She meets his gaze as his features harden. ‘You killed my baby,’ he says.
Adrienne jumps to Melissa’s defence. ‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘She didn’t kill anything. At that point, “your baby” was barely more than a cluster of cells.’
Damon raises his voice. ‘It was stillmychild.’
‘Andherbody,’ Adrienne argues. ‘So she gets the final say. Don’t try and make her feel any worse about it than she already does.’
Melissa finds herself at a loss for words. Instead, she is whisked back to one of the worst days of her life, when she made the decision not to move forward with the unplanned pregnancy. Up until then, her periods had been as regular as clockwork. And she’d chalked the missed one up to the stress of realising her marriage was crumbling. But when her breasts began to feel tender and the fatigue set in, she knew in her gut what it meant. A home-testing kit confirmed her suspicions. She said nothing to Damon, afraid that she might cave under the weight of guilt and remain chained to a life she no longer wanted.
She was an estimated ten or so weeks along when she underwent the procedure at a private clinic in Birmingham. In a cruel twist of fate, the pregnancy had been the result of the final time she and Damon had sex. She’d gone through the motions to please him, rather than admit to herself she was no longer attracted to him.
The abortion served as a turning point. Soon after, she plucked up the courage to leave him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Melissa whispers now.
‘Damon, please go home,’ Adrienne says, the edge gone from her voice, ‘because if you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to call the police. You can’t be here.’
It crosses Melissa’s mind this might be the last time she ever sees him. A lump forms in her throat she can’t swallow, no matter how many times she tries.
Damon finally appears to admit defeat. But the look he gives her before he slowly turns to walk back down the driveway is disconcerting. She has seen him hurt and she has witnessed his upset, but this is something altogether different. She can no longer read him.
‘Are you coming?’ asks Adrienne, but it’s not inflected as a question. Melissa follows her inside.
But neither gets the chance to close the front door.
Chapter 96
Today
Damon
A tear catches my eye as I realise this is the last time Melissa, Adrienne and I will all be in the same room together. Despite my resentment towards Adrienne for giving my wife everything I couldn’t, we did enjoy some good times together. And we could have had so many more. I want to blame Adrienne for what happened to them, for telling me about the abortion and inviting the dark waters to come between us. I also want to blame Melissa too, for taking my child away from me. But I can’t. I chose to kill them. Their deaths are my fault and mine alone.
My gaze remains fixed on their lifeless bodies, recalling the best I can what happened that night. As they returned to their house, I grabbed a mallet lying by the block paving and pushed my way through the front door they were readying to close on me. It was all such a frenzied blur, I can’t be sure who I struck first. All I remember was that I caught them with such stealth, neither had time to protect herself or run. The sound of crackling electricitydeafened me to everything else, so if they screamed, I didn’t hear them. It was all over in less than a minute.
Then I recall standing over them, their bloodied hair tangled together, slumped over one another in a heap on the hallway floor. The murky waters cleared as I stared at Melissa, the realisation of what I’d done becoming clear.
I left soon after through an alley behind the house, careful to avoid the casual gaze of neighbours, and returned later that night with plastic sheeting and tape I’d bought at a DIY store. I cleaned them both up with wet cloths and towels, used their thumbprints to unlock their phones and change the settings to allow me access. I wrapped up their bodies, reversed my car into the garage and lifted them both into the boot before I left. Back at the flat, I scrolled through their phones to find email addresses of their work managers and messaged them, blaming their forthcoming absences on a bout of Covid. Then I texted their families to tell them the same thing. And I’ve been replying to well-wishers ever since, pretending to be them. It has bought me time.
Melissa and Adrienne remained in my car boot for two days until I made my decision on what to do next. Under the cover of night, I drove an hour and a half to Helena’s house in London. I carried them through the garage and lay their bodies down carefully in one of her spare bedrooms. And now, as I whisper goodbye to Melissa, I wipe my tears and close the door on her.
I’m pushing up the sleeve of my jumper to check my watch when a tattoo catches my eye. It’s the Greek Gemini symbol, one of my first inkings. I guess it makes sense now, with what I have learned about myself. Two halves of the same person. I roll my sleeve up further and scan my arm one last time. It’s then that it strikes me like the lightning I so often fear: everything I have discovered about myself has always been here, in plain sight. I have been wearing my story all along.
The flower on my forearm that obscures half a girl’s face is a daisy, like the girl I loved and killed. I have lyrics from the song ‘Bobby Jean’–my baby brother’s name–in which Bruce Springsteen sings about saying goodbye. Mum adored that song. The crackling lines of electricity between giant pylons are self-explanatory. A flame coming from a Zippo cigarette lighter was supposed to be in remembrance of Mum, but I think it’s actually because it’s how I set her flat ablaze using Dad’s device. There’s a grid of numbers on the outside of my bicep that I recognise a date in. It’s of Daisy’s death. Diagonally is the date Mum died, back to front is Bobby’s death. Two rows of numbers I can’t fathom out, but when I use my phone to google them, they are coordinates for the streets where Daisy and Callum were killed. Four beating hearts and a flatline speak for themselves. The words ‘Offering Others Direction In Sorrow’ running along my collarbone was a phrase I dreamed one night. It always felt as if it should mean something. Now I realise that when you take each first letter and put them together, it spells ‘oodis’.You did this.And finally, I see a brightly coloured female skeletal figure clad in a long robe and holding a scythe. I take a photo and reverse-image search it. It’s the Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, a Mexican personification of death. She holds a watch in her hand with the time set to six o’clock. And when I check my watch, I find it’s ten minutes to six. For all these years, my subconscious has been trying to tell me who I am and how my story will end.
A knock at the front door echoes up the staircase and I roll my sleeve back down. I make my way towards the door and offer my guest a narrow smile.
‘You came,’ I say.
She nods but doesn’t move. She scans the space behind me. ‘Whose house is this?’ she asks.
‘An old friend.’
She shifts from one foot to the other. ‘Are they here?’
‘No.’
I lead the way upstairs to the bathroom, where everything is ready for us.
