis, I insist.
He makes a dismissive gesture. The man’s a bitter, jealous failure.
But don’t you see, I say, I don’t care. I don’t care what you’ve done or how bad you are. Edward, we belong together. We both know it. Now I know your worst secrets and you know mine. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? For us to be completely honest with each other?
I sense he’s torn, that he’s weighing the decision in his mind. That he doesn’t want to lose what we have.
You’re quite insane, Emma, he says at last. You’re fantasizing. None of that happened. You should go back to London now.