The End of Her

He’s staring at her. She can smell him – slightly sweaty, so familiar. She sticks her face right up to his and hisses back, ‘Someone tried to run me down. Don’t pretend it wasn’t you.’ She puts all her fury into her voice. ‘You were supposed to kill her, not me.’ She’s breathing heavily now. She spits out, ‘Of course I went to the police – it was the only way to protect myself.’

His face twists with rage and agitation. ‘Bullshit! I didn’t try to run you down! Just stop with the fucking lies, can’t you? You didn’t give me enough time. I needed to be sure I wouldn’t get caught. Now, thanks to you, I can never get rid of Stephanie – and it’s all your fault – going to the fucking police! You’ve screwed us both.’

She says bitterly, ‘No – you’ve screwed us both. I hope you have a miserable life with your stuck-up, controlling wife. If she even keeps you.’ She shrugs past him, gets into her car and drives away.

Patrick strides angrily back to his own car. As he drives back to Aylesford, his mind returns to the turmoil of those days after Erica had given him a stark choice: kill his wife, or she’d go to the authorities. He’d been almost paralysed by his situation, unable to think at all because of sleep deprivation and fear. He was living in a fog of indecision.

The day of the picnic with Stephanie, he’d been agitated, undecided. Over lunch he’d developed a half-formed plan to drive back, Stephanie and the twins asleep in the car, twist the wheel suddenly – he would claim that he’d fallen asleep, lost control of the car – and go off the road at a spot he knew and plunge into the lake. He wouldn’t help Stephanie or the twins out of the flooded car – he would prevent her escape if he had to – but he would make it look like he’d tried to save her. But then Stephanie had insisted on driving back. He tried to protest, but it was as if she had a second sense, as if she knew. In the end, he’d been relieved. He probably never would have got away with it. It had been a desperate idea, born of a desperate situation. By the time he decided it would be a much better idea to get rid of Erica – the source of all his problems – she’d already gone to the coroner.

He’d always planned to get rid of Stephanie someday, somehow – but Erica had forced his hand.

He thinks back to how it all began – clumsily bumping into Lindsey at the top of the stairs while her back was turned. He made it seem like an accident but he knew exactly what he was doing. She went careening down the stairs to the floor at the bottom, and he thought it was done. She lay still for a moment by the back door, but then she began to stir. And … she was fine. He remembers his disbelief, his crushing disappointment. But he’d quickly realized what he must do and dashed down the stairs to help her up, exclaiming how sorry he was. Fussing over her, making a big show of concern. She hadn’t suspected a thing. She was only worried about the baby and insisted on going to the hospital for an ultrasound. They’d taken a cab to the hospital and he’d brooded in the waiting room at the ER, wondering how he could ever get rid of his wife and her child.

It wasn’t until weeks later, during that snowstorm, lying in bed the night before their trip to her mother’s, that he thought of it. The exhaust pipe. How perfect it was. How pleased he was with himself for thinking of it. How easy it had been to do, and so low risk. He remembers the look Erica had given him at the funeral. As if she knew. But how could she know?

He’s been afraid of her ever since.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

WHEN PATRICK RETURNS, Stephanie is in the driveway, buckling the twins into the backseat. Through the rear window, she sees him drive in and park his car beside hers. She wonders where he’s been for the last couple of hours.

‘Hey,’ he says, getting out of his car and coming up behind her. She’s still got her head inside the car, settling the twins. He sounds conciliatory. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t know what he expects from her. He’s turned their lives upside down, their marriage into a fraud, and it doesn’t seem to have registered that it’s all his fault.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks as she pulls her head out of the car and turns to face him.

‘Grocery shopping.’

‘You don’t have to take them. I’m home now. You can leave them with me.’

‘No, I’ve got them all settled now. It’s fine.’ She notices that he seems upset, although he’s trying to pretend he’s not. His eyes are cold, distant.

