Chapter 32 Anna—12 Months Ago
Anna knew she could not leave Simon straightaway after finding out about Melissa. It would be too unexpected; he would realize she had found out, and she couldn’t risk that.
She needed a proper plan. There was still a chance she could avoid Melissa’s fate if she disappeared without a trace.
But disappearing would be a very hard thing to do. He knew where she lived, where she worked, where her mother lived, everything.
In the week that followed her discovery, she set about making an escape plan.
He would surely work out that she knew quite quickly. She found it near impossible to act normal around him, to keep up the pretense of loving him; the energy it took to force everything back to the way it had been before was overwhelmingly exhausting.
She knew she would slip up, given enough time. So she needed to act fast or she would end up as a scattering of bones in a wood somewhere, never to be seen again.
Her first instinct had been to go to the police, of course. But she quickly realized that all she actually had to tell the police were things her boyfriend had said in his sleep and a possible connection to a hiking spot in the Scottish Highlands.
Court cases and criminal convictions, Anna found after a little Googling, could not be won on evidence as ephemeral as “things he said in his sleep.” She had no physical evidence.
She’d read every article she could find.
If Simon had been at Lissa’s school he must have already been eliminated from the investigation twenty years ago.
He, like every male in the upper years and on the staff, would have been interviewed, voluntarily DNA-sampled, and found to be of no interest to the case.
Going to the police would only alert Simon and achieve nothing quickly, and she knew what he was capable of now.
The day after she found out about Melissa, she called in sick to work and then spent the next week rearranging her life. She got a new SIM card and phone; she would toss her old one on the day she left. No one from her old life could know where she was going, in case he came asking.
She knew disappearing meant she would have to break contact with her mother for a while, but was that so bad? she wondered.
She would miss her friends, but she could make new ones, she argued to herself.
She emailed her landlord to end her tenancy, apologizing, but offering to pay the remaining two months’ rent up front. Then she placed a cash deposit on a small one-bed flat in Brighton, on the day of the viewing.
The hardest thing to leave was work. She handed in her notice to her manager and stopped going in, citing a change in situation, but the messages she received the next week from her work friends flooded in: Where was she going?
What had happened? She made her excuses, blamed her fraught family situation, and told them she’d let them know her new number once she’d got settled.
Of course, she knew she wouldn’t be able to do that.
She couldn’t risk leaving a trail and besides, if she was honest, none of them had ever been that close.
She would disappear easily—something she realized must have been a reason Simon had chosen to get close to her in the first place.
It all would have worked out fine, seamlessly, if Simon hadn’t popped around to her flat while she was out.
Anna’s landlord wished Simon good luck with the move—except Simon wasn’t moving.
The night before she intended to leave, Simon invited her over for dinner.
She was so close to being free of him it wasn’t worth raising suspicions by saying no. She told him she couldn’t stay over; she had an early start.
He cooked for her, and she forced down the food, smiling in all the right places. It didn’t seem like he suspected anything, at least for a while.
“I want to give you something, a present,” he told her, with a seriousness she found unnerving. He led her upstairs to his room, and sat her on the edge of his bed, before pulling a small green jewelry box from his bedside cabinet.
Anna forced down a sudden wave of nausea at the thought it might be an engagement ring.
She let him sink down onto one knee in front of her and raised the box.
It seemed like Simon was proposing to her, that he was finally going to do what she had prayed for, yearned for, since they’d met, only now it meant something else entirely.
The irony that it might be happening now, like this, was almost too much for her to bear.
He flipped open the box.
It wasn’t a ring but a necklace, a silver chain with a small silver heart gleaming from it, the heart edged with Art Deco spikes, like rays of the sun. It looked almost religious, was handmade and distinctive.
Anna looked up from the gift to Simon, attempting to make sense of the timing, the sentiment of it.
“Do you like it?” he asked, holding her gaze, studying her every microexpression.
“I do,” Anna answered, with a grateful smile, though unnerved by his intensity.
He watched her smile, watched it hold too long and twitch a little at the corners, then slowly fade.
“Good,” he said, rising, leaning to fasten it around her neck. She touched its cold metal as it rested on her clavicle.
He pulled back to take her in.
“It was hers,” he said then, with such little buildup that Anna was momentarily baffled by his meaning.
“Sorry, what?” she asked, moving, unaware, directly into the void.
He slipped a hand into hers and pulled her close, part embrace, part restraint, and panic fizzed to life in Anna a microsecond too late.
“The necklace. It was Melissa’s,” he told her simply. “I kept it.”
Her eyes flew to Simon’s face. He knew. It was over.
If she struggled, then she knew things would escalate very quickly, and she didn’t want that. She needed time.
She forced love back into her eyes. He knew she knew, but he did not know how she felt about what he did yet. That was the only space she had left to live in.
“I know it wasn’t your fault. You loved her, didn’t you?” Anna asked, as gently as she had ever asked any question.
Simon pulled back a little, surprised, clearly not expecting this softness, this apparent lack of fear.
He took in her guileless face, still filled with love.
“Yes, I did love her. Very much,” he answered after a moment.
He released one of Anna’s hands and touched her face, the flush in her cheek. He was gentle with her.
Then his hand trailed down to the heart necklace, dangling against the delicate bones of Anna’s neck, his eyes filling.
He kissed Anna, hard, the force of it, the need in it overwhelming. Anna held firm in her conviction, yielding to the kiss, to him, to all of it.
More than that, she kissed back, as hard and desperate and needfully as him. A kiss that showed her intent, her acceptance, her loyalty. Because she needed time.
Slowly, with her one free hand, she found the bedside table and the heavy water glass placed on top of it.
Simon whispered in her ear, “We can make this work. Do you want to try and make this work?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice docile, pliable, and as he pulled back to look at her, she smiled. He laughed with happiness and drew her back into a kiss.
Anna’s hand finally gripped the heavy glass and she inhaled sharply as she slammed the blunt object into Simon’s temple, thick shards of it coming away in her hand, some embedded in her palm, some in his scalp.
He reeled away, blood streaming from his head, and Anna ran for her life.
She was almost halfway down the stairs before she felt his hands on her back, and then the ground disappeared beneath her—for a few moments she was suspended in nothing, and then she hit. The world turned black.
On the hall floor she flitted in and out of consciousness, the sounds of his feet thundering down the stairs behind her, his face close, pain-stricken, drifting in and out of focus. She could not feel parts of her body, her legs, one arm.
“It’s okay,” Simon told her softly, lovingly. “I’ll look after you. I’ll make this right. We’ll make this work, I promise you.”
When she woke, she was in this room. She knew it wasn’t Simon’s basement, she had seen that before—this room looked new, built specifically for her.
The necklace was around her neck, a bunch of fresh flowers on the plywood table.
She found, when she finally managed to haul her body up, that everything ached. Her injuries from the fall seemed to be serious, though she felt little pain—just a dull throbbing, which she inferred must be due to some kind of pain medication he had given her.
She shuffled over to the blooms on the table. She sat down on the plywood chair and caught her breath.
She read the note on the flowers:
To Second Chances.
Anna stared at the words on the card for a long time before, with difficulty, she stood and started to look for a door.