By 5pm I had walked into the city centre. In town I had sat on a bench outside of the bottom entrance of the Foyleside Shopping Centre – watched the traffic drive up the one-way street towards the old two-decked Craigavon Bridge and away from the multi-storey car park that blocked the view of the river from the shopping centre. I watched the people walk in and out of the automatic doors, distracted by their plans, their families, their phones. There was a wilted bunch of flowers Sellotaped to a street light. It was only the obvious sign there had ever been a tragedy here. No one really paid any attention. They had moved on even though it hadn’t even been two months.
I walked slowly back across Foyle Street, through the now quiet Waterloo Place and over along the Strand Road towards home to see I had missed another two calls from Cian, and three missed calls from Maud. Neither of them had left a voicemail but Maud had sent a text saying she hoped I was okay and if I could just call her as soon as possible so she could hear my actual voice to know if I was really fine.
I got ready to walk to Scott’s, not that it took much effort. I simply didn’t have the energy to change my clothes, to fix my hair or to put make-up on. It was hard enough putting one foot in front of the other so Donna and Owen would have to take me just as they found me. The idea almost made me laugh – if only I believed anyone in the world would accept me just as I actually was, I wouldn’t be in this mess.
Tori did her very best not to look shocked at my appearance when I arrived just as she was switching off her computer. ‘I don’t know what is going on but Owen has been like a cat on a hot tin roof all day,’ she said, her eyebrow raised as if she expected me to fill her in on everything. I just shrugged before asking if he was in.
‘In his office,’ she said, ‘along with Donna – who has been on edge too. It’s been a fun day.’ She rolled her eyes at the word fun.
I nodded and walked towards the office, leaving Tori none the wiser – and definitely unimpressed by my reluctance to gossip.
Owen and Donna were already sitting when I walked in, full cups of coffee in front of them along with an open storage box. Owen looked about as bad as I did. Tired, his eyes red rimmed. His hands were resting, palms down, on a floral, bound notebook. Donna’s face was serious, her hands clasped, her usually perfectly manicured red nails chipped, bitten down. The perfect façade of our perfect workplace was crumbling.
‘Can I see it?’ I asked. Owen sat up straight, lifted his hands away and I reached down and picked up the book. I wasn’t expecting to feel so strongly just holding it. But knowing it was something she would have held in her hand – a place she would feel safe to share her feelings – it made something in me contract. I almost didn’t want to read her words, it would make it all so real in a way it hadn’t been before, but I knew I had to. There was something so, so visceral about seeing the swirls and loops of her handwriting. The smudges. The crossed-out words – the notes hastily scrawled in the margins. I ran my hand over the soft indentations her pen had made on the page. This was the most real Rose Grahame would ever be to me.
*
I need to put this somewhere. Somewhere he can’t read it.
Can’t control it.
Can’t edit it.
Somewhere where I can tell the truth. The real truth. Not his version of the truth. The first thing I’ve wanted to say for so long now is I’ve been acting a part. I’ve been playing the dutiful wife not because I wanted to but because I had no choice. He still says he loves me, but he has killed any love I had for him over the years. And I did love him once. I loved him with all my heart. I can’t believe I was ever so stupid.
When everyone is jealous of me, I want to scream at them not to be. That it’s not what it seems. I wonder, sometimes, how they can’t see it. The way he controls everything. The way he grips my arm a little too tightly. The way he is always there. Always. He’ll pick me up from nights out – or worse still, invite himself along and everyone loves him. Of course they do. The charming, bestselling author. And he’s good looking. Although it’s true that the more you know a person the more it affects how you see them. I don’t see him as handsome any more. I don’t see him as sexy.
I hate him.
And I’m sorry, Jack, if some day you read this and you read that I hate your daddy – but I do. I hate that he lied to me. Told me he loved me. Made me believe love was his brand of love. Controlling me. Stripping away everything that made me me, until I don’t think I knew who I was any more. Not really.
And everyone was jealous. That was the biggest joke of all.
He is a good daddy to Jack, though. I can’t take that from him. Although I live in fear of Jack growing up and thinking how his daddy treats women is the right way to treat women. I don’t want Jack to treat any girlfriends like this. I don’t want him to control them. To make them change into what he wants rather than who they really are.
