Where the hell is Adriana? It’s nearly seven and there’s still no sign of her. I’ve sent her several texts, but she hasn’t responded. I worry something bad’s happened to her.
I feel like I’m going stir-crazy. I can’t sit in my bedroom a second longer. I need a drink, something strong to calm my nerves, even though I’m not usually one for the hard stuff. I leave the room and bolt downstairs to the larger sitting room, where I know Adriana keeps various spirits in a cabinet set against the wall behind the sofa. There’s a set of decorative crystal tumblers along with a decanter resting on top of it. I grab one tumbler, then fish out a half-full bottle of Glenfiddich from the cabinet and pour myself a generous measure. I’m about to sit down when my phone vibrates in my pocket. Finally, I think to myself, it’s Adriana texting me back. But when I pull it out and see that I have a WhatsApp from a number I don’t recognise I flinch. I’m too curious, though. I ignore the option to block, then read the message.
I look around and up to the ceiling, wondering if I’m being watched this very second. I know it’s more than likely that I am, while the timing of the message chills me. It’s almost as if the sender knows what I found, who I really am. Knows I’m desperate to discover the nature of the relationship between Adriana and my dad. It has to be a trap. But I don’t care. I’m past the point of caring. The urge to discover what Adriana wrote in her journals is too great.
I place my tumbler down on the coffee table and race to the study, open the door and immediately make a beeline for the bookshelf. I scan my eyes across it for the bio of Churchill, remove it and instantly spot the inbuilt safe. My fingers are twitching as I type in the code, so much so I make a mistake and an error code comes up. ‘Shit,’ I say out loud, willing myself to calm down, at the same time aware that Adriana’s going to walk through the door any minute now and catch me red-handed. I try again and this time I’m in. The safe is deep and, on reaching inside, I’m shocked to find around two dozen journals hidden there.
My heart is beating so fast I can hardly breathe as I shift them, six at a time, to Adriana’s desk.
I sit down and start leafing through each one. They seem to date from when Adriana first started seeing Dr Adams and it’s clear from what she says that it was him who encouraged her to use a journal as part of her therapy. There’s so much here and there’s no way I’m going to be able to get through them all before Adriana gets back. They’re not diaries as such, more ramblings of Adriana’s thoughts, as Rick explained, and seem to jump forwards and back in time making it harder to know where I might find stuff relevant to my dad, if at all. She speaks fondly of Dr Adams throughout, how she regrets being harsh on him initially, how patient he was with her when she told him off for not calling her by the name she preferred – Adriana. How she’d always hated the name her mother had given her: Scarlett.
In one of the earlier journals, she explains how her mother made her life hell, how she had both emotionally and physically abused her since she was a little girl. My heart bleeds for Adriana as I read this, wondering how a mother could possibly do that to her own child, the contrast between my darling mum and hers never starker. And then comes the section I dreaded finding. Having hoped that Rick had been wrong in recounting what Ethan had told him. The passage where she talks about the person in league with her mother. I can’t be certain it’s my dad, but all the evidence is pointing towards this.
I flick through more of the earlier entries, and that’s when my worst fears are realised. Adriana talks about it being a relief to tell Dr Adams about her babysitter, Jason. Who’d been sleeping with her mother on and off for eight years and did unspeakable things to her. She describes how she told her parents the night before the fire that Jason had threatened to kill both her and Brian if she dared breathe a word about what she’d seen him and her mother do, but that her mother accused her of lying, while her father was too weak to stand up to her. I didn’t think I could hate my dad more for being the person he was behind closed doors, but I was wrong. Knowing what he put Adriana through as a child is nigh on unbearable, and as much as it sickens me to even contemplate it, I’m now certain he came to London to seek her out, with the intention of making Adriana another one of his conquests.
I glance at my watch and see that it’s gone half-seven. I shouldn’t risk looking at more entries in case Adriana walks in on me, but I can’t help myself. I frantically leaf through the pages of her later journals, and then eventually find what I’m looking for. An entry where she mentions coming face to face with my dad on her and Charles’s wedding anniversary in the same restaurant where he met with Trevor Carrington – the night of his university reunion. How he leered at her, made her feel uncomfortable, made strange comments about it being a miracle she survived the fire her parents perished in. How she was desperate to leave but had to put on a brave face for Charles’s sake. I keep leafing through and then my heart almost stops when I come to an entry where she talks about my dad coming to see her at the house a few days after, when Charles was away in France. How he somehow gained entry, claiming a friend of hers had given him the code to their spare key box, something that both puzzled her and scared her witless. Once again I think back to my conversation with Rick and an entry Ethan read, where Adriana said she wished she could have told Charles everything, that she hated lying to him, but that she couldn’t believe he’d hunted her down, and that she’d had no choice but to keep the truth about what she’d done buried.
My heart is galloping as I wonder what she meant by this, and I literally can’t turn the pages fast enough, desperate to know how things panned out that night. But then I hear movement outside, and before I have time to put the journals away, the door opens and Adriana is standing there.