Chapter 27
‘Every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters.’
Bali was next. Five days of perfect honeymooning in Ubud.
Chase hired a motorbike and we wove through ribbons of paddy fields and visited incense-filled temples with monkeys clambering across mossy stone balustrades.
Our hotel room looked out onto a reflection pool scattered with floating pink lilies.
We did a yoga class, did a couples massage, and drank cocktails watching the sky turn to burnished orange over the jungle.
We laughed, swapped stories and talked about our future, that golden, glossy life we were building together.
It was, briefly, bliss.
The night before we were due to fly to Bora Bora, we were back in the south of the island and had checked into a lush, five-star Balinese hotel. As we unpacked, Chase announced that he was popping out.
‘They don’t have the beer I want here,’ he said, as if it was a mission of vital urgency.
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Just a quick one,’ he promised, and was gone before I could say more.
I ordered room service for two, a little bottle of wine, and set the tray out on the balcony. Then I waited. And waited.
By the time the food had gone cold and the ice had melted, I’d stopped pretending to read and had started trying to quell the nauseous churn of worry. I dozed off, fully clothed, lying on top of the bedspread with the bedside light still on.
I woke to voices.
Chase was in the room. But he wasn’t alone. A man I didn’t recognise. He was older, sunburnt, Australian by the sound of it and was slouched on the sofa near the balcony door, a cigarette trailing from his fingers. Chase was at the bathroom door, holding a long-necked bottle, swaying slightly.
‘Where the hell have you been? And who is this man?’ I said, getting to my feet.
‘Hey, honey,’ said Chase. ‘This is Bruce. Bruce, meet my beautiful wife, Florence.’
‘Good to meet you, beautiful Florence,’ Bruce slurred, grinning.
‘Please leave,’ I said flatly. My hands were shaking.
‘Honey, that’s no way to treat our guest,’ said Chase, raising the bottle to his lips again.
I crossed the room in two strides and opened the door. ‘Out. Now.’
Bruce blinked at me, then staggered to his feet. Chase said something, words I didn’t catch, didn’t want to, but I ignored him.
‘NOW,’ I said again, and slammed the door behind Bruce.
When I turned, Chase had vanished into the bathroom and locked the door. He didn’t come out. I banged on it, shouted, but there was no reply.
I gave up eventually, pulled the covers back, and got into bed, still in my clothes. I was going to leave in the morning. Get a flight out on my own.
I don’t know how much time passed before I was woken again. The sound of shattering glass dragged me out of sleep.
‘What the…’ I fumbled for the lamp.
Chase was in the middle of the room, barefoot, flailing like a puppet. The bottle had been smashed against the wall, and he was walking straight through the shards. His feet were slick with blood, streaking the tiles crimson.
‘Chase!’ I shouted. ‘STOP!’
He didn’t answer. He went to the minibar, yanked it open, and grabbed a handful of miniature bottles.
Then, turning to me with a vacant look, he hurled them one by one at the wall above the bed.
Glass rained down. I rolled off the mattress and scrambled beneath it, heart in my throat, arms wrapped tightly around my knees.
Above me, Chase was pacing, wailing a line from some Neil Young song he always overplayed at home. His feet crunched glass into the tile with every step. I could hear the slap of blood. And then–
Silence.
A beat.
And then a hideous retching sound, followed by a warm spray of vomit that landed on the floor.
I didn’t move, didn’t scream. I just lay there, trying to disappear. Eventually I heard him stumble into the bathroom and slam the door. The vomiting continued, echoing against the tiles, until finally all was still.
No one came. There was no knock at the door. Privacy was prized at these kinds of hotels. No one wanted to interrupt whatever the rich were doing behind closed doors.
At some point, I must have passed into a kind of trance. But when it occurred to me that he might be dead, I got up.
The room looked like a crime scene. Blood, glass, vomit. I stepped carefully over to the bathroom and opened the door.
The stench hit me first. Then the sight: Chase, unconscious on the tile floor, feet gashed and glittering with embedded shards. The vomit was everywhere–thick, green, curdled.
But he was breathing. His chest rose and fell.
I thought of leaving. Of packing my bag and walking away. But the twisted thought entered my mind: what if he died? What if I was blamed?
So I stayed.
I cleaned. I swept the glass using the soles of his sandals. I mopped the bathroom floor with a towel, rinsed it over and over until the water ran clear. I scraped vomit into a bin with a disposable cup, refusing to look too closely.
By dawn, the room was somewhat clean. Except for me. I was a drenched in sweat, my nightdress was flecked with blood stains. My heart was beating so loudly I thought it might burst from my chest and scurry away, leaving me a hollow husk.
The maid came with our breakfast tray. She didn’t say anything about the state of the room. I asked her to leave the tray on the balcony. I gave her a wad of cash from Chase’s wallet. She didn’t meet my eyes.
I called the concierge and asked them to send a doctor.
