Chapter 63 Freya
FREYA
“I’m sorry,” I say, coming back down the stairs. “I’m coming across like a psycho!”
Tess smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You’re allowed to,” she says. “After what Charlie’s done to you.”
“Can I have one of those?” I ask, struggling to keep my trembling hands by my side.
She looks at the wine bottle and nods toward my belly. “Should you?”
I’d almost forgotten. “A little one won’t hurt.”
“Let me get another bottle,” she says, walking out of the room and into the kitchen.
I hear the dulcet pop of a cork being extracted from a bottle, and I wait to be consumed with guilt—hating myself, even now, for letting Charlie down on the vow I made. But the dark force in me rationalizes that it’s too late. Our promises to each other have already been broken.
“To friends,” I say, raising my glass to toast.
Tess’s shoulders drop down from her ears, as she dares to assume she’s off the hook.
“To friends,” she says, knocking her wine back.
I watch, waiting.
“So what are you going to do now?” she asks.
I tilt my head to one side as I look at her. “What would you do, if you were me?”
She takes another sip as she considers her answer. “I can’t possibly imagine how it must feel to be you,” she says. “To have your whole world upended.”
I grit my teeth to stop the telltale spasms in my jaw.
“I mean, Charlie … Maria … the charity money … is your job even safe? I assume there’ll be an investigation into the missing money. They take charity fraud very seriously these days.” She sighs. “It must be awful to be accused of something you didn’t do.”
And there it is. The line that tells me everything I need to know. She wants to make me feel how I made her father feel. An eye for an eye.
I take my phone out of my pocket and dial “Maria’s” number, waiting as a deafening silence resounds around the room. It feels like minutes, but can only be a matter of seconds before the muted ringtone of a phone punctures any last semblance that I’d got this all wrong.
Tess freezes, like a deer caught in headlights.
I clench my fists, fighting to hold them against my sides, instead of smashing them into her face.
“You’d better start talking.”
She looks at me. Fear having seemingly rendered her speechless—or maybe she’s feeling the effects of the Antabuse tablets that I’ve put in her wine.
“Is this what you’ve spent your whole life waiting on?” I hiss. “Planning this pathetic little campaign to get your revenge?”
She allows herself the smallest smile of satisfaction, knowing that the ruse is up.
“I was never going to let you get away with what you did to my dad,” she says.
I shake my head in disbelief, as I think about the lengths she’s gone to, to worm her way into my life.
“How could you make up such a vicious lie?” she cries. “He never laid a hand on you!”
I lean in close to her, as telltale beads of sweat spring to her upper lip—a sure sign that the pills are beginning to block the enzymes needed to break down the alcohol in her body.
“I know,” I whisper.
Her eyes blacken and a deepening flush is creeping up her face. “He was a good man, who only ever wanted to do right by people. But you … you put an innocent man in jail. He died because of you. Your lies killed him.”
“He killed himself,” I say, reminding her.
Her eyes widen, but that might be because she’s struggling to focus as her vision becomes impaired.
“But why put all this time and energy into avenging his honor?” I ask. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just kill me? You’ve certainly had enough chances.”
She shakes her head, slumping into the sofa. “I wanted you to feel this feeling. I wanted to get under your skin, so that everything you thought you knew was wrong. Just like what you did to him. I wanted you to doubt everyone, trust nothing, fear for your freedom.”
I pull a chair from the dining table and sit down opposite her, leaning in close so I can see every twitch of her nerves as the lethal concoction of the medication and alcohol starts to shut down her organs.
“The only person who should be fearing for their freedom is you,” I say. “When they find out you defrauded the charity.”
She smiles. “But you didn’t send the money to me,” she says. “You sent it to your own husband’s account.”
It feels as if a hand is squeezing my neck, cutting off my air supply. But I refuse to show a weakness.
“You think you’ve covered everything off, but what you don’t know—and just like your dad, you’re going to find out the hard way—is that nobody gets the better of me.
Someone’s going to find you in the coming days or weeks, rotting away, having succumbed to the alcoholism that you attended all those meetings for.
Nobody will know it was all a pretense—a ploy to infiltrate the corners of my life I would never have normally allowed you into.
Hats off to you—it was an ingenious idea—but do you want to know what your biggest mistake was? ”
Tess shakes her head, mute now, as she’s probably beginning to feel like she can’t breathe.
“It was thinking that you could ever get away with it.”
She collapses onto the floor, her eyes frantically pleading with me for help as she hyperventilates. I get up, stepping over her body as it convulses, and put the box of tablets beside the bottle of wine on the coffee table, the stark warning on the label not to mix the two hard to miss.
“Nobody else knows you weren’t really an alcoholic, and were only using the meetings to get to me. They’ll assume you were trying to self-medicate, but once they look into your family history, they’ll see a pattern emerge, and conclude that you intentionally meant to kill yourself.”
Tess’s eyes roll back in her head as she attempts to open her mouth.
I lean down, to whisper in her ear, “Just like your father.”