Cian says I’m ungrateful. He has ‘given me everything’. I suppose he has. The house. The car. The baby. The stupidly expensive wedding ring on my finger, which I hate wearing. He upgraded my plain, gold band – which my granny had worn and had given to me before our wedding – when he won The Simpson Award. I didn’t want the new band. Platinum. Diamonds. Blingy. All the girls were mad about it. Said he must really love me. I hated it. A loud ‘I own you’ shouting from my finger. All status. All ‘look at how great I am’. Look at what I have. Look what I treat my wife to.
None of that ‘look how I treat my wife’. He put my granny’s ring in a box in a drawer in his office. Under lock and key. He’d keep it safe, he said. No one would take it.
Not even me.
Perhaps I brought it on myself. Because I wanted him. When we first met. Then again, he was different then. Didn’t have a pot to piss in, as he would say. We were equals, I suppose. And God, he loved me. Cherished me. Treated me to simple romantic things – a picnic on the rug in front of the fire. A glass of wine and a hot bath waiting for me when I came home from work. I loved the claustrophobic nature of his love at first. I was young. Stupid. I still hadn’t figured out that Heathcliff wasn’t so much a romantic hero as a psychopath who controlled and destroyed everything he loved.
I remember he sneered when I told him that Wuthering Heights was my favourite book. It wasn’t even my favourite book. Light a Penny Candle was – but even then I knew Cian Grahame would choke if I admitted a love of something so popular. So ‘common’. He wouldn’t care if I tried to argue it was brilliant, before its time, funny and sad and beautiful. So I thought of the literary books I had read – which really didn’t amount to much. GCSE English. I had enjoyed Wuthering Heights. I found it all moody and dark and Heathcliff sexy and fierce. My teenage hormones rampant, I loved the thought of a man being driven mad by his love of me.
I was so fucking stupid.
I believed ours was true love. That he wanted me, needed me so passionately because I was his everything. But really, I was just another thing to him. Something to own. A character in one of his books – and he tried to edit me, rewrite me and decide my plot twists.
All I needed was for him to love me. Me. The real me. The me I was before we met. The me I thought was a good person. A nice person. I know I was never going to change the world. I didn’t have any standout talents. Finding the cure for cancer wasn’t in my destiny. But I believe I was good. I was kind. I was pretty in my own way. I was funny in my own way. I was caring. I was loving. Yes, I laughed too loud when I found something funny. I cried over ads on TV. Ones nobody else cried over. I loved watching Ant and Dec. I loved reading funny, well-written, beautiful books with pink covers. I was the kind of person people confided in. The kind of person who could be relied on to always have paracetamol in my handbag, spare hairgrips, Vaseline and clear nail polish in case of ladders-in-tights emergencies. I liked to wear sweatshirts and tie my hair up in a ponytail. I didn’t really care about brand names and labels. I probably ate too much chocolate. I could be extraordinarily grumpy when tired. But I was a good person. I hope I can still be a good person.
Just not good enough for Cian Grahame, bestselling author. Mr Success. Mr Has-to-keep-a-public-profile. Did he change, or did I? Did he change me? Sometimes I don’t know what happened any more. Or how it happened. Or whose fault it was, or is.
I don’t even know when. Not really. There wasn’t a changing point – an explosion. There wasn’t a kick to my stomach or a slap across my face. There wasn’t a push to my back as I walked up or down stairs. There wasn’t a moment when I looked at him, shocked, devastated at what he’d done. I didn’t even realise it at first. I’m that stupid. What was romantic and protective became possessive and claustrophobic. I realised it had been a few weeks since I’d seen my parents or my sisters. Then my friends stopped calling round so much. Definitely not when he was home – and he’s a writer, he’s always at home.
He wanted me to leave work – especially when I fell pregnant. He told me most women dream of living a life of luxury, of being ladies who lunch. I couldn’t imagine it – couldn’t want it. Anyway, I didn’t have ladies to lunch with any more. I only had Cian and where once the thought of the two of us existing in our little bubble together was everything I could have wanted, by then it made me feel scared. Terrified. I could see my life disappearing. I could see me blending into the background, like the wallpaper in his office. Expensive. Pretty. But just decoration. Without real purpose. Except to make him happy. Quietly.
