He looks down at his hands. ‘I know,’ he says, so quietly that Becky must strain to hear it.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Because it was you. And it was Maisie. I couldn’t lose you. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brave enough at the time. And then later I couldn’t see how to tell you the truth and not seem like a liar.’
‘But you are a liar.’
‘I didn’t mean to be one.’
‘I said, out loud, I wanted to know what happened. I asked you, who do you think did it to me? There were bruises on my wrist the morning after. Was that you? Did you hold me like that? Did you hurt me like that?’
His eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t know, I honestly don’t know … I don’t remember every little bit.’ He blinks. ‘I’ve tried my best to make up for it,’ he says.
‘I know. You’ve paid a lot of utility bills. Never child maintenance. Never because you brought her into this world, without my consent. Only because you were the guy who made all the sacrifices. So fucking selfless.’
‘How could I have done it any other way without telling you?’
‘Listen to yourself! Can’t you hear what you’re saying?’
‘I’ve told you the truth now and you hate me.’
‘I needed the truth then. I needed it the next morning, Adam, when I woke up alone and there was semen inside my underwear and part of me had been fucking stolen.’
‘Oh God.’ Adam rests his head in his hands. Then he seems to shrink before her as his limbs fold in on themselves and he sobs loudly into his lap. ‘I was always looking for a moment to tell you. When you weren’t suicidal. When it wouldn’t risk pushing you over the edge. And then you gave birth to Maisie and you fell in love with her. And so did I. It was our daughter, Becks, lying in your arms. And I wanted … It was never a sacrifice. And if I let you believe it was a sacrifice, or at least something I didn’t need to do, then I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to be with the two of you, looking after you both for the rest of my life. Only … you didn’t love me. And so I tried to see other people.’
‘I hate you,’ she whispers under her breath.
‘It was always you. I always held out hope because you never got that involved with anyone … and it was hard, because I know that on some level you found the whole dating thing difficult because of your history …’
‘Because of the fact you raped me.’ Her teeth grind together, her fists bunch again.
‘Stop saying that! Let it be what it was, which was two really wasted teenagers …’
And then she roars. She roars at him, in deep, thick, solid, ravaged breaths. She roars at him, wanting to singe his hair and burn his skin with the size and volume of her voice. She roars until his eyes are wide with panic and fear, so that spittle showers him and his neck retracts like a lizard.
‘Stop it!’ he shouts.
‘Did you, at any point, ask me if you could have sex with me?’
‘Stop it.’ He is crying now.
And still she roars, intoxicated by the look of terror on his face, as if for a split second she had made him feel her pain.
‘Did you ask me? Yes or no?’
‘No,’ he screams. ‘I did not ask you.’
The silence is so thick, so clogged she can hear both their struggling breaths.
‘And you didn’t ask me,’ he says, with a voice that is both choked and perfectly clear. ‘You didn’t say yes and you didn’t say no. And then it was you who forced me to lie.’
‘What?’
He unfolds himself from his kneeling position on the carpet and stands up.
‘You said you’d been raped that night,’ he says. ‘And that wasn’t true. But I didn’t have any way of proving it. Maybe if you’d said you couldn’t remember, or that you’d done something stupid while you were blacked-out, then I could have said: “no, that was us, that was you and me. Don’t you remember?” But instead you said you’d been raped. And by the time I got my head around that, I couldn’t come back from it. You never let there be a question about what had happened. You said you were raped and that was it. So that either made me a rapist or not. And I wasn’t a rapist. Not then, not ever. I don’t blame you for anything. I really don’t. But can’t you see how what you were saying made things impossible for me?’
The world recedes. Becky tries to hold onto what is happening. Can he possibly be asking her to apologize to him? Is that where he thinks this might end, sixteen years of agony tied off with an admission from her that yes, perhaps she had been over-hasty and backed him into a corner.
All her fault, really. When you think about it.
He continues speaking, filling her silence with his words. ‘I’m not saying you did anything wrong, Becks,’ he says. ‘Not at all. I should have told you what I remembered, as soon as you said anything. I just want you to understand how it was. From my side of things.’ The view from his side of the bed. ‘What you thought happened, didn’t happen.’
‘Is that what you’d tell Maisie? That you listened to me say I wanted to kill myself and you said nothing, because what, I’d got it all mixed up in my pretty little head?’ Her stomach is hot with acid, the spit cold on her chin. ‘That my version of events was, simply, according to you, wrong?’
He says nothing.
‘That you fucked an unconscious girl,’ she continues, ‘and when she woke up alone, with her pants turned inside out, you thought it was best not to say
