‘Now!’ he yelled.
He waited until the door had closed before he spoke again.
Eight days later, I received a severance offer including two years of full pay, a guaranteed investment from the bank in an empty studio property, and a favourable mortgage on the family home of my dreams. In return, I signed a non-disclosure agreement in which I agreed never to make public the online conversation he and I had where I’d pretended to be a fifteen-year-old boy and he had solicited me for sex. It had occurred a week before our meeting, in a chatroom that Mary, his former secretary, had informed me she’d found in his computer’s search history.
I’d saved the explicit images of himself he’d sent to my alter ego, and messages where he’d offered money for the boy’s photos. The stupid old fool had even paid for a train ticket for the lad to travel to London to meet him. Mary had also supplied me with details of the apartment Harrison rented in central London and regularly used to entertain young male sex workers. Neither the bank – which footed the bill – nor his wife and four children had any idea of the arrangement.
Brandon still doesn’t know our new life was mostly funded by blackmail. Not once but twice. I was forced to go back to Harrison when the heated flooring needed to be replaced. It’s the only secret I’ve ever kept from my husband. But that’s not what pricks myconscience. It’s that Harrison is a paedophile and I’ve chosen to keep that quiet, to benefit myself. I’m a mother. I should know better. My moral compass is highly questionable, to say the least.
Inside my office, I open the windows to allow in August’s fresh early morning air. I take deep breaths to try and rid my mind of the memory of Harrison, but he stubbornly remains. I know that to my friends and the outside world, I’m a self-made woman. But inside, I hate that I’m not. Blackmail alongside my OnlyFans work means that my little empire has been built on the foundations paid to me by the parts of myself I have sold to men.
And that leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.
Chapter 47
Anna
‘It looks like an abattoir in here,’ she begins.
I turn quickly and Margot is standing there. She is calmly surveying the room: the bloody towel, the Stanley knife in the bath, the sanitary pads and me in the middle of it all, crying and with snot dripping from my nose. I don’t know how to explain my way out of this.
‘How did you get in?’ is all I can think of to say.
‘Garage door,’ she says. ‘You keep moaning about Drew leaving it open. I was making sure you hadn’t been burgled.’
She approaches me. I don’t try and stop her as she lifts up my towel and examines the damage I’ve done to my leg. She grimaces ever so slightly and reaches for a second towel, takes a seat on the edge of the bath and uses it to clamp down heavily over my wound. Five minutes must pass where neither of us says a word. Finally, she unpeels it and the bleeding has all but stopped. Then she spots a cord from a bathrobe hanging from the door, and ties it around my leg. At first I think she’s using it as a torniquet until I realise it’s thick enough to cover the gash.
‘Right, let’s get you out of here,’ she says. ‘Keep your leg straight.’
I lean on her shoulder and hobble into the bedroom, where she lays me down on the bed. She returns to the bathroom and comes back with the gauze, tape, sanitary pads and a wet flannel. She patches me up and wipes the remaining blood from my legs and feet.
I can barely look her in the eye.
‘I assume you don’t want me to take you to hospital?’ she asks and I shake my head. ‘And you also won’t want me calling your Drew?’
‘No,’ I mutter.
‘Do you have any camomile tea?’
‘In the cupboard above the dishwasher.’
She’s back ten minutes later with two cups, passes one to me, then she lies next to me, our heads and shoulders propped up by pillows.
‘You haven’t asked me why,’ I say eventually.
‘You’ll tell me if you want to.’
There’s a pause, and I’m unsure if she is expecting me to volunteer my trigger, but I don’t. That would be a step too far, and I can’t tell where it might take our relationship.
‘Look Anna,’ she continues. ‘I don’t need to tell you that you should probably speak to someone about this. So all I’m going to say is that we all have demons. There are things that have happened to me and that I’ve done in the past to others that I spent years trying to run away from. But I’ve learned that sooner or later you have to own your fuck-ups and make your peace with them. Otherwise you will never stop hurting yourself. And the next time, it could be a lot worse.’
‘So you have regrets?’
‘Don’t we all,’ she says with a faraway look in her eye. ‘But you must find a way to draw a line under them. If you don’t, your past will always define your present and ruin your future.’
There’s a lot to unpack in what she says, but now is not the time. She reaches out to hold my hand. Her skin is soft and warm and I allow her to entwine her fingers with mine. The tenderness she shows takes me aback, and that, along with my fragile state, makes me cry like a burst dam. Try as I might, I cannot stop sobbing. Margot doesn’t say a word; she literally provides me with a shoulder to cry on and I’m too weak to refuse. For the first time in I can’t recall how long, I remember how it feels to be a child being comforted by her mother. It’s the purest form of love, utterly unconditional and reassuring. I don’t want to let her go. So I don’t, until I drift off to sleep.
I awake sometime later in the afternoon, only realising I haven’t dreamed the whole episode when I spot my bandaged thigh. I check the Find My iPhone app: Drew will be home in about thirty minutes. So I limp into the bathroom to clear up the scene of the crime. But it’s immaculate. You’d never know what I did in there. Margot must be responsible. And she has also left four brand-new neatly folded white towels on the rail.
