Adam had slept in the spare room for the two nights he’d been back home, as I naively believed that withholding sex would make him understand the severity of what he’d done and the risk he’d taken. But that was childish, and it wasn’t what either of us wanted. Yet it wasn’t until we came away from Pammie’s that I realized I’d been playing right into her hands. She wanted the cancellation of the wedding to ruin us, she was banking on it, so I needed to make sure that what she’d done was never going to have an adverse effect on us as a couple. She had changed me as a person already, had made me see myself differently. She’d stripped away my confidence and had caused hurt that I’d carry with me until the day I died, but I would not allow her to take away the one thing she wanted. She would never take Adam away from me. I’d use the only weapon in my artillery that she’d never be able to outgun me with.
The front door hadn’t even closed properly before I pushed him up against the back of it and kissed him, searching furiously for his tongue. He didn’t say a word, but I could feel him smiling as he kissed me back, softly at first, then harder. It had been a long time for both of us, and with so many emotions in the space in between, it just felt like a pressure cooker going off. I undid his shirt buttons, ripping at the bottom two in my urgency, and he reached around to unzip the back of my dress, the intensity of our kissing not stopping even for a second. As my dress fell to the floor, he swung me round and slammed me hard against the door, pinning my arms up above my head. I was helpless as he kissed my neck, before going down and moving the fabric of my bra aside with his teeth, circling my nipples with his tongue.
I moved to pull my arms down, but he held them firm, changing from two hands to one as he undid his jeans and pushed my legs apart with his feet. It couldn’t have lasted more than three minutes but the release was incredible, and the pair of us remained unmoving against the door, our breaths heavy and in unison.
“Well, that was unexpected.” Adam was the first to speak. “As you could probably tell. Sorry about that.”
I smiled and kissed him. “We can do it again later, slower if you like.”
He kissed me back. “God, I love you, Emily Havistock.”
I didn’t say I loved him. I don’t know why, because I did. Perhaps it was all part of that in-built defense mechanism that women seem to be born with, that bogs us down and keeps us from saying the things we really want to say. Believing that holding back somehow keeps us one step ahead, making us the better, stronger gender. Why, then, did pretending to be someone I wasn’t leave me feeling weak and bereft?
I waited until we were snuggled up on the sofa together to broach the subject that was burning a hole in my head.
“Can I ask you something about Rebecca?” I said, careful to keep my voice steady.
“Do you have to?” Adam sighed. “We’re having a lovely time. Let’s not ruin it.”
“We won’t,” I replied. “We’re just talking.”
He sighed resignedly, but I pushed on.
“Did you get a chance to say goodbye to her? Was she still alive when you found her? Did she ever regain consciousness for long enough to know you were there?”
He shook his head. “No. She’d already gone. She was … cold to the touch, and her lips were blue. I held her and kept calling her name, but there was nothing. No flicker of a pulse, nothing.”
His eyes started welling up. “Did you have to go through the hell of a postmortem or inquest?” I asked.
“No, thankfully. She had such a detailed history of asthma, albeit not serious, or so we thought, that it was obviously the cause of death.”
“And your mum was there with you?”
He nodded solemnly. “She was the one who found her. I can’t imagine what it was like for her.”
“Who was the last person to see her? Before she became unwell?”
“What is this,” he said, “the Spanish Inquisition?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry, I just … I don’t know. I just want to feel closer to you, know what goes on in that head of yours. That was a huge part of your life, and I just want to be in that same space, you know, understand how it must feel for you, even now, years later. Does that make sense?”
I wrinkled my nose, and he kissed it.
“Mum had taken up a few boxes earlier in the day, and they’d had a cup of tea, I think, in between unpacking, and she seemed fine.”
“What, absolutely normal?” I asked.
“Yes, but she always was before an attack. It just creeps up on you.”
“So, you’d seen her have an asthma attack before?” I asked.
