‘She’s not there,’ Jamie is saying. ‘Eve, listen to me.’ He grabs my shoulders. ‘Kayla isn’t in there!’
I stand up, wriggle out of Jamie’s arms and run towards the scene of crime officers who have dug up the grave that Aiden brought me to. Then Marianne is beside me, confirming what Jamie has said. ‘It’s okay, Eve – Kayla’s not here. There’s nothing here. We know where she is. Aiden’s told us everything.’
‘Please take me to her,’ I beg. ‘I need to see her.’
Marianne nods. ‘Okay, yes, of course we can do that. We’ve got officers going to the location she’s at, but it’s at least a three-hour drive from here, so it will be a while before we can get her back to London. Social services are going with them to pick her up. Come on, let’s get you back. We need to get you checked out at the hospital. Did he hurt you?’
I shake my head. ‘Not really. I’m okay. It was my mind he wanted to hurt.’
Marianne takes my arm and leads me away.
It takes hours to give my statement at the police station to two detectives I’ve never met before. I’m still shaken, even though in the end Kayla wasn’t buried in that pile of earth. For those minutes, Aiden made me believe she was in there, and that I’d lost my daughter. That he had killed her. That will stay with me forever.
As well as this, I also had to tell Aiden the truth about what had happened to me, and how Kayla came to be, and I wasn’t prepared for that either. I was never going to share my story with anyone, but he forced my hand. I’d spent enough time blocking it out, and then dealing with it through counselling, that I thought I’d never have to relive it.
One of the detectives leads me to a room where Marianne is waiting for me. She stands up when I walk in and hands me a cup of water. ‘How are you holding up?’
I take the water, even though I’ve already had two coffees in the interview room. I’ve been hoping that caffeine is good for shock, but I’ve never heard that anywhere so most likely it’s not true. ‘Kayla’s okay,’ I say, because it doesn’t matter right now how I am. My daughter is fine. ‘Do you know anything more about where she’s been?’
‘Aiden’s still being interviewed, but from what I can gather so far, he was visiting her in Henley once a week. He’d told her he had to be away for work, so she and Nicole were having a holiday so that they wouldn’t miss him. How thoughtful of him, right?’ She shakes her head.
‘Can I see her?’
‘Soon,’ Marianne says. ‘I’ll sort something out, but it’s a complicated situation, isn’t it? Kayla knows Nicole as her mum. We need input from social services about how to proceed with it, and unfortunately that’s not going to happen as quickly as you’ll want it to.’
‘She won’t still live with Nicole and Aiden, though, will she?’ I want to add that neither of them is her parent, but the reality is – whether I like it or not – they both have been and nothing can erase that.
‘No. Very unlikely. They’re facing serious charges. Of course, Aiden’s paternity being under question is going to make this even more complex.’
My poor innocent daughter. She doesn’t deserve things to be so complicated, such a mess. It would be too easy to blame Alex Foley for what he did to me that night, but Aiden and I have a part to play in this too. I could have been honest with him from the moment it happened, and given him some choices and decisions. We could have made them together.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ Marianne says. ‘Did you know Aiden wasn’t Kayla’s father?’
I nod, shame creeping through me.
‘But how could you be sure?’
‘Because I knew my cycle inside and out. And Aiden and I had been a bit distant with each other that month it happened. I was actually relieved I would have a break from taking ovulation and pregnancy tests, from praying my period wouldn’t arrive.’ I pause to have a sip of water. ‘How did Aiden know? I’ve been trying to work it out but I just can’t. I didn’t tell a soul. Not even my closest friend.’
‘That we don’t know yet. He hasn’t said. We will ask him, though, because I’m guessing this was the starting point for his hate campaign against you.’
A hate campaign. Why does it feel as if it was so much more than that?
‘Did Aiden say anything about sending me emails? Saying things like he knows I lied? They started months ago, right before I came back for Kayla.’
Marianne scratches her forehead. ‘No. You never mentioned this.’
I explain about the emails. The sense that someone had been in my flat. All of it. ‘If it wasn’t Aiden then I know exactly how he found out about Kayla not being his. Alex Foley. He must have told him.’
‘Did he know you’d got pregnant?’
‘I don’t think so. He used to call all the time and send me messages, but I always ignored him. I couldn’t even bear to read most of them. He was acting like we’d had an affair or something. It was… as if I had to relive the attack again every time I got a message or my phone rang. He had no idea I’d got pregnant as a result of his… his…’
‘Rape,’ Marianne clarifies. ‘That’s exactly what it was, Eve. Even if you chose to be in his house, chose to have a drink with him, even if you’d enjoyed his company. And he will not get away with it.’
I nod.
‘We’ll question Aiden about this. I’ll let you know what he says.’ Marianne hugs me. ‘I think you should go home now and get some rest. Someone will drive you home. Is there anything you need from Aiden’s?’
So many of my clothes and toiletries are there but I shake my head. I don’t want to go to that house, even with a police escort. ‘There’s nothing I can’t do without,’ I say.
She sees me out to reception, where she asks someone to take me home, but then I spot Jamie, sitting in the waiting area, his eyes fixed on his phone.
‘I won’t need a lift,’ I tell Marianne.
She looks towards Jamie and smiles. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘You’ll probably need someone to talk to tonight. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know where we are with everything.’
When he drops me off, Jamie insists on coming in. ‘You haven’t been at your flat for ages, what if he’s been in there? Done something to your things?’
‘Well, if he has, it can’t be any worse than what he’s already done. But, if you really want to, then it would be nice to have some company.’
Inside, I check each room, relieved to find nothing out of place. Then Jamie and I sit together, with only the street light shining through the windows lighting the room. I ask Jamie how he found us in the woods.