He came, cleaned the wounds, gave Chase a sedative, and recommended rest. An army of maids arrived in rubber gloves and disinfected every surface, working in silence. I was embarrassed, I couldn’t meet their eyes and went out for a long walk.
By the time I returned, Chase was stretched across the bed, ghostly and dazed, claiming Bruce had slipped him ‘something bad.’ He insisted it wasn’t his own fault and reached for the phone, calling the manager to get the police involved.
The police came, looked bored and uninterested. It was another foreigner stupidly being led astray by another foreigner. They left without even taking notes.
I closed the door behind them and turned, wrapping my arms around myself like armour, the weight of everything unsaid pressing down on my ribs. I didn’t speak. I didn’t have to. The silence between us had already thickened into something brittle.
Chase was sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor like it might offer a solution. He looked up when I spoke.
‘I’m going home.’
He blinked. ‘What?’
‘I booked a flight,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow. I’m going to tell my parents everything.’
He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at me, and I could see him doing the maths, trying to figure out if I meant it, how close I was to the edge. His expression didn’t change. It hardened, subtly, like he was bracing for impact.
‘Florence,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Come on.’
‘I’m serious.’
He rubbed a hand over his face, slow and deliberate, as if he could smooth the situation back into something manageable by sheer force of will. No dramatic gestures. He didn’t fall to his knees. Just a silence that settled heavily between us, thick enough to lean on.
‘I’ll change,’ he said at last. ‘Whatever it is, I’ll fix it. I know I’ve made mistakes, but this…’ He shook his head once. ‘I’m not ready to lose you.’
Something tightened inside me, though I couldn’t quite locate it. Not fear or grief. More like a pressure point.
He pushed himself up from the chair slowly, as if any sudden movement might spook me. He didn’t reach out or try to touch me. He just stood a few feet away, hands loose at his sides, his voice quiet. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I know I’ve made that hard to believe. But I do. I need you.’
I studied his face, the tiredness around his eyes, the faint slackening at the corners of his mouth. He meant it. Or at least he meant it in that moment. But I wasn’t sure that mattered anymore. ‘I don’t think that’s enough,’ I said. ‘This isn’t what I thought it would be.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Us.’ I waved my arm around the room. ‘This.’ I hesitated where I was, rooted to the tile floor.
‘This is a blip. I promise. Marriage is a whole new thing for me. I’m sorry. I can and will do better. Just don’t leave me yet. Give me one more chance.’
I hesitated, unmoving. I wanted to believe him. The fairy tale could not end like this.
We called a truce until the next morning. He went out early, bringing back a pearl bracelet from the hotel boutique. The pearls were heavy orbs, the clasp was diamond encrusted. A bouquet of lilies arrived moments later, filling the room with a heady fragrance. He said all the right things.
And I let myself pretend, just long enough.
We started over.
Again.
We flew to Bora Bora two days later. Even saying the name felt unreal, like something from a novel rather than my actual life.
The villa was exactly what you’d expect: a postcard come to life.
Teak wood, white linen, gauzy curtains lifting in the breeze.
It stood on stilts over water so clear you could see fish darting beneath the floorboards, flashes of silver and electric blue.
A narrow walkway led out to it, just ours, and when they handed us the single key Chase squeezed my hand.
We’d been admitted into our own private paradise.
We swam, straight off the deck into water as warm as bathwater. We ate fresh seafood and drank heady French wines. There was a lightness between us that felt intoxicating. We were newly married and the world had a heady froth on it again.
At night we lay under the stars with the sea moving quietly beneath us, the air heavy with salt and jasmine, and made love in that lazy, sun-drunk way that comes when there’s nowhere else you need to be. Chase talked about the future – moving house, global travel and children.
We were the golden couple. For that week, it was easy to believe in us.
A week later, we were home.
Chase left for work that morning. I stood at the front window, watching him reverse out of the driveway, one hand on the wheel, the other lifting briefly in a wave he didn’t wait to see returned. The car disappeared down the street, through the arches of eucalyptus.
I closed the front door behind me. The click of the lock sounded like a bullet being loaded into its chamber. And that was when it hit me. The noise, drama, and frantic, glittering rush of it all was gone. There was just this house, my Pemberley. This married life. And silence.
This was what I had chosen.
I slid down the door to the floor. My back pressed against the wood, legs folding in beneath me. The polished hardwood was cool through my robe.
I looked at the phone on the hallway table. A childlike urge rose in me to call home, to hear Mum’s voice, and tell her I’d made a really stupid mistake, that I wanted to come back.
But I didn’t move.
They’d paid for the wedding. And business had been hard lately, I knew that. They’d done it because I was the princess in the fairy tale. My true Darcy had ridden in and whisked me away to a glittery future.
I stayed there on the floor, paralysed by the truth of it all.
This was the bed I’d made. And now I had to lie in it.