Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“Of course? What do you mean, of course?”
“This is hard for both of us,” he says carefully.
“I get it. But please be patient with me. I was not expecting this.” He sighs.
“What I meant was, of course I wasn’t a drug dealer because—well, firstly, that’s not who I am, or ever was.
And secondly, I meant of course because as far as I was concerned, you know all about what happened.
I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that you don’t. ”
“You told me you were guilty. You insisted upon it. You can’t expect me to believe something different just because you somehow received a pardon.” I realize my fists are balled under the table. “Just tell me the truth! Please, Johan!”
“I am telling you the truth. I have never sold so much as a milligram of an illegal drug. I wouldn’t have. That is the truth.”
I stare at him. “But how am I supposed to believe that? After you insisted you were guilty? After you willingly took a prison sentence?”
Johan closes his eyes.
“The very last thing I heard about you was when Prawat called and said you’d been sentenced to twenty-five years in Bang Kwang.
He said you’d been involved with the crime ring for ‘a while’ and that you had a girlfriend within the organization.
After that: nothing. Not a word from you, your family, nobody.
Just the rest of my life, stretching on ahead, knowing that the man I had fallen in love with was not only a criminal, but that he’d been lying to me from the beginning.
About everything. And not only that, but that he never wanted to see me again.
” My voice is beginning to crack. “It broke me, Johan.”
His eyes open. “A girlfriend,” he says slowly. “That got back to you?”
“Was it that woman in Chinatown? The one who came into the shop when you were supposedly delivering jaggery balls?”
“You don’t even know what was happening in that shop?”
I shake my head, and once again I’m on the brink of tears. For twenty-seven-year-old me, crying into thin hotel pillows, begging consular staff, police, court officials, anyone who might speak a word of English, for help.
“I don’t know anything. All I have to go on is this conversation now. You’re telling me that everything I’ve believed for more than a decade is in fact untrue, that you didn’t do it? That you are actually just a really nice guy? Would you believe any of that, if you were me?”
He shakes his head, but I think it’s more a stress reaction than an answer to my question.
“Why should I believe you?” I ask quietly. “Why should I trust anything you say?”
“I wouldn’t trust me, if I was in your shoes,” he says after a long pause. “But I hope you will come to believe what I’m saying one day. Even if that’s not today.”
I rest my head in my hands. A part of me does believe him already, I realize; but I think that’s the part that never wanted this to be true in the first place. The part that once loved this man.
“Why are you so surprised that I don’t know what happened?” I ask. “Who were you expecting to tell me you’d been pardoned? The Swedish government? The Thai justice authorities? Neither of them gave a shit about me.”
He stares at me for a long time. “Oh, Carrie,” he says at last. “All these years you’ve been in the dark. It’s awful.”
The tourists who checked in are beginning to arrive back down in the bar now, free of their thick coats and suitcases. There’s a hum of conversation and laughter from the tables they’re pulling together.
I watch Johan trying to compose himself.
He’s still in jeans and a jumper, but they’re of higher quality than the clothes he used to wear; he no longer looks like an aspiring diver with a sideline in translation and plastering.
He looks like he can afford good therapy and regular massages.
And while I accept that none of these things would heal several years in a Thai prison, the impression overall is of a man in excellent health.
Strong, fit, robust and—perhaps more than ever before—unbearably attractive.
“You should have been told,” is what he says. “But—and I know this will make you even more angry—I’m not at liberty to say anymore about why I thought you knew, or what I expected to have happened when I was pardoned. I’m sorry.”
“What? No way! You can’t do this to me!”
“I’m sorry, Carrie. But it’s not just about me.”
Furious, disbelieving, I get up. I cannot be at this table a moment longer. But seconds later, I sit back down. I’m not losing him again. Not now.
He looks at me, silently, for a long time, and his eyes are still beautiful. I wish they weren’t. Bright denim blue, and watching me as if I’m the only person on earth.
“What I can tell you is that there was never another girlfriend.” He says this slowly, with the emphasis on never.
“And I never worked for a big crime ring. I did hear they were going to send that story out. To deter you, in case you decided to fly back to Thailand for another try, although I never believed it would actually reach you. But I guess they’re the sort of people who could pull off anything.
I know it was them who tipped off your hospital trust about my arrest. They just wanted you and your mum out of there as quickly as possible. ”
I wrap my arms around myself.
“Say that again.”
He looks straight at me. “I did not work for a crime ring. And I did not have a girlfriend. I loved you, Carrie. Only you.”
He stops talking and just looks straight at me, as if waiting for me to take this in. “Only you,” he repeats, quietly. “But I made a monumental error of judgment that I nearly paid for with my life.”
I close my eyes, hugging myself harder. I want to believe him.
“So you mean, Prawat lied to me? About you working for a gang? He lied about the girlfriend?”
“Oh, no. He was simply sharing the information he’d been deliberately fed. He’d have had no reason to believe it wasn’t true.”
“So was there even a crime ring? Was that made up, too?”
Johan’s face changes. “The syndicate’s very real. I don’t know much about it but I do know it’s one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world. Certainly the biggest in Asia. But I can tell you I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“And the syndicate’s the reason you still won’t talk to me?”
He squirms. “Yes and no.”
He looks down at my hand on the table for a while and I know he’s looking at my wedding ring.
“I was cleared,” he says. “Completely, and rightfully. I was not a drug dealer, Carrie, and I never worked for any criminal organizations. I didn’t have a double life.
I was exactly the person you thought I was.
