“Shouldn’t I have stood up to it, though? I’m an intelligent woman. Why didn’t I just leave?”
He looks at me, straight on and serious. “Evie, he had you on a pedestal so high at the start and then pelted you with so many rocks, you couldn’t find a way to clamber down. No move you made was safe. It doesn’t matter how many letters there are after your name or how strong you are …”
Now I’m seeing the love-bombing at the start. The monitoring in the guise of supporting me. The hacking away of my self-esteem with every criticism along the way. I watched the life I longed for fall away from me. My plans. My higher degree.He wanted to control the podcast I built, claiming he was “helping” me by producing the episodes. He was always making me dress in certain clothes and wear my hair a different way. Constantly editing, censoring. Not just the podcast, but every tiny aspect of my existence.
I glance at Drew and now everything floods in about him. All my feelings for him. The loss of the most important friend I ever had.The day I missed his mother’s funeral.Standing on that cliff with Oliver, who wasn’t ever going to really jump, and being forced to make the wrong choice, on the off chance that he wasn’t bluffing. He knew I’d stay. He knew I couldn’t bear to live with myself if it was my rejection that caused him to end it all, so he played that card, and Drew paid for it.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry …” It’s all I can utter. He doesn’t even know which bit I’m sorry for. It’s all of it. “I wanted to be there for you at the funeral. I was on my way. And then Oliver …”
He shushes me and hugs me into his chest. I clutch his shirt and cry. More than a decade’s worth of tears. So much grief smashing over me as the waves crash. So many dreams pixelated, fading into nothing. And I’m aware, suddenly, of the impact on my mind. The instability. The fear. The destruction of my confidence. How reluctant I have been to take any step, in any direction. Always potentially wrong, until that spiraled into mental illness—a dark whirlpool of anxiety and depression flaring at its height into fear for everyone I loved. Fear for my own life. Until my body couldn’t take another second of the trauma and let go of even caring, flinging me into the safe haven of amnesia where I was protected from it all.
And then, right when I think I’ve remembered each tiny detail, I recall the trigger for everything.
87
Drew
I can’t work out whether to let her ramble or call her parents or the ambulance. She’s so distressed, she’s all over the place. It must be horrific, being confronted with everything all at once. All her losses. Every complex emotion she’s ever had, about every event, all mixed up. And she is gripping hold of me so hard it almost hurts.
“I pushed you away,” she says, crying. “I pushed you all away.”
I want to tell her it’s okay. But it never was. She hurt us deeply, and now she’s looking at me, her face a mess of understanding.
“Drew, it was all for you,” she admits.
I don’t understand.
“That letter …” she says.
“From Anderson?”
She starts pacing along the sand. “‘Interfering, young, conniving, dangerous woman.’ Of course it was him! Hear the pattern?” She stops. “I found his weird way of talking so fascinating. It’s why I started studying author profiling in the first place …”
She’s lit up like I haven’t seen since we were at school and we’d get into a debate about something political or controversial. I used to provoke her sometimes—I’d fling a statement ather that I knew she’d want to argue with, because I wanted to see her thisalive.
“When I read your mum’s note,” she says, pausing to place her hand on my arm empathetically, “I knew that was a strange way of constructing a sentence. But she was so sick, and on so many drugs—I didn’t think much more of it.”
I nod. I’d been too distressed to question it, either.
“Then I’d been so stressed out the day we got married. I was so worried I’d done the wrong thing. That Bree had been right, and I should have let her call it off. I wasn’t properly listening to the speeches.”
She sits on the sand, drawing her knees up close and hugging them. I get down beside her.
“It wasn’t until Anderson started botching this in every conversation that I started paying closer attention. Because people typically don’t speak like that. They simply get it right, all the time. Or wrong, in his case.”
“That’s when I started looking into similar cases. I came up with a research project for my doctorate that supported all the groundbreaking case studies that already enthralled me. To use linguistic evidence to crack cases where DNA or eyewitness evidence alone isn’t enough … Think of it, Drew!”
I smile gently. “You get your memory back and it’s all about the academics? Nothing’s changed. But why did you drop the doctorate when it meant everything to you? You gave in to his demand?”
“He found out,” she explains. “Oliver must have explained to Anderson what my thesis topic was, not realizing the link. His father sent me the threatening note, but I kept going. And then he turned up in my office one night, drunk. Terrifying. And demanded I pull out of the program. Destroy my research. Ihadn’t even been focusing on him—he’d just piqued my interest because it was such a good example of a clear linguistic anomaly. But then I wondered why he cared so much about what I was researching. And what he’d done …”
I can guess where this is heading. Part of me can’t bear the confirmation.
“I knew I’d heard someone else speak like that but couldn’t remember where. Until I finally remembered your mum’s note. And when he suspected I was onto him, he was furious. I’m talking all-out, blood-boiling rage.”
“Worried you’d pieced it together and would talk?”
“Worried I’d write a whole thesis about it! Or blather on my podcast, though there was little chance of that. The Roches drew up a nondisclosure agreement—I was banned from ever discussing family affairs—they were still so suspicious of my platform. That’s why Oliver started producing my content. They couldn’t let me have even that one thing just for myself. But then I confronted Anderson, Drew. About your mum. And I realized just how much he had to hide.”