He raises his eyebrows. ‘Don’t you remember me telling you?’ he says. ‘When we were still there, you asked me what I was doing there and I told you.’
I shake my head. ‘I was all over the place. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything until they told me that Kayla wasn’t there.’
‘That’s totally understandable. Anyway, after we spoke on the phone I couldn’t stop worrying. I didn’t trust Aiden, so I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I know you can handle yourself, but I’d texted you and you didn’t reply, so I decided to drive past his house, just to make sure everything looked normal. It was pure luck that I got there just as you were driving off with him. I thought you’d seen me because it seemed like you looked straight at me, but I guess you didn’t. I followed you both. I know you’d told me you thought you’d got it wrong after all, but I just couldn’t believe that. Good job I trusted my instinct.’
I laugh then, because what were the chances of Jamie turning up at that exact moment? A few seconds later and he would never have known where we’d gone. And then what? Only Aiden knows what he was really planning to do to me. And what if I hadn’t told him the truth? He would have continued assuming I’d had an affair, his hatred eating him up, making him act in ways maybe he didn’t even know he was capable of.
The laughter quickly dies. ‘There are some things I need to tell you,’ I say.
‘Okay,’ he says, and then he takes my hand while for the third time that night I recount the horror story that for years I kept locked away.
Jamie listens in silence, never letting go of my hand and when I’ve finished, I flop against his shoulder and my tears soak through his T-shirt.
‘I’m so sorry you went through all that,’ he says, eventually. ‘That man is scum. Worse than scum. I can’t even think of a word for him.’
‘Do you know what made it even worse? He didn’t even think he’d done anything wrong. He acted as if it was consensual, as if I hadn’t told him to stop.’
Jamie’s hand lets go of mine and clenches into a fist.
‘He even used to try to call and message me, can you believe that? I used to ignore them all, delete them before I’d even read them, but when Kayla was three months old, just before I left, something made me read a message he’d sent. He said he’d been thinking about me and wondering whether I wanted to have a drink with him at his place. Looking back, I think it was that text that really tipped me over the edge. The fact that the words by themselves were so harmless, so polite even. I can’t describe what that did to me. It was like he was doing it to me all over again with his silent denial. Reading that text made me want to die.’
Jamie grabs my hand again, and when I look at him I notice his eyes are glistening. ‘Did you reply?’
‘No. No way. I deleted it. I couldn’t bear to have it on my phone. Why did he keep contacting me? Why would he do that?’
‘More manipulation and controlling behaviour. I think I might know the answer to this, but why didn’t you go to the police? When it first happened?’
There’s no simple answer I can give to this. It was a culmination of lots of things. Firstly, I didn’t think they’d believe me. I was there voluntarily having a drink with that man. We’d built up a kind of friendship and I even enjoyed his company, often staying for a chat after I’d finished tutoring. He might have even got Justin involved to try and say I’d spent a lot of time with his dad, and I couldn’t let him drag that poor boy into it. I explain this to Jamie. ‘You know, a lot of women would consider him an attractive man.’
Jamie shakes his head. ‘None of that should matter. Even if you were attracted to him in any way, you still said no. You didn’t want it to happen, and he knew that.’
‘I know. It’s just… as soon as I left his house I began to doubt myself. You know, maybe I didn’t fight hard enough, maybe I wasn’t being clear enough when I was telling him no. Maybe he thought me kicking and thrashing at him was part of some fantasy.’
‘That’s understandable.’
‘And then I also didn’t want life to change. I didn’t want Aiden to know and feel guilty that he couldn’t stop that happening to me. I didn’t want to be a victim. For people to look at me with pity, like you are now.’
‘It’s not pity, Eve. It’s admiration.’
‘Thanks. Anyway, as time went on, I tried not to think about it. I buried it in a corner and made sure it was well and truly covered. I was convinced that if I ignored it then my life with Aiden could carry on as it was. Nothing would be different. But then I missed my period and had to take a test. I think I knew it would be positive before I even saw the line on the stick. After one horrendous act I was pregnant. I convinced myself I’d have another miscarriage; after all, I’d already had four so what were the chances of this pregnancy being okay? That’s what got me through at first. But every week that went by with me still being pregnant, only made me sink even further into a hideous depression.’
I also tell Jamie the other reason I didn’t report Alex Foley to the police was because I didn’t want him having anything to do with Kayla. ‘I didn’t even want him to know of her existence, or question whether she might be his. I wanted so badly for her to be Aiden’s, and I know that sounds so messed up, but it was easier to convince myself nothing had happened and just shut that man out of my thoughts and life.’
‘Eve, I’m so sorry you had to go through all that,’ Jamie says. ‘So Aiden’s definitely not—’
I shake my head and cut him off. ‘No, and I never told him. I couldn’t. All he wanted was a family, and I’d already told him I didn’t want to adopt. I know this will seem weird but I didn’t want to break his heart. I knew he would have loved a child who wasn’t genetically his, so it felt like the only thing I could do.’
I continue with my story, revealing to Jamie – a man who only a few months ago knew so little about me – the most intimate details of my postnatal depression. How the second Kayla was born I struggled to bond with her because all I saw was Alex Foley and what he did to me. How, triggered by that final text message, it got so bad that in the end I had to leave because I was worried I was a danger to my own daughter, that I might harm her. How it took me two years, with the help of counselling, to heal, so I knew that Kayla would be safe with me.
‘I’m so sorry I thought the worst of you,’ Jamie says, shaking his head.
‘That’s only because I never gave you a chance to know me.’
‘Everything makes sense now. The reason you couldn’t let me in. I get it all now.’
We sit holding each other, talking everything over until the sun rises in the sky, shining through the blinds. And even though the future is far from certain – with Kayla, with Jamie, with Mum – all I know is that right now, I’m right where I need to be.