When Maya opened the kitchen door and came face to face with her dad sitting on the chair against the wall in the corridor on the other side, they looked at each other, and neither of them moved. It was Nadia coming back along the corridor taking charge who shunted them into the kitchen, told Maya that Vik could handle the helicopter questions, that they should take some time. Frank must have filled her in on the open-window situation.
Maya went back into the kitchen first, heard her dad come in afterwards, turned at the sound of him pulling the internal window closed. He pulled out a chair from beneath the table and sat down.
Maya went over and sat next to him.
‘That was the night, wasn’t it?’ he said with no preamble.
‘The night I walked out, yes.’
‘The worst night of my life except for the night your mum died.’ He looked directly at her.
Maya wished she’d waited to tell Frank and Nadia, maybe told her dad first. But whatever way she’d done it, it would’ve been painful.
‘I’m making tea.’ She didn’t ask whether he wanted any. She had to do something. She couldn’t sit here waiting for the reckoning that had to be coming, the judgement at the things she’d done wrong and wished she could erase.
She set the mugs down in front of them both at the table. Her dad didn’t reach for the sugar to add to his drink. When had that changed? There was so much she didn’t know about him. And perhaps she never would if he walked away again now after the things she’d admitted.
But she still had to tell him the rest.
‘There’s more to that night, other than what I shared with Nadia and Frank,’ she said, checking the internal window was closed, even though she’d seen him do it.
It took her a good minute to form her first words, her explanation. ‘The man who’d chased after us when the window was smashed, the boat torched?—’
‘Was Conrad,’ he finished for her. ‘It doesn’t surprise me. And I suppose he was the one who found you here too?’
She nodded.
‘Was he here officially?’
She shook her head. ‘He said he’d seen me with another girl near the pub, that he’d given chase but we got away. He spotted me again the night I left home, saw me at the edge of the airfield.’ She explained the whole night to him, every detail, leaving nothing out.
‘I was in a state, Dad. When he said he’d help me get away, I believed him and so I ran with him. I tried to close the hangar doors but when we saw headlights from another car, he told me to just run. And so I did. We picked up my things and I didn’t look back.’
And having someone on her side that night, someone who seemed to want to help her and appeared to see her as the Maya she really was, had meant everything.
‘Conrad listened to me that night. We talked for hours. And then he got me a place to stay, I was safe. He didn’t hassle me. I was warm, I was looked after, I wasn’t hungry. And that’s all I could deal with at first. He slowly helped me get on my feet. I got a temporary job at a supermarket so I could pay back the money Conrad had lent me to get me started and so I could fund my board at a bed and breakfast he’d found for me, which was at a reduced rate thanks to him.
‘Shortly afterwards, I started dating Conrad. We went for dinner, then it was a movie, then it was happening more and more and gradually we got closer and closer. We got engaged. I thought I’d found my happy. We got married, I moved in with him.’
‘He swept you off your feet,’ said Nigel. ‘He was like a knight in shining armour.’
‘He was.’ Except instead of a knight come to save her, he’d turned into a man who wanted to keep her no matter what, who wanted her to be so afraid of him ruining her life as she knew it that she stayed with him.
‘We’d not been married long when I began to see another side to him. He kept mentioning the night with Liz, and the night he found me here. He told me what was in the newspapers about the pub incident, that local gossip was that the same vandals had broken into the airbase and damaged the helicopter, taken money, left the hangar doors open so that there was storm and water damage to the inside. Word was that they’d done it for kicks, Conrad told me that. It was horrible listening to it recounted so many times, but I honestly believed he was protecting me, that he still wanted to keep me safe.
‘Over time, especially after he’d had a couple of drinks, I started to realise he might be taunting me with it, but I wasn’t sure. He’d talk about both incidents, especially the one at the airbase, he’d monetise the damage, talk about how locals hadheld fundraisers to get the Whistlestop River Air Ambulance back to being fully operational with a helicopter as well as cars.’
‘He was blackmailing you.’ Nigel’s grip tightened on the mug of tea he hadn’t even touched.
Maya nodded. ‘He was subtle with it, really subtle. At first, he’d only say that had it not been for him then I would be in serious trouble. He’d leave it at that, it wasn’t a threat, but the more he reminded me of it, the more I realised that was exactly what it was. He had some knowledge, a power, he had a hold over me.’
‘Not really the recipe for a happy marriage.’ Her dad’s words were laced with sympathy and something else… fury. ‘How did I not see it for myself?’
‘I didn’t see it, so I never would’ve expected anyone else to.’
‘That man…’
‘I know. But I’ll never regret Isaac. Naively, I thought perhaps having a child together might make our marriage stronger, drive Conrad to be a better man. But it didn’t. Conrad found fault with everything; he used any opportunity he could find to moan at me. And it went on and on. Isaac was learning piano and we got him a keyboard for his birthday but all Conrad would do was complain that it was too loud. Isaac loved school and Conrad couldn’t relate to it. He might have liked some of his teachers when he was at school but as for the establishment, he was done with that as soon as he was old enough to get out. He joined the police, said education after school was a waste of time, so you can imagine what it’s been like with Isaac going on to further study and now university.
