‘That’s true, but not when it comes to you. How have I ever manipulated you?’
‘You knew what you were and what you were doing and you still let me fall in love with you.’
‘Be honest with yourself, I didn’t do anything. We were Matched. We were predetermined.’
‘You chose to take the test and to meet me. If there was any humanity inside you at all, you would have stayed the hell away.’
‘I’m sorry, but I was curious to see who’d be Matched with me, and then when I met you, I felt something I’d never experienced before … something that was completely alien. I needed to get to know the person having that effect on me to try to understand why it was happening. I even read up on it because I didn’t think it was possible to … but I’d fallen in love with you.’
Amy shook her head. ‘Please stop lying to me,’ she said, but from the quiver in her voice, Christopher knew she was beginning to believe him.
‘I know what I am, Amy … or at least I know what Iwas. I was a man who craved infamy for my crimes and I felt a pleasure I can’t describe from ending other people’s lives. I was selfish, I was devious, I cared for nothing and no one, I was everything that you were not. But when I am with you, I’m … better. At least, you make me want to be better.’
Amy wiped her eyes with her sleeve as she listened, then took a few hesitant steps forward and crouched down so their eyes were level.
‘Do you love me, Chris?’ she asked. ‘Do you, in your heart of hearts, really love me?’
‘Yes,’ he replied firmly and without missing a beat. ‘Yes, I do love you.’
For once, Christopher had let himself be vulnerable. It wasn’t because he was securely fastened to the chair, or that he had been caught. He could tell that Amy saw this. She saw that he was a lost little boy, someone who had spent his life unable to fit into society, someone who was aware of the difference between right and wrong, but chose to do wrong anyway. He wanted to change for her and she saw someone who needed her stabilising influence. She saw their shared future.
Amy slipped her hand in her pocket and pulled out the keys to the handcuffs.
Chapter 93
JADE
Jade took the keys to Kevin’s four-by-four from the hook in the kitchen cabinet and climbed into the truck.
After the revelation that Kevin wasn’t her DNA Match and that Mark was, she’d stormed back to the guest house and spent the next hour pacing the bedroom, trying to get a handle on her mixed emotions. She was furious with herself for having allowed things to have gone so far with Kevin when she knew that she didn’t love him. But she was also furious with Mark for lying to her. It was because of him that she’d felt like such a rotten person for so long, being attracted to someone who was out of bounds. Without trust and honesty, was being Matched enough to keep two people together?
With the clothes she’d thrown into a holdall on the passenger seat beside her, she drove along the dirt track driveway towards the highway. The radio played the opening bars of a Michael Bublé song, and it reminded her of how she’d used to tease Kevin for having the musical taste of a housewife double his age. He didn’t care, he said, music was music and, as long as it made you feel something, it didn’t matter who was singing it. Jade turned up the volume to ‘You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You’.
She followed the road signs back in the direction of Echuca Moama on the Murray River, and an hour later checked herself into a budget hotel. She knew that eventually she’d have to return to the farm and face the Williamsons, but for the next few days she needed respite from them all, and especially from Mark.
Jade tried to stop herself from thinking about him by taking in the local sights, going on a trip along the water on a historic paddle steamer, joining thousands of strangers listening to blues and roots music at the annual Winter Blues festival and exploring nearby towns, red gum forests and wetlands. But nothing worked. Her anger towards Mark remained ever potent, despite the fact that she knew his actions had come from a selfless place.
After a fourth fitful night of sleep, she awoke early to the sound of birdcalls. She climbed into Kevin’s truck and from memory drove to where he’d taken her to watch her first Australian sunrise the day after she arrived on the farm. She hoped the calmness of the arrival of a new day might help slow her brain from racing at a hundred miles an hour.
She sat on the vehicle’s front bumper, watching the sun begin its ascent into the sky, when a noise on the gravel disturbed her. She turned her head. It was Susan.
‘I hoped you might be here,’ she began. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ Her tone was much softer and less confrontational than it had been a few days earlier. ‘I’ve been back here every morning since you ran out, just in case you came. I used to bring Mark and Kevin up here when they were boys. Kev liked to see as far into the distance as he could. He wanted to travel the world one day.’
‘I remember him saying,’ Jade murmured. ‘He wanted us to do it together.’
She closed her eyes and tried to recall Kevin’s voice. It had only been a few weeks since his passing and alreadyshe was beginning to forget how it sounded. Despite everything she felt for Mark, she still missed her daily conversations with his brother. Susan stretched her arm out and wrapped it around Jade’s shoulders. ‘So you married my son even though you didn’t love him.’
Jade nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Because I knew how happy it would make him. I was very fond of him and I wanted his last days to be happy.’
‘You wanted the same thing for him as Mark did. And Kevin’s last dayswerehappy and for that I’ll always be grateful. The both of you placed his needs above your own, I see that now. Please don’t hate Mark for it.’
‘I don’t hate him, Susan, but that’s not to say I’ve haven’t spent the last few days pissed off beyond belief. I’m usually pretty sure of myself – normally it’s one strike and you’re out. But Mark has my head all over the place and I don’t know what to think or how to feel. The only thing I know is that, after everything that has happened since I got here, I need some space and to get away from your family. I don’t mean that to sound as nasty as it does.’
‘No, it doesn’t sound nasty at all, love. And I’m not going to pretend I know what it’s like for you. But please take some advice from an old ’un; don’t let the chance to be happy pass you by. I had to let go of my anger at the disease that was killing my son as the only person that hate was hurting was me. Now you’ve got to let your anger towards Mark go. I’m sure that’s what Kevin would have wanted. If you’ve got the opportunity to love someone as much as they love you, then grab it with both hands and hold on to it for dear life.’
