Page 68 of You Can't Hurt Me

“Were you? Look at me and tell me honestly that the day you came home to find the pregnancy test wasn’t the day she died?”

Something in his expression crumbles, hollows out. In the sunlight slanting through the blinds, his complexion looks ashy, strands of his hair stick up at right angles. He looks vulnerable in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to notice before, shattered, utterly alone.

“I have the receipt for it,” I say levelly. “That was in Eva’s bedroom too. It’s how I know you know about her and Tony. You came back, found the pregnancy test and you fought about it. You left her in a terrible state, vulnerable to using again and lied about it afterward. That’s the truth, isn’t it? And the fentanyl—”

“I was there that lunchtime,” he cuts me off, voice cracking. “I didn’t tamper with the drugs she took that evening, if that’s what you’re insinuating. She confessed her affair with anAnthony Thorpe. We rowed and screamed at each other. She ran at me, swore in my face. I know there’s no excuse but—” He inhales to steady himself. “I guess I gripped her too tightly, the fingermark bruising on her arm was me. I felt terrible but we talked afterward, I apologized over and over. By the time I left, we’d made up and then I drove up to Manchester.”

“But somehow you forgot to tell the inquest about it. You’ve lied all along, left stuff out when it suits you. You’ve known since Dungeness that she was having an affair with my brother.”

“Look, I should have told you when you mentioned Tony at the lunch. It was only then the name fell into place, the surname that was different to yours.”

“I could tell you were thrown but you improvised pretty quickly and lied yet again, making up that affair between Priya and Eva to distract me.”

“I was weak, I realize. I liked you. If you’d discovered the truth about Tony at that point, it would have thrown the whole project into jeopardy. There was no way we could have carried on... I didn’t want that to happen.”

“Agreed. Very weak,” I say, bitterly.

“I was scared too. I knew how damning it would look for me: the vengeful scorned husband, discovering his wife is pregnant with another man’s child the exact same day she dies? I didn’t plan to lie to you, but I had to cover my tracks to look as if it happened three months earlier. I knew it was too early in her pregnancy for it to show up in the autopsy, and there was no reason for them to do a pregnancy test. Surely the important thing is I had an alibi that evening. Plenty of people saw me at the conference in Manchester around the time she died. There’s no way I could have been with her.”

He sits back down at the table facing me, the journal gripped in his hand.

“But we can’t reallyknowthat you didn’t lace the drugs. On the scale of deceit, yours is way worse than mine,” I say, realizing how suddenly frightened I am that it could be true. “I think the police would agree with me.”

He shifts in his seat, looks at me. We are so close, his hand an inch away from mine. A sense of self-preservation takes over me, my survival instinct. I know how quickly his temper can turn. I could call the police.

“You must know I’m innocent. Look at me, Anna.” His voice drops to a soft murmur. “I’ve devoted my life to trying to help others, trying to cure their pain. I’m a good guy. I’m not guilty of anything.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Well, aren’t you?” he echoes back at me.

“I’ve never harmed anyone,” I say, emphasizing each word.

“Really? I wonder.” A savage glint shines in his eyes. “The harm you’ve both done. You and Tony. The pair of you. Destroying my marriage, tainting our lives. You’re both... damaged. How could you think we had a future together? You and I never stood a chance.”

The contempt in his tone is a final twist of the knife.

“Please, just go,” I almost whisper, turning away. A moment later the door slams.

It’s only when he is gone, I realize he took the journal with him.

27

My eyes snap open to the drab symphony of gray morning light seeping through my window. When I get up, my body aches. Behind my eyes. In my heart, my guts. I find myself googling symptoms. Pain: acute, chronic, persistent.

Images of last night flicker up, the final realization that so much has ended, all choices extinguished. A future with Nate, an escape from Tony. These two men helped to destroy Eva’s life and now they’re closing in on mine. I can’t help thinking, how can I escape her fate?

Outside my window life carries on the same, shrill and ceaseless, in the excitable chatter of children on their way to school, the metallic clang from a building site opposite. The hours stretch, all the more elastic and endless since Amira is away. I miss her, and yet even if she were here, I’m not sure I’d want to confide in her. Where would I begin without alarming her unduly? What could I tell her that I know for sure to be the truth?

Priya emails, brisk and businesslike, oblivious, I assume, to all that has happened. She’s expecting a completed manuscript by the end of next week and wants to know how it’s going.All good, I reply.

I wake up at 7:00 a.m. the next day feeling different somehow. Clear-headed, single-minded. I tidy up the apartment, clean out the fridge, order in healthy food, give up alcohol. When I’m not proofreading, I go for long runs. Without music. Unexpectedly I find myself engaging with the outside world. In the snap of twigs on the muddy path, the way my exhalations and inhalations hang like misty clouds in the morning air. But still the rhythmic slap of my soles on the path sounds out two names: Tony, Nate. Nate, Tony. The faster I run, the more the consonants blur.

What a fool I was. Indignation fires me up, deepens to molten rage. They are the arch manipulators and yet now they accuse me of being the villain. A thief and a liar. Stealing from Eva’s bedroom, creating a memoir to gain access to his house, cover for my own crimes. Each claims I’ve betrayed them to protect the other. Such a difference a fortnight can make.

My dreams shift up a gear. They are no longer bland but replete with revenge, ice-cold, bloody and exacting. For myself as well as Eva. How dare they? Tony always taking what doesn’t belong to him. Taking. Taking. Taking. Shackling me to our shared past to keep me weak. Nate blaming and belittling me when his crimes are potentially so much worse.

I was sleepwalking into our affair, and now in the gray dawn of each day, I start to wonder how much he used his knowledge of neuroscience to seduce me. He spent his life absorbed by the brain, in particular our unconscious and the power it exerts over us. Didn’t he tell me one afternoon, alight with its potential, how it’s entirely possible to provoke a response, a set of behaviors even, without the victim realizing, simply by knowing the right way to play them?

---