Martin. Why hasn’t she told him of her past, the lost years between finishing school and returning home to Riversend, the ten years of flailing about? She’s told him something of the privations of her childhood, so why has she never recounted her twenties? That decade-long winter, leavened only by the brief summer of Tarquin Molloy, the unfulfilled spring of Byron Swift. Why didn’t she confide in him when she had the chance? Was it because she thought that decade unimportant, an uneventful hiatus between her school days and her life with him? Was she still buried in her book, unwilling to raise her head?
This past year, Martin has become more and more open, telling her about his own awful childhood, the deaths of his parents, his sisters. She’s seen him changing, softening, become more giving, shedding the persona of foreign correspondent, losing his shell. She’d believed herself maturing alongside him, the psychic wounds healing, the scar tissue growing over. She and him and Liam: nothing else mattered. That was what she had told herself up there on the cliff: nothing else mattered, the world couldn’t reach them there. Not the bushfires, not the virus, not the past. So she didn’t tell him about Tarquin Molloy, convincing herself it no longer mattered. But it wasn’t true. They didn’t live quarantined from the consequences of their actions; they could not travel unimpeded to new worlds; there was no vaccine against the past.
That thought traps her; she can’t move on, can’t escape it. And now sleep is reaching out, its tendrils stroking her. Her thoughts start to swirl, a vortex pulling her downwards, inviting her to surrender consciousness, to give in to her dreams. And yet every time she slips towards the soft bed of oblivion, they are waiting, the ghosts of Tarquin Molloy and Byron Swift, their haunting presence.
‘It’s your money Martin wants,’ whispers Tarquin. ‘You’ve got millions.’
‘It’s your looks,’ insists Byron. ‘It’s his dick that wants you, not his heart.’
She bites her lip, emerging once again from the slippery pool. How can she sleep with these spectres waiting for her?
Then she thinks of Martin with Liam, surely the clincher. His love for the boy is so evident, so selfless. And Liam is not even his biological son.
Beside her, he emits another whistling exhalation, and again she feels her love for him. The ghosts cower. She rolls over once again, trying to drift off, but the sheets are wrinkled and the duvet twisted, too warm in the cold apartment. She yearns for sleep before the day begins in earnest, if only to escape her maddening thoughts.
But still she can’t fall into the void. Her mind switches back from Martin to Tarquin. All this time, she’s believed he’d used her, deceived her, abandoned her. It’s what the case against Zelda Forshaw established: that the accountant had abetted him in defrauding the bank. The prosecutors asserted he’d bolted, leaving Zelda to face the music. Of course, Mandy accepted their version of events. Why wouldn’t she? It was proven in a court of law.
But now she knows different. Tarquin was dead, murdered. He hadn’t got away with it, he’d never left the country. He’d been killed, shot, back then, maybe while she still fretted in the Gold Coast penthouse. And he wasn’t a thief, he was a cop.
And suddenly she is fully awake, the knowledge clear in her mind, the real reason she can’t sleep. All this time, she’s thought he was the one who had betrayed her. Now she realises the opposite may be true: that she had betrayed him, condemned him. That her jealous heart and her spiteful tongue had killed him. My God, what had she wrought?
They convicted Zelda but not her. They concluded she was innocent, of course they had. For hadn’t she reported him, in a jealous fit, after she found him sleeping with Zelda? Told them he’d asked for her passwords, claiming he’d inadvertently allowed his own to expire. She’d done that; there was no denying it. It had been a petty thing, a childish retribution, a reminder that he shouldn’t take her for granted.
Ever since, she’s thought maybe that was why he had abandoned her, disappeared with the money and left her behind, knowing that he couldn’t trust her. That was what she’s been telling herself for five years; her rationalisation, the reason why she hadn’t ever told the police and the bank all she had known. Why she had lied, why she had protected herself, why she always denied helping him. But he hadn’t fled; he’d been murdered. Why? Because someone had discovered he was a cop? And how had they discovered him? Could it be because she had reported him, his misdemeanour, using her passwords instead of his own?
Suddenly, it’s hard to breathe, the sobs coming. Fuck. She’d got him killed. The poor bastard. Maybe he hadn’t sent her to the Gold Coast to get her out of the way. Maybe Zelda was right, and he had sent her north to make sure she was protected, that she had an alibi as he probed the bank’s computers. He was a cop and she’d got him killed.
Beside her, Martin grunts and rolls over. She turns to look at him, his profile now clearly visible in the rising light. How dare she suspect him, after what
