CHAPTER 30
Ella
Asian lionesses hunt their prey, circling until they are ready to pounce. They work in teams, strategically relying on each other to draw them closer to their unsuspecting meal.
I’m that meal.
Colin has worked me like a lioness, circling me with the help of Henry. Over what? Jealousy?
I yank on my coat, my right arm getting stuck trying to find the sleeve.
“Oh, are you off out?” Helena appears from nowhere, her thick brows drawing together. I stuff the picture unceremoniously into my pocket and lick my lips.
“Yes, I need to head out to get some medicine. Can you tell Rufus I’m not feeling well?” I say, slipping my heels off and shoving my trainers on unceremoniously.
“We have lots in the cupboard,” Helena says, stepping forward. The shoe closet door slams behind me, making me jump.
“It’s fine.” My voice is too loud and Helena stops moving, her fingers twitching by her side.
“Sorry, I just – I need some air. Thanks.” I throw her a smile before pulling the door open. I don’t wait for her response, my feet are quick down the drive.
Colin and Henry were connected. Every taunt leads back to him.
Henry’s crime scene had to be tidied up because it was Colin’s weapon, after all.
Colin was angry that I was going to marry Rufus and not him.
He wanted to sabotage me and destroy my chance of happiness.
Why else would he tank my career? Why else would he draw out my ex-lover? Why else would he mock me?
My feet pick up into a run, heat flashing through my body.
When I first broke it off with him, he was so generous and kind. But then Rufus came onto the scene, and the comments became nasty.
“You can do better than him,” Colin had said one night at the Yahlo Gala, his black tux jacket slung over his shoulder. My body pressed into the bar so I couldn’t step away from him. Or maybe I didn’t want to, I still don’t fully know.
“I miss you, El. You’re so beautiful. Sometimes I just lie awake at night watching you sleep, I loved knowing I kept you safe,” Colin had said, and I’d forced out a laugh, the sentiment sitting rancid between us.
“Don’t say that.” I took a step back, but I didn’t leave. We both felt it.
“Don’t you miss lying next to me?” Colin leant closer, his brown eyes steady on me. It wasn’t about the sex, it was about companionship. I did miss it.
The shrill tone of my phone drags me back to the present. A branch whips my shoulder as I round the corner.
“Hello?” My voice is breathless.
“Ella, are you OK?” Jude says.
“I’m fine, I’m just running to the shops before they close.” Colin is the stalker, he has to be.
“Right. Well, I got a call today from Susan and–” Jude says. In the flurry of it all, I had almost forgotten about Susan.
“Oh, yeah.” My breathing is laboured from the pace but I don’t slow down. The adrenaline pushes me forward.
“I have to go, Jude. But can we catch up about Susan in a bit? I think I’ve found something.
” My pulse quickens at the memory of Colin, the attention he layered on when we broke up.
The way he was always watching. I shove the phone into my pocket as Colin’s gate comes into view.
His gate is higher than ours with sharp prongs on either side, but if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that gates mean nothing around here.
I step onto the first rung, swinging my leg over, landing on all fours in the least ladylike manner.
It doesn’t matter. I can hear Henry’s voice in the back of my mind.
I don’t know how I’m going to play this.
My body buzzes as I stride up to Colin’s door.
He must have better cameras than ours because the door opens before I’ve hit the first step. I keep walking, though, hands swinging by my side.
“Excuse me, what are you doing?” Hannah, Colin’s gentle but almost useless wife, stands wide in the door, her plain hair pushed off her face with a large peach band. She grips onto the door handle, her shoulders drawn back and her usual timid demeanour lost.
“Is he home?” I push past.
“Who?” she squeaks. “I–I don’t know what you think…
Well, if you…” she dithers behind me, her proverbial wings flapping.
I realise as I enter the hallway that despite being on the same street, their house is very different from ours.
Where ours has a long corridor with various doors before opening out, theirs is a simple box space, with another set of glass doors on one side.
It’s telling that I’ve never been here. I find myself in a square hallway with stairs ahead to the right.
It’s decorated better than I thought, with warm peach walls that hold two large canvas art pieces, both detailed and abstract.
They catch my eye, the way they make the space bigger somehow.
I puff, “Where’s Colin?” I turn around to find Hannah close behind me.
“He’s… er, well, he’s through there. But he’s a bit busy,” she says.
At one point, when Rufus and I were in the early stages of our relationship, Colin told me about Hannah.
The details and nuances he went into struck me as unnecessary, but now that I look at her, really look at her, I see it.
She’s both forgettable and stunning. Her beauty is overshadowed by her demeanour.
She looks away from my gaze, desperate to disappear already.
I know that she sleeps with a pillow between her and Colin.
That every Sunday, she takes a two-hour walk around the woods, and that sometimes, when Colin has followed her, he’s seen her sitting and crying.
She’s truly unhappy, but this facade is her life.
I want to hold her, but I turn on my heels.
I take the door dead ahead of me, which opens onto a living space.
The room is painted a light grey, but the sofa and curtains are a bold deep turquoise.
Ahead, the room widens out into a conservatory where warm lights fill each corner.
There, with his feet up in a Chesterfield chair, reading a book, is Colin.
“Well, hello.” He doesn’t stand, doesn’t even look up. Rage rips through me.
“Can we talk?” I say. My breath is short.
“Sorry, she just…” Hannah says, waving a thin hand towards me. Her nails are unnaturally long and painted a deep red, which makes her look thinner.
“Hopped the fence, eh?” Colin says, nodding towards a small screen that sits on the edge of the windowsill. He’s well connected here, I’ll give him that.
“It’s OK, Hannah, give us a second,” Colin says.
I turn and smile at Hannah, which makes her jitter on the spot.
