CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

 

 

“So it’s. . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say it for a minute. “It’s true? You’ve been in prison.”

“No!” When he turned back around his face was telling her something else entirely. “It’s not as straight forward as that.”

She started to back away from him. What the hell did that mean? How could this be happening? She knew things had been too good. Things were finally happening between them and she was starting to feel like they were really heading somewhere.

“Don’t look at me like that.” he said, pain etched in his handsome features.

“Tell me the truth, Jake.” God, she was shaking.

As he stood there scowling at her, his jaw tightening, Charlie felt like her heart was going to leave her chest.

“I thought I’d left it all behind,” he said eventually, his voice quiet. “Shit! I should never have let you talk me into that gig.”

Surprised at his anger, and his lack of answers, Charlie couldn’t quite speak in that moment. Her life was about to come crashing down around her. She was learning that the man she was falling for wasn’t who she thought he was, and her heart felt like it was deflating right in her chest.

“Fuck!” She jumped when he slammed his hand on the counter, leaning over with his head in his hands.

“Jake. Tell me. I deserve to know.”

“Why did it have to be me who saw those lads taunting you that night? Why couldn’t it have been someone else who stepped in? Then I’d still be here minding my own business, no one knowing me, me not knowing anyone that I didn’t have to.” His head slumped. “Never knowing you.”

Her breath caught. Struggling to keep her tears at bay, Charlie’s heart shattered. It was all a lie. He was a lie. And she needed to get the hell out of there right now.

Carefully, she kept her eyes on him as she backed away down the hall towards the front door. Then the floor creaked under her foot and she paused just as Jake spun around to face her.

“Charlie.” His voice sounded hoarse. Desperate. And there was a part of her that hurt for him, as crazy as that was. She could be standing in front of a murderer, for God’s sake. Something in his eyes kept her there when in reality she should get as far away from him as possible.

“What, Jake? You wish you never knew me. It’s easy to make that a reality. All I have to do is leave this flat and we never have to see each other again.”

“Shit. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just. . . ”

“Just what? Angry that I’ve found out who you really are? A criminal?”

He stepped towards her with his hand out, as if he was telling her he wasn’t going to hurt her. But she took another step back and he paused.

“No. I’m trying to find a way to tell you. Yes, I didn’t want you to know about my past, but not for the reasons you think.”

“Then what is it?” Those tears threatened again, but she managed to keep them inside. “Tell me the truth before we never see each other again.”

Shoulders slumping, Jake moved to sit on the sofa near the window, putting a welcome distance between them. She waited, watching him as he seemed to break, her heart beating a frantic rhythm in the silence.

Then. . .

“I was in prison for a time. Eight months to be exact. But I didn’t kill anyone, or anything like that. I’m not a criminal.”

All the breath rushed from her lungs, but she stayed exactly where she was. Jake looked up at her and the anguish in his face twisted her gut.

“Sit down, please. Hear me out before you leave. Then if you still don’t want to see me ever again, I will respect that. I promise.”

Walking around the single chair close by, Charlie’s eyes never left his as she sat down in it, her hands going in her lap, fingers twisting. “Tell me. Everything.”

With eyes that seemed to hold so much pain, he nodded. “When I was nine my father died in a road traffic accident. He was a director of an IT company, very successful. He was involved in a four car pile-up in the city where we used to live on his way to work one morning. The coma lasted for around two months, but with the extent of his brain trauma, eventually the decision was made to turn his life support off.

“My mum never really got over it. I would hear her crying for hours in her room at night and she rarely smiled. Even when she did you could see it wasn’t a real smile. There was always something in her eyes that revealed her sadness. It was just the two of us from then on. My mum’s parents had died, and only my dad’s mum was still alive but she had Alzheimer’s, didn’t know who any of us were, and was in a care home. I knew, even at such a young age how lonely my mum was, so I guess I could never blame her for falling for the charms of the first man who showed her some kindness. I was eleven when she met the man who would become my stepdad. He was nice for a time. I got on well with him at first and he and my mum seemed happy, until they got married.”

A hollow feeling settled in Charlie’s chest. It was all too familiar. But this wasn’t a time for her to think about her past.

Jake got up and went in the kitchen to the fridge. He got a bottle of lager and held it up to Charlie. “Want one?”

It was a little early, but it was the weekend so what the hell. “Okay.” She had a feeling the story she was about to hear was going to be a tragic one. Maybe it would settle her nerves a little. He passed it to her.

When he returned to sit down, he looked at his bottle and swallowed hard while he picked at the corner of the label, his expression now pained. Charlie waited, taking a sip of her cold drink, aware of how difficult this conversation was for him.

“You know the expression a wolf in sheep’s clothing?” he asked.

Yes she did, only too well. But instead of voicing it, Charlie just nodded.

“I think it was invented for that guy.” Jake took a long drink of his lager. “He changed so quickly it was like a whirlwind knocking both me and my mum off our feet. And I mean everything changed. He started drinking all the time. He was aggressive a lot, mostly for no reason at all. I started noticing things about my mum’s behaviour. She would be in her room for two or three days at a time and whenever I asked, that arsehole would give me the same old excuse that she had a migraine and for me to leave her alone. She’d never had migraines before, but they seemed to be quite frequent.”

