Chapter Four
After she’d vomited all over her marble tiles, and after she’d cleaned up the mess, Vanessa went back to the table. She grabbed the note and the USB, and went looking for her husband.
On Mondays, Robert worked from home, writing up case notes on his patients.
Or at least, that was what he claimed to be doing.
They both knew that he spent most of his day playing tennis, or reading, or, more recently, quietly going to his appointments with his dermatologist. She’d thought that expensive facials were the only secret he was keeping. How incredibly stupid she’d been.
Robert’s study door was closed. She could hear voices coming from inside. Robert’s, raised and angry, and a woman’s, low and controlled.
‘Of course not!’ Robert said, almost at a shout.
The woman spoke again, but Vanessa couldn’t make out what she said. Then it was Robert’s turn, quieter now. Then again, the woman. What was this, a lover’s tiff? Anger flared in her chest, and Vanessa reached for the handle but the door opened before she could grasp it.
A woman stood there, clearly surprised to see her.
Their eyes locked. This was not the woman from the video.
She was older, for starters, in her late thirties at least, and her hair was cut very short.
A buzz cut. She was about Vanessa’s height, but had a more muscular build, and a nasty bruise on her left cheek.
‘Excuse me,’ Vanessa said, automatically.
The woman raised an eyebrow. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and she walked past Vanessa and down the corridor in the direction of the front door, where she let herself out, shutting the door quietly behind her. Vanessa turned on Robert, anger rising again.
‘Who,’ Vanessa said. ‘The hell. Was that?’
Robert shook his head. He looked clammy and pale, almost dazed. ‘She’s a detective. Judith someone. I let her in. I thought she needed my help. I thought maybe there’d been a suicide. But it wasn’t that at all.’
‘What was it?’
He shook his head. His eyes were unfocused. He was looking past her, through her.
‘Just tell me!’ Vanessa felt like she might scream. Her hands were clenched into fists. The USB drive was a hot, hard presence in her left hand, the paper crumpled in her right.
‘She said that a patient has accused me of sexual assault. A new patient. I only met with the girl on Friday morning. The most innocuous . . . A college student who was having panic attacks. Anxiety over exams. The usual thing. Obviously, obviously nothing happened. I didn’t touch her.
I listened to her talk. Tried not to fall asleep.
These fucking kids. Every tiny challenge is an occasion for a meltdown, every mood-swing is a mental illness. ’
‘Robert!’ Vanessa cut across him sharply.
It was an old topic of conversation, and one she’d long run out of patience with.
In recent years Robert had become more and more disillusioned with his work.
That was fine. She understood that. What she didn’t get was why he continued to do it, why he continued to see patients and charge them for his time when he clearly believed they were wasting it, clearly believed he couldn’t do anything for them.
It wasn’t like he needed the income. She’d been paying most of their bills for years.
Robert waved a hand at her. ‘I spoke to her about perfectionism. Recommended CBT. She seemed fine. And now this!’ His colour was coming back.
The shock of the conversation he’d just had with the detective seemed to be fading, and anger was taking its place.
‘You should have been there. The way she spoke to me, like I was some sort of criminal. She didn’t come here with questions.
She was in no way open to any alternative explanation.
I told her that I see people who are disturbed individuals.
That some of them are capable of developing unhealthy fixations.
As if—as if—I would ever have sex with a patient, let alone sexually assault one of them. ’
He looked completely innocent. Completely and utterly believable.
But she didn’t believe him. He was not the man she’d thought him to be.
The entire foundation of who they were had just cracked, right down the middle.
My god. Had it always been like this? Had he always been such a good liar?
Or maybe the fault was hers. Maybe she was one of those women who refused to see what was right in front of her.
Vanessa took in Robert’s clothing, his carefully trimmed beard, his wildly expensive Lindberg glasses.
They’d met when they were both students.
Robert had been Rob then. He’d been living in a bedsit next door to a Hungry Jack’s, and everything he’d owned—which hadn’t been much—had smelled of cooking oil.
Neither of them had cared, not even noticed, really.
But those days were in a distant past that she could barely remember.
‘What?’ Robert said.
She reached for words and couldn’t find them.
‘Vanessa. What?’
* * *
She made him watch the video in the kitchen, turned her back so that she wouldn’t have to see it again.
Not that she’d ever stop seeing it. She walked to the sink on unsteady legs, and poured herself a glass of water, forced herself to drink it slowly.
She still felt sick. Didn’t want it all to come back up again.
When she was ready, when she’d steadied herself as best she could, she turned around.
And saw Robert, not frozen in place, guilt-ridden and ashamed, as she had expected, but instead leaning into the laptop screen, examining the footage with close attention.
It was too much. It was all too much. Vanessa’s grip tightened around her glass of water, and then she threw it, as hard as she could, against the wall.
The act shocked her—she hadn’t known she was going to do it until it was done—but the sound of the glass shattering was disappointing. It was too quiet. Too meek for the moment.
‘Vanessa!”
She stood there breathing. Couldn’t look at him. Because it was all beginning to flash through her brain. Everything that was to come. The press camped outside their front door. The questions. The horror of it.
Bad enough that he’d had an affair—multiple affairs?
—he’d obviously slept with his patients.
At least one patient, but there could be more.
And that detective, that woman. She’d been, even in that short moment in the corridor, so clearly formidable.
Frightening even. She wasn’t going to go away. Would Robert be arrested?
Oh god, Lachy. She’d have to tell Lachy. Henry had his own life. He lived in a high-rise in Sydney with security and a full-time concierge. His life would go on. But Lachy lived with them. She’d have to make other arrangements, she’d have to—
‘Vanessa! That’s not me!’ Robert said, pointing at her laptop.
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. She felt hysterical. The chorus of that god-awful noughties song started playing in her head. The one where the singer is caught screwing other women again and again, caught red-handed on camera, and he keeps denying, in the face of all logic, that it was him.
‘Listen to me. That’s not me!’ Robert said.
Vanessa kept laughing because she couldn’t stop, and then she was crying.
She wanted to leave the room, to take Milo—who was whining now, curled into the corner, distressed by the raised voices— and leave the house.
But somehow that wasn’t happening. Instead, Robert had taken her by the hand and was dragging her back to the laptop and forcing her to look at the screen.
‘Look. Really look at it, okay? What do you see?’