I let go of the flyer.
It fluttered downwards onto the countertop as I retreated further back around the end of the kitchen island.
I didn’t understand this.
I didn’t know what he was hoping to achieve.
‘Lucy?’ Sam asked.
There was a different quality in his voice. An uncertain modulation.
I looked at him and immediately felt something inside me begin to disintegrate.
The puzzled and scared expression on his face had developed into something more like panic and doubt.
‘Lucy, what is this?’ He reached up and clutched at his hair. ‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s a stunt,’ I told him. ‘A lie.’
I stared furiously at Donovan, ignoring the flyer, daring him to say something more.
‘Louise,’ Donovan said, fixing on me doggedly. ‘Her name is Louise.’
Tears filled my eyes.
The humming inside my skull was getting louder, more intense. It wasn’t just making it hard for me to hear my own thoughts, it was making it difficult for me to trust them, too.
I didn’t like the way Donovan was watching me. He wouldn’t look away. He seemed to be using every trick he could think of to apply more and more pressure, the same way he’d relentlessly squeezed my wrist upstairs.
‘Sam, he’s lying.’
But another piece of my heart seemed to crumple and flake away when I saw the way Sam was looking at me.
He was clearly anguished and upset and scared.
But it was also apparent that he was having difficulty trusting me.
And he was glancing between myself and Donovan repeatedly, as if he was asking himself why – if I was really who I said I was, if I really didn’t know what was happening here – Donovan had ended up inside our home.
‘Lucy?’ He stopped himself, closing his eyes for a second, as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. ‘Look, if you have something to tell me, if there’s any truth to this at all . . . Jesus.’ He lowered his hand from his hair and cupped it to the back of his neck. ‘I mean . . . he has a knife.’
Four small words but they said so much more.
Because it wasn’t just Sam’s way of reminding me Donovan had a knife. It was also his way of saying that he didn’t want Donovan to use that knife on me, or on him.
Especially if I’d been deceiving him.
Particularly if, by telling the truth, I could somehow lessen the danger we were in.
He has a knife.
And that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
Donovan had the knife so he had the power.
He could say what he liked about me, no matter how outrageous, and the knife would lend credence to his words.
It could turn me into a liar in Sam’s eyes.
A murderer.
A fake.
Which is why I reached down, opened the wine cooler in front of me and removed a bottle of white wine by its neck.