The floor feels like it’s falling away as Alice’s legs buckle beneath her. She lands heavily and tries to focus but everything around her is spinning.
“Alice!” she hears a woman cry, but it sounds muffled and a long way away. She turns toward the direction she thinks it came from, though she can only see the blurred outline of two bodies close together.
“Y-you … you can’t be,” she croaks, her mouth feeling like it’s filled with cotton wool. “That’s impossible.”
“Well, you’re looking at the impossible,” he says.
“You’re Daniel?” she asks, unable to process the question, let alone the answer.
“Oh, so he did talk about me,” says Nathan acerbically.
Alice can barely speak, the words that are circling in her head are banging against the sides of her skull.
“When did you know?” she asks. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were when you found out who I was?”
“Oh, darling, I’ve always known who you were,” he says patronizingly. “As soon as Tom died, I came looking for you.”
“No, no,” says Alice, shaking her head, refusing to believe what he’s saying. She thinks back to that day in the unit. He was there to see someone else. He was there by chance. “No, you’re lying. You came to see someone else.”
“I came there to see you,” he says. “I knew you’d be desperate by then, and you were. You would have clung to anyone who showed you sympathy.”
Alice is still shaking her head vehemently.
“That was the easy bit,” Nathan goes on. “If I’d known I’d have to wait all this time to get the money, well…”
“But … but why?” Alice manages.
Nathan’s face clouds over. “Did you honestly think it was fair that the inheritance from my parents, our parents, should all go to Tom?”
The Evans family had split into two uneven factions before Alice and Tom had even met. It seemed they’d done all they could to help their volatile and capricious son and brother. And by the time Alice was welcomed into the family fold, there was little to show for Daniel’s existence aside from a few childhood photos on the mantlepiece.
Alice remembers them being the ironic backdrop as she and Tom, along with his heartbroken parents, sat in their dining room, stunned by the news that their youngest son had been convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison. His mother’s face was crumpled with grief, as if she’d lost the only child she’d ever had, and his father’s stiff upper lip was close to collapsing.
“I don’t want that boy’s name mentioned ever again,” he’d said. “He’s been trouble ever since he was sixteen and there’s no part of me that’s surprised to find him in the position he’s in now. It’s as if this was always going to be his path. Well, long may he walk it, but he’ll be doing it on his own.” He’d put his arm around his wife and she fell into him, her agony unlike anything Alice had ever seen.
“You can’t just freeze him out,” Tom had said softly. “He’ll always be your son.”
“He’s no son of mine,” his dad had said.
“They disowned you,” Alice says to the man she no longer knows. Her eyes regain their focus as she stares at him. There is no part of him that she recognizes as her husband. “They wanted nothing more to do with you.”
“But Tom would have put them up to that. I know he would.”
“No, you’re wrong,” says Alice. “He tried to do the exact opposite, but your parents wouldn’t hear of it.”
“I only have your word to take for that.”
“So when you came out of prison, you assumed Tom’s name and date of birth?” Even as she’s saying it, it sounds too absurd to be true.
“Well, I couldn’t exactly use my real name,” he says, half-laughing. “As a convicted fraudster I was going to find it hard going. Tom, or Thomas as my parents used to call him, was, apparently, a good upstanding citizen, and as I knew more about him than anyone else, he seemed the obvious choice.”
Beth looks at Alice, wide-eyed, as his admission takes hold.
“So, you planned all this from the outset,” says Beth, her voice shaking. “You were always looking to defraud me. It wasn’t just an opportunistic one-off.”
Nathan laughs heartily. “What? You think I fell in love with you first, and robbed you second?”
“But, I—” starts Beth.
“I also knew who you were before I met you. Those dating sites are an invaluable source of vulnerable, needy women, looking for a knight in shining armor. I didn’t need to look too hard between the lines of your profile to find out who you are. By the time we met, I knew your full name, what you did for a living, who your father was, and where your mother lived. All I had to do then was wait for you to get greedy—and boy, did you get greedy.”
Beth turns and raises her free hand, striking him on the face. He pulls her hair, yanking her head back, and she screams.
“Beth!” Alice calls out as she struggles to get up.
Beth is writhing, frantically trying to get a grip on him as he stands behind her with his hand furled in her hair, pulling on her scalp.
Alice runs unsteadily to where they’re standing, perilously close to the edge. “Get away from her,” she screams, raising her arms. But just before she gets there, Beth kicks up with her foot, her heeled boot landing square in Nathan’s crotch. He momentarily lets go of her as he doubles over in pain and in that instant she pushes him with all her might.
He stumbles backward as if in slow motion, and Alice tries to grab him, but instead of taking her hand, he reaches for Beth’s. Beth squeezes her eyes shut as she’s pulled toward the sheer drop, and in that split second Alice has to decide who she’s going to save. She lunges at Beth with everything she’s got, tackling her side-on. The force sends both Beth and Nathan upward, seemingly flying through the air, their arms flailing. Alice reaches out and feels a hand grip onto hers. She closes her fingers around it as tightly as she can and pulls back with every shred of strength she can muster.
It’s only then, as the body falls heavily on top of her, that Alice is aware of the choice she’s made.
It was the right one.