Page 58 of By His Side

“Clear my name!” I laughed. Darien didn’t laugh. He just carried on looking miserable. “You’re serious?” I waited for his nod. “How the hell did you think you could do that?”

“If he admitted—”

“He?” A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I had to plant my feet more firmly on the carpet to prevent myself from slipping off the sofa arm. “You don’t mean… you can’t mean.” I found myself unable to say his name, like saying it might conjure him up. It felt like he was already here, though, his malevolent presence poisoning the atmosphere. “What did you do?”

Darien’s mouth twisted. “I went to see him.”

I couldn’t seem to stop shaking my head, such was my desire to deny that this conversation was happening. “You can’t just go and see him. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I applied for a visiting order.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

“A few days ago! And you said nothing.”

“You would have told me not to go.”

“Damn right, I would have done.”

Darien shuffled closer. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

“And what exactly did you think you’d gain from going to see him?”

“I thought I could get him to admit the truth. I… er… smuggled a recording device in with me.”

I stared at him. “Are you insane? If you’d gotten caught, you would have kissed goodbye to your job.”

“Yeah, well… I’m doing a lot of things these days that wouldn’t go down too well if those in authority knew about it, so I figured why stop there?” He ran a slightly shaky hand through his hair. “And anyway, I didn’t get caught. I figured if I could just get evidence of him changing his story, it might be enough to at least convince people to look into things again.”

“And how did that go for you?” There was a bite to my words. Darien had said I’d be pissed, and I was indeed pissed. It didn’t matter that he’d done it for the right reasons. Not when he’d deliberately kept it from me. He’d set off to work this morning and hadn’t said a word, all the time knowing he’d be seeing him.

“Not well.”

“I bet.” I studied Darien. He was looking at me, but not really, his gaze slightly off center. It had been the same since we’d started this conversation. In fact, now I came to think about it, he hadn’t looked at me properly since he’d gotten home. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.” I felt sick, my body temperature too high and my clothes feeling like they belonged to someone else. Julian had taken seven years of my life. More, if I included the period before that when he’d controlled my every move. I thought I’d found something good, that Darien was an oasis in a desert of shit. A shining beacon of light as it was. And now, my ex-boyfriend had even managed to contaminate him. “You let him get to you, didn’t you? You let him get inside your head.”

“No, of course not!” Darien’s face said the opposite, though.

“So he didn’t tell you it was all me, that you shouldn’t believe a word I say? That I’m a fantasist who makes things up?”

“Well, yeah,” Darien admitted. “He did, but that doesn’t mean I believed a word of it.”

“Right. And that’s why you can’t even look at me, is it?” I stood, Darien making no effort to follow the motion, his gaze remaining at waist height. Heat had given way to feeling cold inside, like someone had removed all my internal organs, put them in a freezer for an hour, and then given them back to me. It had been stupid to get involved with Darien and think that I couldn’t be hurt, that I was in control.The Felix I’d become in prison had only ever been a hard outer shell. Inside, I was the same naïve fool I’d always been. The one who believed in romance and thought there was someone out there for everyone.

I left the room and took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the “where are you going?” that floated up the stairs after me. My first target was the backpack that I’d left in the spare room. From there, I went into Darien’s room and pulled open the drawer he’d emptied for me in a moment of touching domesticity that had made my heart skip a beat.

“Felix?”

I started shoving things into the bag with little regard for folding them when it would take too long. Footsteps on the stairs. Slowly, like Darien didn’t really want to come up here, but thought he should. It was my turn not to look at him as he filled the doorway and stood there. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” My tone was terse, like we were strangers. “I’m doing you a favor.”

Darien stepped into the room and stood at the end of the bed, my frenzied bag packing taking place on it. “How do you work that one out?”

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