Chapter 73
SEVENTY-THREE
Once I’ve established that Lina is okay, I head upstairs.
Pausing on the landing, I glance towards Evie’s room, wondering whether to check on her.
She might not want company right now, but I can’t just leave her.
Approaching her door, I knock softly. She doesn’t answer, and I push the door open to find her sitting sideways on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, staring out of the window at nothing, it seems.
‘Can I come in?’ I ask.
She answers with a small nod, and I close the door behind me and go tentatively across to her.
‘Lina’s okay,’ I assure her. ‘They’re keeping her overnight, but they don’t think there’s any permanent damage.’
‘Good,’ Evie murmurs, and I guess she’s still trying to process her feelings about the one person she thought she could trust.
‘Do you mind if I sit?’ I ask.
She shrugs, and I take that as a yes and sit down beside her.
‘I heard you downstairs,’ she says after a moment.
‘Dad wasn’t lying,’ she goes on, her gaze still averted.
‘Imogen was. She just wanted to mess with my head. She’s done it before to another girl at school.
I told the police that in case they didn’t believe him either.
I’m sorry she’s dead and everything, but she was a bitch.
Dad didn’t sleep with her. He just wouldn’t. ’
I’m uncertain how to answer. It’s clear she’s protecting him.
Does she really believe him, though? Do I believe all he’s just told me?
I want to with every part of me, but I’m so scared and confused.
He hadn’t told me about Jemma, maybe for what he thought was good reason, but he did deceive me.
He’d lied outright about Natalia and how she’d supposedly died.
Again, with what he claims was good intention: to protect Evie.
How can I be sure, though, that his whole story isn’t an intricate web of lies?
Dangerous lies that eventually drove Natalia to madness born of desperation?
I take a breath and broach the subject I pray she might be amenable to. ‘Would it help to talk things through, do you think?’
She answers with another apathetic shrug.
‘I realise you might not feel able to talk to me, Evie, and I get that, I really do,’ I go on gently. ‘I couldn’t talk to anyone after losing my husband and my little boy.’
That gets her attention, a small sidelong glance in my direction.
‘I did go to bereavement counselling eventually,’ I tell her. ‘I wish I’d gone sooner. It did help.’ Unsure how much she’d overheard about Jack’s huge mistake, I don’t add that it was Jemma I’d ended up mostly confiding in.
Evie unfurls herself after a moment, slides her hands under her thighs and begins rocking to and fro.
It worries me, this outward indication of how fraught her emotions are.
There were signs of it before the dreadful thing that happened to Imogen.
Before Natalia reappeared so devastatingly in her life. Jack must have been aware of it.
‘I thought maybe you and your dad could go together,’ I venture. ‘I think he might need to talk to someone too, especially after losing his family in the terrible way he did. He’s kept so much bottled up. You both have.’
‘His family?’ Evie turns to me, her brow furrowed in confusion. ‘But they’re not…’ Trailing off, she looks sharply away again.
Not what? My heart lurches as I recall how Natalia had urged me close to her as she lay breathing her last on the hall floor, the words she’d whispered. His parents… They… What had she been trying to tell me?