eye. And there she was again.
His Amy. The one he had fallen in love with all those years ago. The one he saw returning a little more each day.
They were only three or so hours’ drive from Perth, but it was as if they had been transported to another world. It seemed to Alex this might be one decision he hadn’t got wrong. Although, his plan hadn’t started so well – the drive down in the hire car, in the fading afternoon light, had been through deserted bushland most of the way, and Amy had been so pale he had worried he’d have to turn off course at any moment and find her a doctor.
They had arrived late. To a quiet, darkened resort, an empty reception area, then a girl handing them keys for a villa he had prebooked on the internet only hours earlier, which they had to walk down a pitch-black path to get to. By the time they had unlocked the front door and Alex had turned on the lights, Amy had been white-faced, silent, shaking, her chest rising and falling rapidly, and she’d gone and locked herself in the bathroom for over an hour, while Alex contemplated whether he was really up to this new, pro-active approach.
However, the next morning, when they had woken up to the sounds of the sea and the excited squawking of children and gulls, and headed out for breakfast to find themselves in a beautiful, bustling resort, he knew for sure that his idea had been a good one. Waiting it out here would be a completely different proposition to their small, claustrophobic hotel room in the city. In fact, as the days had gone by, they both seemed almost to have forgotten that they were waiting for anything at all. They had swum, and eaten, and read, and taken walks along the beach. Last night, on one such expedition at sunset, Amy grabbed hold of his hand and held it for just a moment, while Alex thought uneasily of his wife.
When they had first got there, he had used the hotel internet and sent a long email to Chloe. He’d tried to be honest about everything, but had realised as he was typing that there were things he would never be able to explain fully. How could he tell her about his confused feelings for Amy and ask her to understand? Plus, he couldn’t tell her about Amy’s revelation regarding the baby; that one really wasn’t his secret to divulge. So, even as he pressed Send, he’d felt it was a futile gesture; another way of disconnecting them while trying to bring them closer again. The only way he could really begin to make amends, he had come to realise, was to abandon Amy and go home. The thought nagged at him every time he checked his email. It had been five days and she hadn’t replied.
He hadn’t had any heart-to-hearts with Amy this week – it had been an unspoken agreement between them. They had talked a lot of baloney, really, about current affairs and other guests in the hotel. Of course, a lot of subjects veered towards uncomfortable territory, but they had both become adept at steering the conversation back on course. And they had been laughing, and teasing one another, and sometimes it had felt like they’d never stopped, and that was killing him.
This time together had made Alex realise how much he and Amy had been robbed by circumstance. Whenever he thought about it, his blood heated up with anger and injustice. He thought about his time with Chloe: Chloe laughing, dancing, cooking at home, heading off to work. He thought about Chloe in her wedding dress. Amy should have had that. If not for the twists and turns of fate, then Amy would have had it all – probably with him. How he wished he could make it up to her.
The sun had begun its descent as he watched Amy lean over him in her bikini, reaching for her towel while dripping water onto him. She had just begun rubbing her hair when Alex’s mobile phone began to trill. The noise stilled her hand.
‘You need to come back,’ Detective Thompson said, without preamble, when Alex answered the call. ‘The defence has closed. The jury are about to retire. I don’t think they’ll be out for long.’
Alex met Amy’s eyes. She didn’t need him to do anything further for them both to know that this halcyon period was over.
84
Chloe had woken up with the feeling that something was wrong. Given that everything seemed wrong these days, it felt strange to think that way, but this was different. More nagging. More troubling.
It wasn’t that she was trying to block out the thought of her husband sharing a room – and a bed? – with another woman, because she had been doing that 24/7 for the past few days. Nor was it the email that was sitting patiently in her inbox, full as it was of pleading and excuses and guilt, which she still couldn’t begin to think how to reply to – although that wasn’t exactly helping her in her endless quest for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
Nevertheless, despite her fresh misgivings, she went to work. The Abbott countdown was now days rather than weeks. The atmosphere in the office was tense. Even the solicitors who had nothing to do with the case knew that the way it played out could have a dramatic impact on the fortunes of them all.
There was now a small scrummage of media to contend with outside the office, wanting the first sound bites, any insider knowledge. When they’d initially appeared, a couple of days earlier, Mark had described being harangued by them as he tried to walk inside; yet they’d left Chloe alone, seeming largely uninterested in her. They probably assumed she was a secretary. If so, it appeared that sexist assumptions weren’t completely dead, she thought, though media savvy possibly was – the secretaries knew far more than anyone else around here.
In the office, she munched her way through a packet of crisps as she read over what seemed like dozens of emails, mostly irrelevant, paying careful attention to all those marked Abbott. Her stomach was aching at the thought of their first trip to court – another time she might have found it exciting, but she wasn’t in the mood.
The morning dragged by. She didn’t stop for lunch as she didn’t have much of an appetite, and she couldn’t wait for the day to be over. Mid-afternoon, she made her way around the desk and headed for the toilets to splash water on her face. Her body felt sluggish, out of sorts, her feet a little unsteady.
In the bathroom she stared at her face in the mirror, eyeing the girl who stared back with the same suspicious eyes. She had just turned the tap on and leaned over when the first spasm rocked her, making her almost double up. She instinctively curled into herself, going to her knees on the hard floor, trying to steady her breathing, failing before the second wave of pain rolled in. She gasped, just as the door to the toilets opened, and there was Jana, her expression moving into shock, staring at Chloe on the floor.
‘Call an ambulance,’ was all Chloe could murmur, before the floor quivered like the shimmer of a heat haze, and she keeled forward.
85
‘You still have a life, you know,’ Alex said. ‘I think you’re just choosing not to live it.’
They were back in Perth, sitting in a bar near their hotel, and they had both had a couple of whisky chasers. That was probably why he felt emboldened to say such a thing, Amy thought.
She had just told him she had nothing. No direction. No purpose. No attachments. Nothing. She had just said she didn’t know what she would do if the verdict was not what they wanted it to be. And it had made him unaccountably angry.
However, his reply riled her.
Alex looked her in the eye and continued, ‘It’s beyond terrible what you’ve gone through. I know that. But…’ he paused, glanced down, then back at Amy, and there was a fierce glow in his eye as he stated firmly, ‘You have a life, Amy. You are
Her mouth fell open. The tears gathered in readiness. ‘That’s not fair, Alex. I can’t…’ she said, voice breaking. ‘I don’t know how…’
‘No,’ Alex replied, the lines of his tanned face softening as he reached for her hand. ‘It isn’t fair. And you couldn’t… and you didn’t… But think about why we’re here. Now, Amy, I think you can.’
Maybe he was right, she thought, seeing past her emotion for a second. It was why she had felt compelled to come this far – she needed to see them get what they deserved. She had to see them punished, because if she did, then another small chink of her ethereal life might crack and reveal something solid underneath that she had been
