Chase fought against the sneering coolness in his voice and sat back down, this time on the sofa with him, but at the furthest end of it.
‘We met at that pub. Do you remember? The one by the park?’
He remembered. He could even remember what she had been wearing. It came to him with such vivid clarity that he almost thought that it had been lying in wait for eight years, just at the edges of his memory: a pair of very faded jeans, some plimsolls which had once been white but were scuffed way past their original colour and a light-blue jumper, the sleeves of which were long enough for her to tuck her hands inside them. Which she had done as she had delivered her blow.
‘I told you about Shaun.’
‘Believe me, I haven’t forgotten that special moment in my life.’
‘Please don’t be sarcastic, Alessandro. This is really hard for me. I just want you to listen, because you were right when you said that we had unfinished business between us. We did. And, for me at least, we still have until you hear me out. Or, rather, I still do....’
The palms of her hands felt sweaty and she smoothed them over the burgundy dress. ‘Eight years ago, I fell in love with you.’ She braved his silent stare and willed herself to continue. ‘I was married and, believe me, I shouldn’t have looked at you, far less spoken to you, but I did. You have no idea what you did for me. Being with you was like being free for the first time in my life. I finally understood what all those silly romance novels were all about.’
Alessandro frowned. This was hardly the direction he’d expected the conversation to go in. ‘If you’re hoping to pull on my heart strings, then you’re barking up the wrong tree. I have perfect recall of your little speech to me. It involved you telling me that Shaun was the great love of your life, that it had been fun seeing me, but you were only in it for some help with work...hoped I didn’t get the wrong idea. I’m recalling the moment you waved your wedding ring in my face and pulled out a photo of your loved one.’
‘Yes.’
‘So where are you going with this, exactly? Why have you come here to waste my time?’ Another shot of whisky would have gone down a treat but he did remember what he had said to her about his parents teaching him the horrors of having no control, by example.
‘I was an idiot when I married Shaun...’ Chase stared absently into the distance. ‘I was incredibly young and it seemed like an exciting thing to do. Or...or maybe not, thinking about it now. Shaun told me it would be an exciting thing to do and I went along with it because I had already figured out that it didn’t pay to disagree with anything he said.’
‘Watch out. You’re in danger of wiping some of the shine from your blissfully joyous married life.’
‘There was never any shine on it, and I wasn’t blissfully married,’ Chase told him abruptly. She refocused on his face to find him watching her carefully. When she thought about the horror that had been her married life with Shaun, she wanted to cry for those wasted years, but the self-control she had built up over the years stood her in good stead.
Alessandro found that he was holding his breath. ‘Another lie, Chase?’ But he wanted to hear what she had to say even though he told himself that he wasn’t going to fall for anything she told him. Once bitten, twice shy.
‘I haven’t come here to try and make you believe me, Alessandro,’ Chase said with quiet sincerity. ‘I know you probably won’t anyway. I know I’ve lied to you in the past and you’ll never forgive me. You’ve made that crystal-clear. I’m here because I need to tell you everything. And, when I’m finished, I’ll walk out that door and you’ll never see me again.
‘When I met you for the first time, I began something that was dangerous, although you weren’t to know that. I’ve thought about what you said, about Shaun hitching his wagon to me because he knew that he would be able to go further with me shackled to his side. I think you were right, although at the time I didn’t see it that way. By the time I made it to university, I’d lost the ability to think independently. My studies were the only thing keeping me going. We’d come to London and I had been taken away from my friends, from everything I knew, although I guess you would find “everything I knew” hardly worth knowing anyway. Shaun was in his element. I was married to him and he was in complete control, and he enjoyed making sure he exercised that control.’
‘What are you telling me?’
‘I’m telling you that I was an abused wife. The sort of pathetic woman you would find contemptible. The sort of woman who can really understand how all those women at Beth’s shelter feel. Why do you imagine I have such empathy for them?’