It was all too familiar for Charlie and her stomach twisted in knots at his words. An image of Dale popped into her head—one of him with his screwed up face right in front of hers—but she shut it out. This wasn’t about her. And by the way Jake was getting more agitated, peeling more bits of the label from his bottle as he stared down at the rug, he needed her full attention right now.

“One day, not long after my thirteenth birthday,” he continued, “when Arsehole went out to work, I knocked on my mum’s room. When she told me to leave her alone I ignored her for the first time and walked straight in. She was sitting up in bed and failed to bring the quilt up over her face in time. There was a big bruise on her left cheek and it was swollen.”

On instinct, Charlie lifted her hand to her cheek and when Jake saw her his nostrils flared as his jaw went tight.

“When I first saw you like that, my mum’s face replaced yours for a second.”

That’s why he’d looked so furious, she remembered.

“Anyway, I got angry and snapped at her. I said, ‘That’s why you disappear? Because he’s hitting you?’ and immediately saw the fear in her eyes. It was that moment I knew how scared she was of him. My mum panicked and made up some story about him having a rough day and lashing out, and how sorry he was. She swore to me it was the first time, like I wasn’t living in the same house. I had no choice but to listen. I was thirteen. But I made sure I told Arsehole I knew what he was doing. After that, it didn’t happen again for a while.

“We lived in a nice house paid for by my dad and his job. After he died, my mum told me he’d left money in an account for me that I could access when I was eighteen. I knew my mum had been well looked after. She’d have inherited quite a lot of money from my dad’s estate and sold the company before she met Arsehole, so there was also the money from that. Unfortunately it didn’t take long for him to know that, and as I got older I realised exactly why he’d wooed my mum. By then she was already in too deep. She didn’t want to be on her own and although I understood that, I could never accept that she’d chosen the life she had. Arsehole was bleeding her dry. He’d regularly say he was going away on business trips. I knew he had a shit job though. He made out he worked at some big marketing firm, but in reality he was in telesales. The business trips were him going on holidays at the expense of my mum—my dad.

“I was too young to do anything about it, even when he continued to hit her. I’d scream and shout at him, but then he’d hit me too. Her hospital visits got more frequent, and when he broke her eye socket, social services got involved because of my mum’s hospital record. That was when we ran. I was seventeen when we left our home in Sussex.”

Jake drained the rest of his bottle as Charlie’s stomach began to knot. She knew he was building up to something—something that caused him a lot of pain and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the rest.

“The three of us had lived in a poky two-bedroom house just outside Glasgow for two years when I decided we needed to move out. I begged my mum to leave him, but she was now drinking all the time too; there was no changing her mind. Arsehole was being more strategic with the beatings by then, making sure he didn’t do anything too serious that might put her in hospital. There wasn’t any money left; he’d developed a gambling habit too, which had practically finished it off, but he didn’t know about my inheritance. My mum had kept it to herself.

“One time I came home and they were going toe-to-toe in the living room. I’d heard the shouting as I’d walked up the driveway. When I walked in, the bastard had my mum in a headlock and I saw red. I flipped. I pulled him off her and punched him in the face. Then I hauled him up against the wall—I was strong enough to fight him by then—and I threatened him. He laughed in my face, his nose busted and blood all in his teeth, and my mum got distressed and started screaming at me to get off him. It was at that point I realised I had to get out of there. I was nineteen; I had access to my inheritance and used some of it to put a deposit on a small flat I rented not too far away from my mum. I might have left that toxic environment, but I had to stay close by to make sure she was ok.

“I got on an engineering course in the local college, and had started to play some gigs around town, so I was seeing my mum less and less the busier I got.”

Pausing, Jake moved forward leaning his arms on his thighs, his bottle dangling between his legs in his hand. He closed his eyes, a deep frown appearing between his brows. Then he dropped his head, and Charlie saw his chest jerking. He was fighting to keep it together. She moved to get up, a sudden urge to go to him, but then his head came up and he inhaled deeply, as if to force his anguish back.

“Jake, you don’t have to—”

“Yes I do. I have to keep going.” His eyes were so intense as he looked at her that her own filled with tears. This was torture for him. “I’ve kept all of this inside me for far too long.”

Now the tears left Charlie’s eyes. There was no way of holding them back while she saw Jake, a big, strong man, breaking down right in front of her. She’d begun to feel that what she’d overheard was the truth; even after all of the times they’d spent together, how safe and comfortable he’d made her feel. She’d hated thinking that he’d kept the information from her because of some smeared past that he was hiding intentionally.

Now, though, she saw a vulnerability in the man that broke her heart. In that moment, all her uncertainty, her anger towards him had turned to pain.

