Pictures of You

Chapter 87

87

Drew

I can’t work out whether to let her ramble or call her parents or the ambulance. She’s so distressed, she’s all over the place. It must be horrific, being confronted with everything all at once. All her losses. Every complex emotion she’s ever had, about every event, all mixed up. And she is gripping hold of me so hard it almost hurts.

“I pushed you away,” she says, crying. “I pushed you all away.”

I want to tell her it’s okay. But it never was. She hurt us deeply, and now she’s looking at me, her face a mess of understanding.

“Drew, it was all for you,” she admits.

I don’t understand.

“That letter …” she says.

“From Anderson?”

She starts pacing along the sand. “‘Interfering, young, conniving, dangerous woman.’ Of course it was him! Hear the pattern?” She stops. “I found his weird way of talking so fascinating. It’s why I started studying author profiling in the first place …”

She’s lit up like I haven’t seen since we were at school and we’d get into a debate about something political or controversial. I used to provoke her sometimes—I’d fling a statement at her that I knew she’d want to argue with, because I wanted to see her this alive .

“When I read your mum’s note,” she says, pausing to place her hand on my arm empathetically, “I knew that was a strange way of constructing a sentence. But she was so sick, and on so many drugs—I didn’t think much more of it.”

I nod. I’d been too distressed to question it, either.

“Then I’d been so stressed out the day we got married. I was so worried I’d done the wrong thing. That Bree had been right, and I should have let her call it off. I wasn’t properly listening to the speeches.”

She sits on the sand, drawing her knees up close and hugging them. I get down beside her.

“It wasn’t until Anderson started botching this in every conversation that I started paying closer attention. Because people typically don’t speak like that. They simply get it right, all the time. Or wrong, in his case.”

“That’s when I started looking into similar cases. I came up with a research project for my doctorate that supported all the groundbreaking case studies that already enthralled me. To use linguistic evidence to crack cases where DNA or eyewitness evidence alone isn’t enough … Think of it, Drew!”

I smile gently. “You get your memory back and it’s all about the academics? Nothing’s changed. But why did you drop the doctorate when it meant everything to you? You gave in to his demand?”

“He found out,” she explains. “Oliver must have explained to Anderson what my thesis topic was, not realizing the link. His father sent me the threatening note, but I kept going. And then he turned up in my office one night, drunk. Terrifying. And demanded I pull out of the program. Destroy my research. I hadn’t even been focusing on him—he’d just piqued my interest because it was such a good example of a clear linguistic anomaly. But then I wondered why he cared so much about what I was researching. And what he’d done …”

I can guess where this is heading. Part of me can’t bear the confirmation.

“I knew I’d heard someone else speak like that but couldn’t remember where. Until I finally remembered your mum’s note. And when he suspected I was onto him, he was furious. I’m talking all-out, blood-boiling rage.”

“Worried you’d pieced it together and would talk?”

“Worried I’d write a whole thesis about it! Or blather on my podcast, though there was little chance of that. The Roches drew up a nondisclosure agreement—I was banned from ever discussing family affairs—they were still so suspicious of my platform. That’s why Oliver started producing my content. They couldn’t let me have even that one thing just for myself. But then I confronted Anderson, Drew. About your mum. And I realized just how much he had to hide.”

“About what? Her note?”

“Not about that, no.”

“What, then? Him being my father? I mean, it’s a bit scandalous, I guess, that he had another kid with someone else. But it’s hardly earth-shattering. Even when the truth did come out when he was desperate about Harriet, it might have strained their marriage behind closed doors, but they’re the type of family to push through it. It didn’t cause a blip, professionally.”

She looks wildly uncomfortable suddenly, even more than she did a minute ago. “It was more than that. While Anderson was throwing his weight around in my office, I felt physically threatened. And I had a flash of this time in Florence, with Oliver. In bed. It wasn’t just once, to be honest. It wasn’t assault, exactly. But I suppose technically it wasn’t not assault …”

She trips over her words as they struggle out of her mouth and I stare at her, horrified. Anger flaming right to the edges of my soul.

“It was borderline,” she concludes, her upturned, injured face telling me a completely different truth.

“There is no such thing,” I say, firmly. “No borderline. Evie, I’m so sorry.”

“But Drew”—she looks at me, tears spilling down her cheeks now—“it wasn’t borderline with Anderson and your mum. Not remotely.”

A large wave crashes onto the beach and barrels toward us. Evie lurches to her feet away from it, but I can’t move. It rushes at me. All of it. The white foam on the sand. The truth about who Anderson is. Who Oliver is.

Who I am …

The water recedes and she steps toward me again, holding out her hand to help pull me to my feet so we can stumble from the tide, where we fall again.

“By this stage I had almost given up,” she admits.

“On what?”

“I’d already lost almost everything that mattered. It was late. I was the last one working in the faculty. Anderson was drunk and dangerous. Maybe I had a death wish? So I went for him. I confronted him. And maybe he really did intend to silence me that night because, Drew, he confessed everything. I think he meant to cleanse his soul by admitting it, finally, to someone, and then to erase me. But he must have lost his nerve.”

I can barely breathe, with what she’s telling me.

“I know exactly what happened that day with your mum.”