He told me I was ungrateful. Unsupportive. He told me I was a bad mother – before I even held Jack in my arms. How could a mother have a baby and plan to give the baby to someone else to mind while she went out to work? I told him he could look after the baby. It was a moment of rebellion on my part – one that I paid for after. Not with cuts or bruises. But it still hurt. The names. The insinuations. The way he looked at me as if I was nothing. Then he would make a big fuss – go and buy all the nursery furniture we could possibly need and more. Promise me it would be better. He would be better. We started painting that room – our baby’s room – filled with the things he chose. He dabbed paint on my nose and laughed and I tried – I really tried – to love him again. He took my picture and I smiled for him and part of it was genuine. I promise.
But when I said my back was aching, my ankles swelling, he tutted. Accused me of ruining the day. Accused me of not caring about the baby. Told me we never should have even considered having a family in the first place. I felt Jack kick and wriggle in my stomach and he asked was there still time to get an abortion? We could tell everyone it was a miscarriage. I pleaded with him to stop. I told him I was sorry. I lied. I lied and told him I loved him and I loved our baby and I carried on painting even though my pregnant belly ached, and my ankles hurt and my head pounded and I wanted to cry.
As quick as his anger had arrived, it passed. He called me to him later, showed me where he had posted the picture of me, nose daubed with paint, to my Facebook account. He kissed me, and my tummy, and it was as if nothing had happened. It was as if he hadn’t suggested killing our baby.
And that was before he started to become ‘clumsy’ around me, accidentally knocking me into the worktops, saying he hadn’t seen me as he closed the door trapping my fingers, getting a bit too lost in ‘passion’ and leaving little bruises … After a while, I couldn’t deny there was more to what he was doing than being clumsy.
The thing is, even though I know he isn’t a good person, I know I have to accept I’m not a good person either.
A good person doesn’t cheat. A good person doesn’t give up on their marriage. Even if the for-better-or-worse bit is now worse the vast majority of the time. Even if they fall in love with someone else. Maybe Cian was right all along. Maybe I was ungrateful. A weak person. A person who doesn’t deserve his love. Or what he gave me.
I’d leave. I’d let him win. If it wasn’t for Jack.
Owen says I deserve more. He says I never deserve to feel anything but love. I should be happy – and waking up every day smiling and assured that I am enough.
I don’t think Owen really knows me though. How can he when I don’t know myself?
*
I went back on the pill today. I had to see the doctor in my lunch break – pick up my prescription from the chemist, hide the pills in the back of my locker. I don’t see any choice. I can’t get an implant – he’d know. I’d be afraid he’d know even if I had the coil fitted. This seems the safest option because I can’t fall pregnant. I can’t have another baby – not with him. It would end everything. I can’t keep taking the morning after pill. I can’t risk having to see if someone could get the abortion pill smuggled into the country for me. I can’t travel to England for a termination. He’d know. I can’t hide a pregnancy – he is there, waving the pregnancy testing kit in my face every twenty-eight days. Sitting on the edge of the bath while I pee in a cup and he dips the stick in. There’s no way I could hide it. None.
This is the only thing I can think of to be in control of my own life. I always thought I’d have a house full of babies, and if things were different I would have. If he was more like the man he was when we met – then maybe? That man wouldn’t shout at me the way he does. He wouldn’t tell me I could never understand what it was like to be him. I wasn’t like him. I’m ordinary. Boring. I couldn’t create anything if my life depended on it.
Except his babies, apparently. But I don’t want to. Not now.
I’m scared of him.
His moods are getting darker. He’s more controlling. Everything has to be just so. I left one of Jack’s bottles in the nursery – I was tired and it was the middle of the night – and he accused me of being lazy. Of trying to annoy him. Of being ungrateful for the house we lived in, the lifestyle he gave me. I cried. I told him I had just been tired and he had sneered. Told me I wouldn’t be so tired if I didn’t insist on going out to work.
But how would I even see Owen? I can’t tell Cian that Owen’s the only thing that makes me feel like I want to go on. He makes me feel loved. Strange, isn’t it? You can work alongside someone for years. Know them as a friend and then, one day, everything changes and you wonder how you never, ever knew before? Then again, I never saw the bad in Cian. Not at first. Now it’s all I see.
