I wait for Mildred to chime in that Dan might still fancy her but sometimes, Mildred shuts up and lets my intelligent instincts take over. Dan had never loved Elisa, I was sure of that. Our marriage is rock solid.
Really,chimes in Mildred.Then, why are you lying to him about how you’re going to a group for victim support ...?
I haven’t said that yet. I’ve said I’m going this week, I point out, silently.
‘You know everything, Freya. She got pregnant,’ he goes on, ‘and her family went mental because her grandmother, the one with all the money, is more Catholic than the Pope. Yadda yadda, you’ve heard it before.’
‘They must have hidden the newspapers from Granny,’ I reply smartly. Elisa had been all over the papers in those days, at the opening of every envelope inhead-to-toe Gucci, lookingchampagne-dazed.
‘Her parents could have dealt with it but in her grandmother’s world, pregnancy equalled marriage or the trust fund dried up. Elisa needed hers – her family knew she was hardly going to be a career woman given her interest in school – or work, for that matter. It was wedding bells from then on.’
‘You could have said no,’ I point out. ‘Youweren’t inheriting the bloody money. It was hardly the 1960s.’
‘Freya, you know how my mum is. She wasn’t able to say boo to a goose and my dad was the same. In their world, if you got a girl pregnant, you took responsibility, whatever that responsibility took. Normally it was just an angry father – in our case, it was a religious granny.’ He grinned, remembering. ‘Elisa was panicked.’
Panicked she’d miss out on the loot,says Mildred.
‘And made it the wedding of the season.’
‘Oh, totally,’ he groans. ‘I heard some people were selling the invitations. She had four hundred on her side alone. And all the time I knew it was a mistake. Zed kept saying to me, “You’re mad. Mad, Dan. Don’t marry her, she’s not the woman for you, but ...”’
I finish the sentence for him. ‘You did the honourable thing.’
‘Yup, that’s the problem with us nerds: honourable.’
‘And we got Lexi out of it,’ I say. ‘So you doing the honourable thing, and going out with crazy Elisa, all worked out in the end.’
His face breaks into a huge smile.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it all worked out in the end. Freya, Elisa has never stuck with anything in her life. But we have to give her the benefit of the doubt, for Lexi’s sake. Our aim is to make sure that Lexi doesn’t get hurt. But,’ he goes on, ‘we have to help her see Elisa if she wants to.’
Give Elisa the benefit of the doubt?Mildred is in my head telling me we needed a staple gun so I could go confront Elisa.No, a nail gun like builders use! Channel your inner Robert de Niro ...I wonder is Mildred the worst part of me with no added filter.
‘We are going to manage it,’ Dan says, ‘I promise you. I love you, love our family. Elisa can’t harm us.’
Finally, I relax against him on the couch. He’s right. We are rock solid, truly.
Only in my own head are Dan and Elisa aonce-great romance.
9
Difficult roads lead to the most precious destinations
I have the nightmare again.
I’m never in a garage on my own and it’s never the garage I was mugged in.
It’s always somewhere utterly innocuous like the supermarket car park where in reality, you are never more than five yards from a person pushing a trolley and looking exhausted.
I’m always with the children. Sometimes, all three of them.
They’re smaller: babies, wriggly as puppies, and I’m trying to hold on to them all as I run, screaming, away from a man who is bearing down on us with menace.
In the nightmare, he’s huge,giant-sized.
Only I can save my babies but I keep letting them slip from my grip, keep having to stop and hoist them up again as he comes after us. The atmosphere is dark and full of dread and when I wake, I lie in thathalf-alert horror of not knowing what’s real and what’s not.
Am I safe?
