She thinks of Liam. It’s as if fate conspired to grant her a year and a half of happiness, lifting her up so the fall would come that much harder. She wants to flee, to get back to her son, to protect him. And yet the past is coming, it’s here, she can’t carry it back to Port Silver; she can’t risk it getting a trace of her boy, picking up his scent as well. No. Whatever happens, she needs to leave the past here. Let Sydney have it, let the city keep it.
She feels a surge of anger, anger at Tarquin. For a moment it’s a relief, this new emotion replacing the guilt. Even at the end, he was lying. He hadn’t dropped Zelda, after all; if anything, his affair with her had intensified. He was still fucking her, assuring the accountant that it was Mandy he was leaving, sharing with her his plan to steal millions. Bastard. He had lied to her, he had lied to Zelda; he had lied about being single. He was married the whole time. And did the wife know? His soft words and his hard cock, screwing both Mandy and Zelda and then returning home to his wife. And then.
And then, lying there amid the carnage of Martin’s apartment, she feels a strange resolve come to her, a peculiar strength. She’s right: the past is after her, there is no escaping it. So she can lie here, pathetic, waiting for it—or she can get up and fight back. For Liam, for Martin, for herself. For their future. It may smell blood, it may have its fangs out, but that doesn’t mean she has to always be the victim. She’s tried that: she knows it doesn’t work. Her books and her beauty won’t protect her now; she needs to push back. Fuck it, she whispers to herself, and struggles to her feet.
She can start with the truth: she’d known. She has to acknowledge it, even if she still doesn’t intend incriminating herself. She’d known; she’d always known. Known that first night, seeing his mastery in the casino, known in the following nights, as he taught her how to count cards and more. Making a game of mnemonic techniques, teaching her how to construct a memory palace, recalling random strings of letters and numbers by placing them in familiar locations. And she’d known that there was more than one Tarquin Molloy, more than one man inside that handsome body: the serious corporate lawyer and the charismatic player. She’d known: not that he was a thief, planning to steal millions, nor that he was a policeman, working an investigation. But she should have suspected. For she knew he was probing the bank’s networks. She knew because she had helped him. She had denied it ever since: to the police, to Clarity Sparkes and Harry Sweetwater, to anyone and everyone. But Mollisons must have suspected, just as Zelda suspected. No wonder they sacked her; no wonder Zelda had come searching. She’d thought she had got away with it, deserved to get away with it. After all, she was fundamentally innocent, he had still betrayed her. Even now, no one knows, no one needs to know. But the past knows, and it has her scent.
There’s a noise downstairs: Martin arriving. Martin. Is he really different? Is he genuine, the real deal? Yes, she tells herself, he must be. He lacks the swagger of Tarquin and the self-belief of Byron Swift. But that is no bad thing. She can see where it was; sometimes, when he is engulfed by his journalism, his purpose, she can detect the same signs. It had been here on the walls around her in his self-affirming trophies, now lying broken on the floor. Are all men like this, intrinsically untrustworthy, ultimately self-obsessed? Immediately she censures herself: she of all people should not be entertaining such thoughts.
Martin appears in the doorway, concern writ large on his face. He doesn’t even glance at his broken trophies. In that moment, she sees his love; she sees his concern for her.
‘C’mon,’ he says gently. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Where?’
‘A hotel. We can’t stay here.’
‘Do you need to pack?’
‘There’s nothing left to pack.’
She looks around. He’s right. ‘I think it’s coming for us.’ There, she’s said it.
That stops him, drains the momentum from him, so that he is standing absolutely still, eyes locked on hers, forehead creased. ‘What? What’s coming?’
‘The past.’
He speaks slowly, softly, across the gap between them. ‘Do you believe that you were somehow responsible for Molloy’s death?’
She matches his gaze, tells the truth. ‘Yes. I think maybe I was.’
Movement returns to him. He threads his way through the debris to stand with her. He takes her hand. ‘You can’t know that. No one knows who killed him, no one knows why.’
She studies his eyes. She likes them so much, how expressive they are, how they reveal his vulnerabilities. He’s different from Tarquin, different from Byron. Different. It occurs to her that he’s suffering as well. ‘Martin, I am so sorry. About Max. It’s so awful.’
His gaze falls to the floor, but she can see the anguish in his face, the grief in the slump of his shoulders. She takes him, holds him. He’s cold, his clothes damp from the rain. She strokes the back of his head as she might a child’s.
‘It was terrible,’ the words come from him with difficulty, as if he’s choking on them. ‘I saw it. What happened to them.’
‘It’s not your fault, you know. There was nothing you could have done.’
‘Wasn’t there?’
‘No. Of course not.’
He leans back from her a little, so she can see his face, see the pain in his eyes. And the love. And she is