“A few, yeah. But we both knew what to do whenever she felt it coming on, so it was never an issue, assuming she had her inhaler with her, which she always did. She knew to just stop what she was doing, sit down, and puff away until she was able to regulate her breathing again. It only ever got scary once, after we’d run for a train. It wasn’t even that far, but it knocked the stuffing out of her, and I had to get her to lie down on the floor of the carriage, while I desperately searched for her pump.”
“But she was okay, though?” I asked.
“Eventually. But you know what you girls’ handbags are like.” He tried to smile. “She had everything in there, as if she was living in it, and I had to turn the whole thing upside down to find it. The first thing she said, once she was able to, was, ‘If that was my new Chanel lipstick I saw rolling away, I’ll kill you!’ She was lying on the floor, unable to breathe, and all she was worried about was her bloody lipstick.”
He smiled at the memory. I smiled too. I liked the sound of her.
“If I’d have been there, I could have helped her. I could have found her inhaler and stopped it.” His head bowed and his chest lifted. “But you just never know when it’s going to come. You can be going along just fine, and then bam! You feel the signs, and then if you don’t do anything about it, it can take you out, just like that.” He clicked his fingers.
“So, she must have been exerting herself, then?” I said gently. “Perhaps moving boxes around or something?”
He nodded. “There was a big box, full of books, upturned on its side in the hall. It was so heavy she should never have tried to lift it, but it seemed she did. That kind of work would have put a huge strain on her lungs, plus she would have been running up and down the stairs all day.” His voice cracked. “I guess she was trying to get it into shape by the time I got home.”
“But you spoke to her that evening, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I called her just before I left the office, and she was fine.”
“Was your mum with her then?” I asked. “What time did she leave?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Can we leave it now? Please.”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t know how somebody can just die like that,” I said, my voice getting a little higher with each word. He looked at me questioningly.
“It just freaks me out, that’s all,” I said.
How could he not see? Surely he must have asked himself the question. It was so blindingly obvious. Pammie was the last person to see his girlfriend alive, and the first person to find her dead, on the day they were moving in together, on the day he left home. There was no greater motive for her to do something terrible, to stop her worst nightmare from being realized. She would have felt that she was losing Adam, relinquishing control, and she wouldn’t have been able to bear that. God knows what hell she’d put Rebecca through in her attempt to get her out of Adam’s life. How far had she pushed her? I shuddered at the thought. Poor Rebecca, who once, like me, had so much to look forward to. A life with the man she loved. Her own family. But she’d not backed down. She’d stood up to Pammie and, by doing so, had unwittingly made the ultimate sacrifice.
Was I taking the same risk? Was I signing my own death certificate?
I didn’t want to carry this overwhelming sense of foreboding alone. But I had no choice. It was one thing to tell Pippa and Seb about how Pammie made me feel. They had seen for themselves how cruel she could be. But to accuse her of murder? That was something completely different, and, until the time came when I knew for sure, without any shadow of a doubt, that she had something to do with Rebecca’s death, I had to keep it to myself.
I smiled up at Adam.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
If only you knew.
Over the next few weeks, I threw myself into work, taking on every appointment I could manage. It helped to keep my brain busy, to stop the fear and panic from taking over. I was shattered, both physically and mentally, when I got in from work each night, but Adam would never have known. I did everything in my power to make him want and need me more than ever before.
“What the hell’s got into you?” he said, smiling, when he came home from work to find me dressed in a black-lace bra and panties, serving up fillet steak with a homemade peppercorn sauce.
I gave him my best smile. He didn’t need to know that I’d have loved nothing more than a snuggle on the sofa in our pajamas, watching a box set while eating pot noodles. Instead, we had sex on the dining table before I’d even managed to set the dinner down, and after eating, I listened sympathetically as he moaned about a lazy colleague, while I washed up. I was all his Christmases come at once, so that when the chips were down, when he was forced to make a choice, he would choose me, because he would never be able to give me up.