‘Yes …’ I broke off and choked back a sob.
‘What’s wrong?’
Hot tears fell down my face. She didn’t sound angry with me at all, just concerned. ‘Can I … Can I come and stay with you?’She’d moved into a lovely flat in Bromley a year ago and had told me I had first dibs on her spare bedroom if ever I needed it.
‘Of course.’ There was a softness in her tone and not even a hint ofI told you so.I wanted to hug her so badly it hurt. ‘I’m taking a half-day and going home right this second.’ I could hear keys jangling. ‘I’ll be in when you get here. And Lili?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re going to be safe with me, I promise.’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Now.
ALICE CLUTCHED A bouquet of white roses interspersed with delicate green ferns and heather and tried to look as if she was relaxed and comfortable and happy. Lo and Isaac’s wedding ceremony had gone ahead as planned. She looked at her sister, radiant in her gorgeous gown, as guests threw confetti over the pair of them, and the photographer snapped away, catching every moment.
People kept coming up to her – strangers – and kissing her affectionately on the cheek, saying how well she looked but, thankfully, there’d been too much hustle and bustle for a proper conversation with anyone. Close family knew about her disappearance and amnesia, but no one else. She kept trailing around, doing her best to play the part of an ecstatic sister, but she couldn’t help feeling like a fraud, like she was the understudy who’d been rolled in because the real maid of honour couldn’t make it.
Bit by bit, her memories were coming back, the ‘flashes’ occurring with growing frequency. A sound or a smell, a place, or a turn of phrase could set one off. Sometimes they arrived with no obvious trigger. While she was pleased she was making progress,she also couldn’t wait for the process to be over so that she could feel like a whole person again.
Her bridesmaid’s dress was dark-green velvet, with a V-neck, long sleeves and a sweeping skirt, but the best thing about it was that it had pockets. She slid her fingers between the folds of the fabric and closed them around her phone, just to make sure it was still there and she hadn’t lost it. Not the mobile belonging to Lili Everett, but the one Norina had given her.
This phone held her life as she knew it. She’d added to her video diary, talking herself through the different photographs and the events of the previous week, recording every little detail she could remember about Ben. Just in case.
While the photographer took a couple of shots where Alice wasn’t needed, she took the opportunity to check for new messages. There was just one:Only four hours now.
I can’t wait,she texted back, grinning, but then had to quickly put her phone back in her pocket because she was being called back for more formal group shots, but as she stood beside Lo and Isaac, different groups of family and friends coming and going, she let her mind drift.
Lo had mentioned that she’d had her own wedding here, in this very castle. She wondered if she’d stood in this very spot, if she’d been the one wearing the wedding dress, smiling blissfully at her groom.
No, not here.
The information arrived in her head silently and easily, as if it had always been there rather than locked away and missing for the past week.
It had rained that day, making the skies dark and gloomy.She and Justin had posed for their photographs in front of the ornate fireplace in the banqueting hall inside the castle, surrounded by extravagant flowers and a million candles.
She grabbed onto the sleeve of the person next to her.
‘You okay, hun?’ her cousin Kerry asked. ‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet.’
No, she wasn’t. She wasn’t okay in the slightest because that one concrete memory had started a chain reaction. On the outside, she was perfectly still, but on the inside, everything was churning.
Her current memories were new and fresh, like writing in wet sand, and the tide of her old ones surged in like a tsunami. And when the giant wave of knowledge retreated, the shore beneath was smooth and flat, scrubbed clean of anything that had been there before.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
One year after the separation.
EVEN WITH THE bass beat thudding through my body, I could feel the buzz of my phone in my pocket. A missed call. I’d already had more than twenty this evening. I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, tried to move my body to the music on the nightclub dance floor. I was there with Lo and a gaggle of her friends, celebrating her last night of freedom.
Marriage doesn’t mean freedom.I thought sourly.Anything but. And that doesn’t even change when the marriage is over.I had the buzzing of my phone in the back pocket of my jeans to remind me of that.
I knew it was Justin without even checking. Our divorce had been made final only a few short weeks ago, and I’d hoped that would mean he’d give up, stop contacting me, stop either trying to win me back or berating me for being an ungrateful, back-stabbing bitch. For a few blessed weeks, everything had gone silent. But this morning someone had sent me a link to an online news article about Justin – about his Arts Foundation funding being withdrawn – and I knew, just knew, I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
The reason for tonight’s barrage of phone calls had its seeds back last summer.I’d been seeing a therapist since I’d left Justin, but after an initial burst of progress, I felt as if I’d got stuck, circling round and round the same issues. She’d suggested a journal, a way to process what I was feeling and thinking. I’d gone out and bought myself a nice notebook for the purpose, but it still lay unmarked in the top drawer of my bedside table. For some reason, it felt more natural to say these things out loud than to write them down, so I’d picked up my phone and had begun to record, keeping the camera turned away from myself, not ready yet to see in my own eyes all I’d allowed Justin to do to me.
After a while, I’d begun to post short videos on social media, always keeping the camera trained on a bookcase or a pot plant, always using a filter to alter my voice. The anonymity had been freeing. And it turned out my posts resonated with other women too, many who didn’t know – as I hadn’t – that they were being emotionally abused. Hadn’t I laughed when Lo had suggested it after my own hen night? I’d been so deluded. And if I could highlight some of the red flags, save just one woman from being sucked deeper in by a man like Justin, it was worth the discomfort of sharing what I’d been through.