And you—us—our wedding—every moment of it was real. ”
My eyes swim with tears. It feels like a betrayal to Robin, to my children, and especially to my old self, for me to be crying like this, but this is many years’ worth of grief and anger discharging, and I have neither the strength nor the desire to stop it.
Johan hands me the little napkin that came with his drink, and I dry my eyes.
Outside, darkness is beginning to fall; car lights bleed into the compacted ice, and the cocktail bar across the way is switching on its fairy lights.
As if in response, our own bar lowers its lighting and the round white globes on each table glow into life. It’s uncomfortably romantic.
I look at Johan, once the love of my life. He’s still watching me, with the intensity my body still remembers.
“I am so sorry.” He reaches over to hand me more tissues as another tear falls, but I pull away. I don’t want him touching me. Looking at me in that way.
“How am I meant to believe anything you say?” I ask again.
“I don’t know.” His voice is sad. “I just don’t know.”
I look away. As he says, I have no reason to trust him.
But I know he’s telling the truth. I feel it.
And that’s why I’m crying; that’s why the world feels changed.
Even though it’s years too late, I’m finally hearing what I longed to hear.
What I needed to hear, for the sake of my sanity. My heart.
—
He asks about my family. He wants to know about Mum, Maya, and Eagle, their life in Colorado. I’d forgotten how much he liked my mother, how admiring he had always been of not only her work but of her as a woman in her own right.
Dutifully, and because I’m in shock, I ask about his parents, about Lucas, about life in Sweden. I ask the sort of questions one might ask an ex they haven’t seen in several years. But I’m lost. Everything I built on anger is collapsing around me.
“How’s your dad?” he asks, next.
“He’s got Alzheimer’s,” I say shortly. “He’s in residential care. And actually quite sick at the moment.” I check my phone, but there’s nothing from Nicola.
Johan’s face falls. “I’m sorry. That’s…God, that’s heartbreaking. Your lovely dad.”
“Yeah.” I fiddle with my drink coaster; a leather spot of black on a smooth, white table. “It’s been incredibly hard.”
“What sort of things does he remember?” Johan asks.
“It varies. It was mostly just his episodic memory for a while—recent events, things he’d done and said.
But it’s a lot worse now. He hasn’t got many dates or facts left at all.
He’s just in this kind of shifting time warp, with people he mostly doesn’t recognize coming and going.
Like, I’ll go and see him and he’ll tell me about his daughter who’s a surgeon, even though he can’t quite remember her name. ”
“Oh, Carrie.”
“Yeah.”
“Does he remember his surgeon daughter’s husband getting arrested on their wedding day?”
I try and fail to smile. “He did once tell me that story, yes. But he’d forgotten your name, and he had no idea it had happened to me—he said it had happened to a friend’s daughter. He told it like he was the village gossip. Scandalized tones, shaking his head, the works.”
“He didn’t remember the details?”
“No, thankfully.”
“I’m glad,” Johan says after a pause. “I’d hate to have contributed to a painful memory. It’s bad enough that you’ve had to live it all these years.”
Tiredness is closing in quiet and fast, like heavy snowfall. The shock is wearing off. Johan’s energy is focused entirely on me; he doesn’t look anywhere else. It’s me who keeps breaking eye contact.
I take a breath. “If you really can’t or won’t tell me anymore, I think I want to go,” I say. “I have two children and a husband. It’s not right for me to be here with you.”
And it isn’t right. I need to be there for my poor little Maeve after her trip to the head teacher’s office.
And for my Raffy, who is without his mummy for the first time in his life.
If Robin’s gone so far as to admit they’re struggling without me, things must be bad.
I’ll get them while they’re still at the table if I call in the next ten minutes.
My heart lifts at the thought of their little voices, their silly faces covered in food and pen marks, the illicit chocolate Robin’s probably let them have.
“I hope your husband is a nice man,” Johan says after a pause. “I hope he looks after you.”
“He does. Beautifully.”
“Good.”
“I know you’re a father, too. I looked you up online, of course. When I found your cabin.”
“I’m a stepdad,” he says. “Matteo isn’t my son. As he has reminded me more than once when I’ve refused to buy him sweets.” The ghost of a smile.
There’s an uncomfortable sensation in my chest as he tells me this.
“I’m going to go,” I repeat, standing up. “I’m leaving in the morning. And this is…I just can’t…”
Johan stands up, too. He watches me for a while longer, then nods. “I understand.”
I close my eyes. Twelve years of my life rewritten, just like that. I hold onto the back of my chair, trying to ground myself. I listen to the hum and clatter of the reception and bar, a shout of laughter disappearing into a stairwell, the sound of milk being foamed by a barista’s wand.
“Carrie.”
I open my eyes. He’s putting his wallet in his back pocket—the left one, as always.
“It’s an anniversary for us today,” he says. “Thirteen years since the day we met. Did you know that?”
I exhale slowly. Of course. A tall man standing in a corridor outside Major Trauma. Work trousers, paint on his wrist. Sky-blue eyes and a deep sense of knowing. The pull of that man.
“I’d forgotten,” I admit.
“I hadn’t.”
He moves closer and my body, without my permission, simply switches on.
Briefly, I feel fury at it, this internal chemistry lab over which I should surely have developed some agency.
But it’s very clear that I haven’t, that I can’t move away, no matter how much I want to. And I sense it’s the same for him.
“Take good care, Carrie Cole.” He reaches forward and gently kisses my cheek. It lands near my ear and spreads across my whole body. He watches me for a moment more, then thumbs away the tear that has sprung, against my will.
“There wasn’t a day I didn’t think about you,” he says. He removes a tear from the other eye. “There still isn’t. I loved you every bit as much as you loved me.”