So it’s entirely possible the opposite could be true of Owen. I never saw how amazing he is. Now, it is everything. That sounds really cheesy, doesn’t it? But I feel a bit cheesy when I think of him.
*
I’m in love. Properly in love. Like I’ve never been in love before. And he loves me back. Cherishes me. And I have to put that here because I can’t say it out loud anywhere. I can’t shout it from the rooftops, which is what I want to do. I want to be a complete madly-in-love eejit and wear a T-shirt that says ‘I love Owen & Owen loves me’ on it. I want to feel the way I feel when I am with him forever. This is happiness. This is love. This is everything. He is everything. And he’s so sexy – I mean … God, he drives me wild. (I’m blushing as I write this but I want there to be a time when we don’t have to worry about snatched moments and secret trysts and we can shag on the kitchen counter or on the sofa or anywhere we want.) No one has ever made me feel like he does. No one has ever made me want them as much as I want him. His mind, his body (oh, God, his body!!! I know, I’m like a schoolgirl with a crush!), his heart. Most of all his heart. His beautiful, loving, tender heart. Capable of fixing me. All things considered, I’m such a lucky, lucky girl!!
*
I’m going to do it!!!
I’m going to leave him. I’m going to go and be with Owen. Take Jack. Start again.
Owen has been amazing. He’s helped me feel brave enough. We’ve talked about it so much – planned it. Now I just have to do it. Leave Cian and hope he feels strongly enough about his public image that he won’t make a big scene.
I know he’ll be hurt – but it’s his turn to feel hurt. I’ve done it for long enough. I want to be happy. I’m young. I need to live my life. With Owen and Jack.
*
I tried to let the words settle. Sink in. I tried to marry them with the smiling selfies, the life-affirming quotes, the posts about how happy she was – how she was blessed. I only needed to see the grief tearing strips from Owen second by second, moment by moment, to know it was true. He was rocking, slowly – small movements – barely perceptible but it was almost as if, the more I read, the more I knew, the more it was ‘out there’, the more real it became. To all of us. To Owen most of all. He’d known she had been unhappy, of course. He’d known how Cian had treated her. He had known how she had wanted to escape. How they thought they were going to escape together. Somewhere new. A fresh beginning where he would help her heal again. But seeing the face of others as we read her words? It was as if pain had become visible – and it was all I could see when I looked at Owen’s face.
‘I should have done more,’ he whispered.
‘You were taking her away from it all,’ I said. ‘You were giving her a new beginning.’
‘Not enough, it wasn’t enough. We weren’t quick enough. I didn’t get her out of there fast enough.’
I was trying to think of something to say when a rattle of the shutters outside made us jump. Donna looked at me, wide-eyed and scared.
‘DS Bradley,’ I said, shaking my head as if trying to shake the words out of it. ‘I meant to tell you, I asked him to meet me here. I want to talk to him.’
‘Here?’ Donna asked, twisting her hands tighter.
‘I think he needs to see this diary, don’t you? Don’t you think he needs to know about Cian? The real Cian?’
‘Of course he does,’ Owen said.
‘But won’t I get in trouble?’ Donna asked, as the rattle on the shutter grew louder.
‘How? Why?’
‘Because I kept it from him – isn’t that obstructing justice or something?’ she said. She looked genuinely terrified.
‘We don’t have to tell him you had it,’ Owen said. ‘Say we found it yesterday … or today …’
A third rattle, loud, almost deafening made Donna jump again. ‘But I need to get home to the boys. Won’t he ask questions? The boys will be worried. They won’t know where I am. I don’t have time to stand here and talk to the police. I can’t risk getting into trouble. I’m all they have.’
I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to keep DS Bradley waiting any longer.
‘Just go home,’ I heard Owen say. ‘We’ll deal with this. I’ll deal with this, Donna. It’s about time I took more responsibility for it all.’
I heard a mumbled response as I unlocked the front door and raised the shutters to let DS Bradley in.
‘I was about to leave,’ he said, his face serious, a hint of irritation in his voice. ‘I’ve told you things are busy at the moment, Emily, so if we can get to the point, that would be good.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ve something to show you and something to tell you.’
