Nicole
Nicole
Nicole dices an avocado onto a bowl of green salad for an early dinner. Through the kitchen window she watches Andrew on the patio, wrestling with covers for the garden furniture, covering it up for the winter. She cannot articulate what she is feeling, does not know if it is pain or anger, resentment or regret, or whether it is simply a yearning to be able to turn back the clock, to the time before Isla’s death, before Andrew’s treachery. Before her life veered out of control.
Pulling some Dijon mustard from the fridge, she begins to make a dressing which she’ll keep to one side until she’s ready to serve. Upstairs, the boys are in their bedrooms. All she wants is for them to have some semblance of a normal family dinner despite the fact that all four of them know there is nothing approaching normality about their family right now.
It was at Nicole’s insistence that they’d made a collective trip to the police station on Thursday evening for fingerprinting. Andrew hadn’t been keen, had thought it would look odd, the whole family turning up en masse. But Nicole had pointed out that the boys couldn’t very well go alone, and that it might be sensible for them to put on a united front.
Mixing the dressing, she recalls her conversations with Nathaniel and Jack on Wednesday evening, breaking the news to them about the discovery of her car and the implication that it had been involved in a collision. It was Nathaniel she’d told first, watched the horror spread across his face: Do the police think your car was involved in Isla’s death? Nicole had reassured him that there’d been no such suggestion, even as the same question plagued her too. Knowing how Nathaniel felt about Isla – knowing the unrequited crush he’d tried unsuccessfully to conceal over the past couple of years – she could not begin to imagine how he might be feeling at this latest turn of events.
Jack’s reaction had been different: quiet, withdrawn, as though he were retreating into his own private thoughts to which Nicole had no access. She’d wrapped her arms around him, reassured him it would be okay, wished she could know what he was thinking, but he’d remained silent, remote.
Nicole makes a mental note to schedule a call with Jack’s psychologist, to take a temperature check on how he’s doing, whether his feelings about his ADHD diagnosis have changed at all.
Andrew enters the kitchen, offers her a tentative smile. She turns away, does not know if she is incapable of reciprocating or just unwilling.
The doorbell rings, and Nicole wipes her hands on a tea towel, walks into the hallway, opens the door.
‘Where is he?’
Abby glares at her, and panic floods Nicole’s body. She knows, instinctively – in the split second between opening the door and seeing the fury on Abby’s face – that the walls of her house are about to crumble, that there is a finite amount of time until the whole edifice comes crushing down, and that there is nothing she can do to stop it.
‘What’s wrong?’ Her eyebrows rise with faux-innocence. Nicole knows she must not give anything away, not yet, not until Abby confirms the cause of her anger.
Abby does not reply as she barges past Nicole, into the hall, through to the kitchen. Nicole follows close on her heels, to where Andrew is marinating steaks, wearing a ‘World’s Best Dad’ apron that Jack bought him for Father’s Day last year.
‘You pervert.’ Abby pushes Andrew hard in the chest, so hard that he stumbles. He glances briefly at Nicole, alarmed, as if in hope that perhaps she will come to his aid, perhaps she will rescue him from this calamitous mess he has created.
Nicole does not speak, is not sure she could muster any words even if she tried.
‘She was seventeen. Seventeen . You’ve known her her entire life. How could you do that?’
Abby spits the words at Andrew, thrusts her palms into his body again, while Andrew holds up his hands in pre-emptive surrender.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how it happened, I know it was wrong—’
‘ Wrong? You seduced my seventeen-year-old daughter and you have the audacity to say it was wrong ? How dare you even look me in the eye. You’re an abomination.’
Andrew cows his head in shame, and it is the first time Nicole has seen him truly penitent. The first time she has seen him genuinely fearful of the consequences of his actions. All those conversations she and Andrew have had, all the times he has apologised, cried, pleaded for forgiveness. Now she understands – in a moment of such sharp enlightenment it is as though a spotlight has been shone on her previous na?vety – that those were nothing but crocodile tears, nothing more than tactical remorse. Nothing beyond a desire to appease her and restore the marital status quo. The realisation is so pronounced, so profound, it is as though her mind is fast-forwarding – Andrew moving out, Nicole instructing a solicitor, negotiations over money and the house and the split of pension pots – and she understands in that moment that whatever else happens, her marriage to Andrew will not survive his betrayal.
‘Was it you?’ Abby’s voice is quiet, suddenly, as though someone has turned down the volume.
‘What do you mean?’
Abby eyes Andrew: unblinking, unflinching. ‘Did you kill my daughter?’
Nicole’s blood chills in her veins. She has not yet told Abby about her car, could not find the courage to reveal that her missing 4x4 has been discovered on an industrial estate, that it bears signs of having been involved in a collision.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course I didn’t.’
‘Why’s that ridiculous?’
Abby pushes Andrew again, and he flounders, takes a step back, tries to regain his balance.
‘What happened? Did you get bored of her? Was she threatening to tell someone?’
Nicole watches as heat bleeds into Andrew’s cheeks, and she knows, in an instant, that in her fury Abby has chanced upon a facet of the truth. It is a truth Andrew has kept meticulously concealed. He has given Nicole no indication – not even a hint – that perhaps there was animosity between him and Isla. He has told her only that it ended because he realised what a terrible mistake he had made, how egregiously he had wronged Nicole and the boys. Now she wonders if there is a single grain of truth in anything Andrew has said or whether his entire narrative has been a fabrication from start to finish.
‘Tell me! It’s the least you owe me. Tell me what happened!’
Abby is shouting, and Nicole thinks about her boys upstairs, about the secrets that are festering in her home like bacteria in a wound. She doesn’t dare risk exposing a revelation that has the power to contaminate her entire family.
‘Please, Abby, I know you’re furious, and you’ve every right to be. But please don’t do this now, not with the boys upstairs.’