“I’ll never forgive myself for leaving her. If I hadn’t I…” Shaking his head, he looked down at the floor and breathed deeply. Then he took a long drink from his bottle and continued. “I’d had another altercation with him. This time we’d fought properly and the neighbours called the police. Arsehole did a good job convincing them I’d been the aggressor, that I’d hit my mum too, and he wanted me charged. My mum was so distraught she said nothing. I got taken into the station, spent the night there. They let me go in the morning, but told me to stay away from the house for the time being.” Jake huffed out a laugh. “Arsehole was still pressing charges.”

He got up and walked over to the kitchen counter that separated the two rooms, placing his hands down before hanging his head. “My mum texted me every day without fail. She always had, to tell me to have a good day in college, or to enjoy my gig. Even just a hello. Five days later and I hadn’t heard from her.”

Jake paused, keeping his back to her, head still low, and Charlie could see by the movement of his wide shoulders that he was breathing heavily.

“I went. . .” He cleared his throat. “I went round there one morning after I knew he’d have left for work. There was no answer. Something didn’t feel right. I had this. . . this nervous heat in the pit of my stomach. My mum rarely left the house. I kicked the door in and that’s when I found her. She was sprawled on the couch. There was. . . blood everywhere.”

Charlie put her hand to her mouth to cover the gasp. The pain in Jake’s voice broke her heart. She knew before he even said the words what it all meant. And as he struggled to continue, she got up and walked over to him, not knowing what to do to help. She was shocked by what he’d revealed but kept it inside.

“He’d killed her. I knew that fucker could seriously hurt her, but I never thought he’d. . .”

Placing a hand on his back, Charlie needed him to know that she was there for him, that even though she’d started out accusing him of lies, now, none of it mattered.

He turned his head a little in her direction in acknowledgement before he continued. “I was in shock, just so fucking distraught that without even thinking, I went to her. I moved her and tried to get her to breathe. Her eyes remained vacant and I couldn’t deal with it. I’d stupidly picked the knife up, staring at it in my hand, covered in her blood, unable to process what had happened. So her blood was all over me, my finger prints were on the knife, and when the police came it was me they cuffed, dragging me away from her like I was the one who’d taken her life away. Fuck!”

Tentatively, Charlie slipped her arms around him, hoping she wasn’t overstepping. When he didn’t resist, she rested her cheek on his back. Then he surprised her by taking her hand and moving it up to his chest, holding it there tightly under his. “It still hurts so fucking much.”

Jake sniffed up, running his other hand down his face. When he straightened, Charlie stepped back a little, and he turned to her, keeping hold of her hand. Her stomach knotted at his harrowed expression.

“After my arrest two days before, that arsehole had seen an opportunity to get away with murdering my mum. The police found a letter in the house. The envelope was dated from the day after I got arrested. It had been sent first class from a post office somewhere in Northumbria. It was from him to my mum, telling her he’d had no choice but to leave. He couldn’t take the threats and the violence from her son anymore and worried for his own safety.” A grim smile appeared as his eyes went past her, staring at nothing. “I was in deep shit in that moment. I expected the police, the courts, to realise they’d got the wrong guy. . . Didn’t work out that way.”

The tears in his eyes brought more of Charlie’s own. He looked at her, his red-rimmed stare glistening and pained, as if he was begging her to take the pain away. She placed her hand over his forearm. “Jake.”

God. When Charlie had overheard those women, she couldn’t ever have imagined this would be Jake’s explanation.

He swiped at his eyes with his free hand, leaning his hip against the countertop, looking down at their joined hands. His thumb stroked over the side of hers. “He almost got away with it. I was in that prison for a little over eight months, accused of murdering my own mum while he was out here somewhere. I had to grieve for her in a six by four room. The anger I felt kept me occupied. In a way it helped me through. It was like, inside my heart had broken into tiny pieces, but my mind was refusing to accept all knowledge of it. The revenge that was germinating inside almost destroyed me in that cell.

“My solicitor was working with one of the detectives who had been involved in the case. They found some new evidence. They’d followed the postmark on the letter, traced it back to the post office from where it had been sent. CCTV footage showed Arsehole hadn’t gone in there that day, but they looked into everyone on the footage and found a connection with a man who had been. The guy’s phone number was in Arsehole’s call log. They’d been talking for years; he’d worked in a scrap yard up in Northumbria with him before he met my mum. He was a friend of Arsehole’s, at least until he confessed to posting the letter for him. Arsehole had given it to him on one of his so-called business trips months before. So he’d planned it all. He’d planned to kill her.” A shaky breath followed and Jake looked at her, his hand now sweaty in hers.

“I was cleared of all charges; given a full pardon. Walked out of those prison gates a free man on the seventeenth of May, almost exactly two years ago.”

“And your stepdad?”

The dark clouds still filled Jake’s eyes as he looked vacantly across the room. “They never found him.”

Charlie gasped. “What?”

The feeling of utter dread that followed almost had Charlie gasping for air. Suspected murderer, the newspaper clipping had said. The man’s face filled her mind, followed by the memories of him in the stairwell, the balaclava, the attack in her flat; all of it played on a twisted loop through her mind like someone had hit fast forward on a slide projector. Holding her stomach, Charlie felt sick. Knowing what this was all leading to, she could barely get the next words out.

“Jake? Did your stepdad try to kill me last night?”