He followed me into Owen’s office. Donna had already left and Owen was holding onto the journal for dear life. I suppose I hadn’t thought of how hard it would be for him to get to see something that was such a part of Rose for such a short time, only to have to let go of it again.
He stood up, shook DS Bradley’s hand. ‘Emily hadn’t told me you were coming, but she’s right – you need to see this. It’s a journal Rose kept – it’s her own words about how things were between her and Cian. It’s what I told you – but in her words, her writing.’
His words were like a slap in the face to me. He had told DS Bradley about how Rose was treated, about his affair with her and all the time Detective Bradley was talking to me, was telling me to think carefully about things, he knew of the allegations made against Cian. I watched as Owen pushed the book across the desk. DS Bradley pulled some latex gloves from his pocket, put them on and lifted it.
‘And where has this been until this time?’ he asked.
‘Here,’ Owen said. ‘I was sorting out some of our filing yesterday – found it in the back of a drawer.’
‘And you waited to pass it over until today?’
Owen shifted in his seat. ‘When you read it, when you take it … you’ll see it contains a lot of personal information. Not just about Cian – but about me. About her feelings towards me. About what we had together.’ His voice broke a little. He coughed. Cleared his throat. ‘I just wanted the chance to see it. To read it. To spend some time with her words.’
DS Bradley opened the book, flicking through it, scanning the words. He tutted. Shook his head. Sighed but stayed silent.
‘So you can go get him now?’ Owen said. ‘Doesn’t this show motive? Doesn’t it show form?’
‘It’s definitely something to add to the investigation,’ DS Bradley said.
‘No. It has to be more than that,’ Owen said. ‘It has to be enough to show what he did to her.’
‘Much as I would like it to be, Owen, it doesn’t fall into the category of hard evidence. It’s useful – definitely – but it’s nothing more than circumstantial. Any defence counsel would argue that it’s a big leap from a few scribblings in a diary saying she was scared of him to him having her killed – especially given the wealth of stuff posted on her own social media accounts.’
‘Which he posted for her,’ Owen said, anger in his voice.
‘Look, Owen, you know as well as I do that I want to nail this bastard. I don’t know how, and the pieces haven’t fit together yet but I have no doubt he has something to do with her death.’
I felt my face blaze hotter and hotter as they spoke. If a man of DS Bradley’s calibre suspected Cian Grahame of being involved – what must he think of me? The poor misfortunate under his thumb now? Had he known all along that Cian had been controlling towards Rose – had he thought that was what was waiting for me? I shuddered at the thought. How I had trusted him. Loved him. Maybe I was sick? Maybe I was as bad as him? I was desperate for DS Bradley to know that I wasn’t.
‘I lied,’ I blurted and both men looked at me. ‘I lied when I said I was with him the night Kevin McDaid was killed. I wasn’t. I didn’t know he was going to say that,’ I said, my eyes pleading with DS Bradley to believe me. ‘When he told you that day in his house – I didn’t know and he had pleaded with me to help him. Said he was desperate. Scared of losing Jack. I panicked when he said it and I should have told you afterwards. But no, I wasn’t with him. I had only just met him that day, when he had come in with Jack to the surgery – to register him.’ I nodded to Owen to confirm this. He nodded back.
‘You’d never even spoken to him before then?’ DS Bradley asked.
I rubbed my temples. ‘No. I mean I had read what he’d written on Rose’s Facebook page …’
‘Rose’s Facebook page? Were you friends with her? I thought you said you didn’t know her?’
I felt my face burn. I wanted the floor to swallow me up. All my lies. All my pathetic-ness was being laid bare now to the police and to Owen and the right thing to do was face it, even if I wanted to run from it.
‘No. No. Her page has no privacy settings – or very poor ones. After she died, I looked her up. I saw what he wrote. I couldn’t help but think of him as a decent man who was grieving.’
‘And do you look up the Facebook pages of many people who have died?’ DS Bradley asked.
‘No,’ I said, staring at my shoes. I noticed the leather at the front of my right trainer was scuffed. A deep score – not the kind that would wash off or would be easily covered. ‘It was different with Rose, because I was there when she died. I was on the street. I saw it happen.’