“We need to talk.” I face Colin again, my fingers twitching at my side.
“About?” He calmly folds down the corner of a page and closes the book.
I breathe in deeply.
My jaw sets. “Can we be honest here?”
Colin smiles at me, the type that doesn’t reach the eyes. “Aren’t I always?”
He indicates for me to sit, so I fall into the chair opposite him. Shortly after I moved in with Rufus, Colin called me. His voice was tight and low, as though he was hiding. He asked me to move in with him. Promised to leave his wife, the wife he forgot to tell me he had.
“Are you stalking me?” I lift my chin, scanning his face for any clues. The printed image burns in my pocket.
Colin leans back. “I’m sorry, am I stalking you?” He raises a brow.
I nod.
“No,” he says after a moment.
“Do you know Henry Fisher?”
If he’s shocked, he doesn’t show it.
“Yes,” he says, and the energy that drove me here pushes against my chest, burning through me.
I’ve got him. It’s a smoking gun. I think of Hannah teetering at his side.
After I found out the truth about Colin’s relationship and ended ours, I wanted to give Hannah the truth.
I knew so little of how this world worked, and when I told her that her husband was sleeping with me, she slapped me, those sharp nails scratching the side of my face.
And within the same week, she was by his side at an event as though nothing had happened.
“So you are stalking me?”
“Not in the slightest. You’re asking all the wrong questions, though,” Colin says. Ever the one for a good game. I close my eyes, my breath drawing in over my wet lips.
“Well then, tell me what I should be asking.” I bite back a scream.
He leans forward, running his gaze up and down me. “How would I know Henry?”
I seethe, “Because you and Benji are close. And you both worked in the same prison that Henry was at and…”
I think back to Henry, the way his voice echoed through the prison’s visitors’ room, the look in his eyes.
“Because people talk, lies come out as truths and you knew you could use that. Because you’ve never really had a moral compass, have you?” The anger spits from me, all the intimate moments between us itching under my skin.
Colin’s jaw sets. “Careful now.”
But I can’t.
“No. Maybe you both got to talking. Maybe it was useless information until we broke up. But suddenly, you had an ‘in’, so you cobble together false truths and hide behind handwritten notes because I couldn’t love a cheater.” I lean forward, my nails digging into the arm of the chair.
Colin smiles. “And you’re so in love now?”
There it is, the elephant in the room. Jealousy.
Colin lets out a low, bitter laugh. “Exactly what I thought.”
He opens his book, lifting his feet back up onto the stool.
“Here.” I slam the picture onto his lap, pushing the book so it lands flat on his thighs.
Colin picks it up, his face shifting from shock to amusement to confusion.
“What the hell? This isn’t from me,” he says.
“But you used to say it all the time.” There’s a desperate energy to my words.
“Jesus, Ella, who bloody remembers what they said years ago? Is this what you’ve been getting, sick images of you asleep?”
He shifts forward now, the image still in his hands.
“Yeah.” I drop into the chair again, the energy dissipating as I do.
Colin lets out a low whistle.
“Before law school and antiques trading, I used to buy and sell cars,” Colin says.
“OK…” I roll my neck, scanning the room for any more clues.
“And the first thing you had to do, with a car, is understand who had it before.” My body freezes as Colin continues: “Who were the previous owners? What has the car been through and what did the owners do with it? You’d never want to buy a car that was part of something illegal or damaged, not when you were taking it on. ”
A heat prickles my palms. I can’t move, the image hanging from Colin’s fingers.
“Rufus…” His name is a whisper in the silence of the room.
Colin turns back to his book. “A lovely husband he’ll make, I’m sure. He’s well connected. Would be happy to pay someone to look under the bonnet before he brought the car, as it were.”
His eyes meet mine, and I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. Colin raises a brow.
I snatch the image and rise from my seat.
Rufus paid Colin to find Henry. Rufus paid a criminal to dig into my past. Rufus.
I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, and my skin crawls at the idea of lying next to a man like that.
I want to ask Colin why? Why did Rufus do it? I want to pack my bags and run again.
I lean down towards him. “How dare you,” I snarl.
Colin’s hand grabs my arm.
“I loved you,” he says, catching me off guard, his face inches from mine. I can feel his breath on my face, it’s warm. The smell of his aftershave, familiar, hangs under my nose. Our eyes lock. His thumb makes small circles in my skin, and I don’t move.
“You don’t do that to someone you love,” he says, moving past me, leaving me alone in his conservatory, my body shaking.
The heavens open the moment I hit the pavement outside Colin’s house, darkness falling from the sky.
I pull my coat over my head with jittery hands, but it’s no use, the rain seeps through at an angle to drench me.
None of it makes sense. If Rufus is stalking me, then what’s the purpose?
We’re engaged. His dark eyes follow me everywhere I am in the house.
He knows my routine to a tee. Hell, he created my routine.
So, why would he be bent on destroying me?
A fat droplet falls onto my left eye. I hunch down.
No, this doesn’t make sense. Rufus doesn’t do anything without serious planning.
He obviously looked into my past at some point and found it worthwhile to keep digging. The thought sends shivers over me.
By the third loop of the block, I’m wandering. I can’t go home, not to a house full of guests. My phone vibrates again, a determined pulse that lasts for a minute and fades away. The stalker hasn’t called me since the engagement party, but there’s no telling what he’ll do. Would it be Rufus?
The fourth time my phone rings, I yank it from my pocket.
Jude’s name appears.
“Hey,” I say.
“Where are you?” There’s determination in her voice that stops me in my tracks, the rain pushing through.
“Just walking home, why?”
“In this weather, Jesus. Drop a pin, I’m coming to get you.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve got a lead, a woman named Anya,” Jude says, and my stomach folds over.