Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
LIANE
How does it feel to not only be caught for a crime, but to have been caught by the people closest to you?
To know that none of this would have happened without their help?
To know that the only reason you are sitting in a cell surrounded by bars is because your husband and children conspired against you to ensure that this is where you would end up?
It’s certainly an awful feeling.
But there’s one thing that makes it even worse.
It’s that I know I deserve it.
As I contemplate custody and how the rest of my life will look once I’ve done what my lawyer advises me to do and plead guilty to the charges against me, it would be easy to feel sorry for myself.
I’ve definitely spent a large part of my life feeling that way.
It was feeling sorry for myself that led me to do what I did, taking my mother’s life simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of doing what everyone else manages to do in going to work and having a normal life.
I wanted more.
I got greedy.
Now I am paying the price.
The most galling part of all this is not what I did to my mother.
Sure, pushing her down the stairs for my own financial gain was a terrible thing to do and that will form the darkest part of my story when all the journalists tell it in whatever reports they choose to make.
But for me, the worst part is that I hurt my family to the point where they saw no choice but to have me arrested, simply so that I couldn’t hurt anyone else.
Frederik, Scott and Joel, with her help, got me to confess and create the evidence that has allowed the police to have such an airtight case against me.
Sure, it hasn’t helped that, in my shock and dismay since, I have hardly offered the police a credible story to counteract the accusations and the evidence against me.
But really, the damage was done the moment the people I care most about in the world decided that they no longer cared about me.
I can’t blame my husband and our sons for what they did.
I can’t deny I wasn’t shocked to discover it though.
Being betrayed and backstabbed by the three people closest to me.
The three people I loved the most. The three people I did all of this for.
All the time I had spent worrying about Haven and what threat she might have posed to my family, I could never have envisioned that it would be my actual family who brought me down.
If only they had stood by me, picked my side, banished Haven to history and gone forward with me instead of her, things could have been so different.
We all could have had a better life, a life in which money eased our struggles and there was no shame or scandal brought upon us.
Surely that would have been better. But as I sit here in this cell, I know there is only one person it would have been better for.
Me. Not them. Because we’re different. My husband and our sons can’t do the things I did.
They can’t commit crimes or live with the secret or the guilt or convince themselves that they did a bad thing for a good reason.
No, only I am capable of that and it’s why they turned against me and picked her side instead.
Haven.
My foe.
My arch nemesis.
And sadly, my conqueror.
Having called her a bitch loudly enough for her to hear down the phone, it was off my chest, and I gave up and waited for the police to arrive.
Those were a soul-searching and soul-destroying few minutes, but as bad as they were, I didn’t want them to end.
That’s because I knew that when they did, the police would have arrived to arrest me.
Arrive they did, and I was marched very unceremoniously and very shamefully out of my house and into the street, where all my neighbours watched me get put into the back of a police car in handcuffs.
Oh, the gossip they must have now. The tales they can tell.
The stories they have about their naughty neighbour, the murderer in their midst. I bet I’ve been the main topic of conversation in every home, coffee shop and restaurant in this town and not for the right reasons.
I’d hoped to one day be the talk of the town for being the woman who had all these amazing adventures around the world and who made everybody envious with the exciting life I was leading with my mother’s inheritance money.
But now I will only ever be known for being a killer, and that’s never really the way anyone wants to be remembered.
It’s certainly not how I want my boys to remember me.
I hope that in time, they will find the strength to come and visit me in here and give me the opportunity to explain myself.
Or if that doesn’t work, at least give me the opportunity to apologise.
I feel terrible for what I have put my sons through.
Their lives won’t be easy knowing their mum was a murderer.
But they’re strong boys and they’ll survive. So will Frederik. I know that.
But what about her?
What about the woman who came into my family and blew it up with her accusations and investigations?
If it hadn’t been for her, maybe Scott would have been too scared to tell anyone what he knew, that I was the real killer, and maybe all of this could have been avoided.
If it hadn’t been for her, I could be sipping cocktails on a beach in the Caribbean right now.
If it hadn’t been for Haven, I might have gotten away with murder.