It was hard for me to tell if Donovan knew he’d got my name wrong.
It seemed like an unwitting mistake. A slip of the tongue, perhaps brought on by his blood loss and suffering. Louise instead of Lucy. As if he’d misspoken and had failed to notice. As if his faculties were beginning to dim.
But then when he said nothing more – when he turned his focus back to me, sweating, pensive, awaiting a reaction – I began to understand that it had been deliberate. Targeted.
‘That’s not my name,’ I told him.
He didn’t respond. He just stared at me and swiped at the perspiration on his upper lip with his thumb.
‘You said Louise.’
Again, he said nothing.
‘My name is Lucy.’
I could hear a muted ticking in the room. It was coming from the wall clock above Sam but it might as well have been inside my head.
I glanced back at Sam in confusion. He was pinned against the wall, his body tensed, his face blanched, his eyes huge and tremulous.
He shook his head at me.
I think we both sensed that we were dealing with someone who was acting increasingly unhinged. Sam would know better than me, but I guessed it was possible Donovan was undergoing a psychotic episode.
But then another possibility occurred to me. A more obvious one.
‘You have the wrong person,’ I said.
I swung my head between Donovan and Sam, my conviction growing, needing them both to understand.
‘Don’t you get it? I’m not who you think I am. You’ve made a mistake.’
The more I thought about it, the more it made a crushing sense.
The blood tests. The DNA analysis. He’d talked about wanting to verify that I was the person he was searching for.
But that implied an element of doubt on his part. It meant he knew he could have made a mistake.
‘You have the wrong person. The wrong house. All of it. You’re wrong.’
Donovan contemplated me for a long moment, his chin tilted upwards slightly, nostrils twitching, as if he was smelling the unpleasant stink of our microwaved phones on the air.
‘You’re scared of the basement?’ he asked me.
Not this.
I reached out a hand to Sam and he took it.
‘She has claustrophobia,’ Sam explained, giving my hand a squeeze.
‘And you would know?’ Donovan said.
‘Yes.’
‘Because you’re an expert? I’ve read some of your work, Sam. Your academic papers.’
Sam gave my hand another squeeze. ‘Is that supposed to intimidate me?’
‘No.’ He gave Sam a hard look. ‘But I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t tell that it does. You wrote this one piece. It was about how some phobias have a simple trigger and others are much more complex. I’m paraphrasing, but I think your general point was that there could be a real mixture of reasons. A childhood incident overlaid with another trauma, for example. Or layers of multiple traumas. They can confuse the picture. Get jumbled up.’
‘That can happen, yes.’
‘Interesting.’ Donovan returned his attention to me. ‘I looked in your medicine cabinet. In the en suite. You have a lot of medication.’
I just stared at him. It was another invasion, and while I suppose it shouldn’t have irritated me, it still did.
‘For your anxiety?’ he asked me.
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Prescribed by your GP?’
I said nothing.
‘You pick up the medicine yourself?’
Sam did. Usually. There was a pharmacy that was convenient for the university. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
‘So now what happens?’ Sam asked.
‘Hmm?’
‘I asked, what happens now? What do you want from us?’
‘Now?’ He assessed me again. ‘Now we get Louise to tell us the truth.’