‘No. Leave them with me. You always complain about grocery shopping with the twins, what a hassle it is.’

She does. But she doesn’t want to leave them at home with him. It’s the first time she’s really had that thought crystallize in her mind, and it gives her a start. She’s afraid to leave the babies in his care. ‘I know,’ she says, turning away, ‘but it’s good for them. They need an outing and they go to the park every day. The grocery store is different. I let them feel the oranges, the bags of rice. They love it.’ And people always stop to tell me how adorable they are, she thinks, and I need that right now, it makes everything easier to bear. Whatever she does, whatever she decides, it will be for them, for Jackie and Emma. Maybe she’ll get in the car now with her twins, her diaper bag, and her handbag, and just keep driving …

‘Do you want me to come?’ he offers.

She manages to smile at him. ‘No, that’s okay. I do this all the time.’

‘Okay, fine.’ He looks at her for a second and then turns away and goes into the house.

She drives to the grocery store, her mind in a tumult.

Later that night, after a strained evening meal, after they have put the twins to bed, Stephanie takes her laptop to the living-room sofa and watches Patrick go upstairs to their bedroom.

Stephanie sits on the sofa dry-eyed. All her tears have been shed. Tears are a sign of weakness, she thinks. What she feels now is a coldness, a resoluteness, a resolve that she didn’t have before. A kind of strength that comes from having no option but to face your situation head-on and deal with it.

It’s late, nearly eleven. She closes the laptop, leaves it on the coffee table and makes her way slowly upstairs. She’s so tired; exhaustion makes it feel like she’s climbing a mountain. She pauses at the top. For now, she’s still sleeping in the same bed as her husband. Should she move to the bed in the spare room? She would like to. Does she dare?

She walks slowly to their shared bedroom, the carpet softening her footsteps to nothing. She gets to the bedroom door and stops. Patrick is at the closet. He has his back to her but at a slight angle, so that she can see what he’s doing. He’s holding his gun in his right hand, as if he’s checking it. Her heart begins to beat wildly. How had she forgotten about the gun? It’s always been there. Locked away, in the safe. Patrick keeps it there in case anyone breaks into their house while they’re sleeping – it would take him only seconds to access it.

She stares, unable to move, her heart knocking at her ribs. The safe where he keeps the gun, on the closet shelf, is open. She knows there’s ammunition in there. Has he loaded the gun? Is this it? Is this how it all ends? He doesn’t know she’s there; he seems to be completely oblivious to her. She makes a quick calculation – she can’t turn and run, she could never get to the twins and get them out of the house fast enough. She’s glued to the spot.

He places the gun back in the safe, locks it and turns around, startled to see her there. He must notice her pallor, because he says, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I’m just not feeling that great. I thought I’d go to bed.’

He studies her. ‘Yeah, you don’t look too good,’ he agrees.

She walks to her side of the bed, grabs her nightgown from beneath the pillow and turns her back to him. She starts stripping off her clothes. She doesn’t want to provoke him. She doesn’t dare move to the spare room. She crawls into bed without bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth, and turns on her side facing the wall. She tries to fall asleep, but her heart is racing.

As Patrick joins her in bed and the long night stretches on, she can’t sleep, because she’s thinking about the gun.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

IN THE DARK, Patrick stares at his wife’s back, which is all she offers him these days. She’s pretending to sleep, but he’s not fooled.

The look on her face when she saw him with the gun – Christ, it was like she expected him to shoot her. The situation is worse than he thought.

If it weren’t for Erica fucking Voss, Stephanie would have no idea. She’d be happy and unsuspicious, with sleeping twins and an investment portfolio with over two million dollars in it. And now he might lose everything.

He can feel himself unravelling. He’s incandescent with rage at Erica. He’s furious with Niall, and disappointed in Stephanie. He thought he’d beat the polygraph. He’d studied how to do it, how to bite hard inside his mouth for a spike of pain to throw off the test. He thought it would work. It should have worked.