Chapter Seventy-One
Jenny must have left by then.
Jenny.
‘Dammit!’ Emme said, as she turned her volume up to maximum, just in case she could hear anything, but it was soundless. It always had been.
Emme continued to watch. Lexy came out of the apartment.
But her face wore an expression Emme hadn’t seen on her before.
She wasn’t helping Jenny in a crisis. Or even admonishing her the way she had just berated Emme.
Lexy was pleading with Jenny. It was Jenny who looked angry.
Her earnest face cracked into frowns and anger.
She was shaking her head and reproachful.
Jenny was the one who looked like she was telling Lexy off.
‘What the fuck?’
Emme could understand why Jenny would be angry at her predicament, for being pregnant and ditched, and probably out of a job, but why was Lexy beseeching her?
She went to the previous event on the history list. Jenny arriving home on her own, rushing up the stairs and looking brighter, the time stamp saying it was only two minutes earlier: 7.16pm.
What had happened in those two minutes?
Emme went back further, and dropped her phone on the bed in shock.
No.
She picked her phone back up, her hand shaking.
The previous event. Time stamp: 6.49pm. Lexy Harrington and Tristan Du Kok on the threshold of the family home.
Kissing passionately, before he turned her around and pressed into her from behind as he pinned her against the door and threaded his fingers through hers.
Lexy’s sparkling ruby ring and wicked smile, fully facing the camera as she bit her lip.
Bastards.
It was there all along. No wonder Lexy was raging with jealousy.
No wonder Lexy had seemed so especially jumpy when Emme first arrived in town.
Video evidence was sitting on their devices like a time bomb and Bill was too stupid and too disinterested to notice.
Was that why she relaxed a little at the end of November, after the thirty days had expired?
Was that why she was so pissed off when Bella accidentally upgraded the BUZZ app to ninety days?
Her tryst with Tristan wouldn’t be so easy to cover up.
That was why she turned psycho after she saw Tristan and Emme together at the Kivvi Christingle.
Was Tristan fucking both Jenny and Lexy? The guy got more and more depraved.
Emme went back one more event, 5.43pm, Jenny and the kids leaving the apartment, the children in their costumes. Jenny looking happy and nurturing as she closed the door and held Bella’s hand.
Emme felt sick to the core. Her palms had gone in on themselves, she was gripping her phone so intensely.
She looked across the room at her coat strewn on the chair and got up off the bed, her legs so heavy it was as though weights were tied to them.
She had to find out how long Tristan and Jenny had been dating.
She had to find out what happened on Halloween night, and thought of the one person who might have the answers.
As Emme threw on her boots she felt nauseous at the realisation that while Tom and Chrissy were having their first dance to ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, Tristan Du Kok was fucking Lexy in the Harrington home.