The Wife Before Me: A twisty, gripping psychological thriller

by Laura Elliot

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘I’d a business meeting in the Shelbourne. It was cancelled when I was on my way there so I decided to call it a day. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘I came home to prevent my father’s cross being removed. Unfortunately, I was too late.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I meant to tell you about that. A woman phoned from the council. Seems you ignored their letters. Motorists were complaining―’

  ‘Stop lying to me,’ she snapped. ‘There were no complaints, apart from the ones you manufactured. You must be very satisfied with your day’s work.’

  ‘You can’t believe I had anything to do with this.’

  ‘No one else is responsible.’

  ‘You’re calling me a liar?’

  ‘A vindictive liar. I was a fool not to heed my father’s warnings.’

  ‘Your father had only one reason for hating me.’

  ‘Don’t you dare sully his memory with your disgusting insinuations.’

  ‘He broke you, Amelia. He left you incapable of love or trust. That’s why we have problems in our marriage. You can deny it all you like but you need to name it. The two of you alone here. Those night terrors. You were too scared to understand what was happening to you. The sooner you accept what was going on, the sooner you can seek help and start to rebuild our relationship.’

  The mesmerising tenor of his voice. She had listened to him once but that was before she discovered that violence took many forms, apart from bruises and cracked ribs.

  ‘He said you’d break my heart. How right he was.’ She could feel it sundering, the fissure widening. ‘He saw through you from the beginning but I was too besotted to heed him. I had to wait until you attacked me before I realised he was trying to protect me from a nightmare, like he always did.’ Her hand moved protectively over her stomach. ‘I’ll never forgive myself – or you. Never.’

  ‘I wasn’t the one who accused him.’ Nicholas took a step towards her, then stopped when he saw her expression. ‘No one twisted your arm, Amelia, or forced you to confront him. You did that all by yourself. Putting up a cross in his memory may be a salve to your guilt but to me it’s the height of hypocrisy. He told me he’d do everything he could to break us up, which is not surprising considering―’

  ‘When did he say that?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you, did he?’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘He hired a private detective to check on me. He found nothing, of course. What would I have found if the tables were reversed? Hmm?’

  ‘Stop it. Stop. I won’t allow you to poison my love for him into something hideous. You’ve wrecked our marriage. I’m not prepared to put up with your behaviour any longer. You’ve freeloaded off me for long enough. I want you out of my life.’

  ‘Freeloaded?’ She forced herself to stand still as he walked towards her. ‘That’s not what we agreed. What’s mine is yours. Isn’t that what you told me? I’ve no intention of going anywhere. My child―’

  ‘Your child? You thought otherwise when you knocked me to the floor.’

  ‘You provoked me, Amelia, just as you’re doing now.’ He grasped her shoulders, twisted her head so that she was forced to look at him. ‘Our child belongs to both of us. Remember our vows? ’Til death do us part. I’ve no intention of breaking mine or allowing you to do something as foolish as breaking yours.’

  ‘Leave me alone. You’ve raised your hand to me for the last time.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ The blow, so swift and sudden, sent her spinning away from him. She fell, her body crashing against the ladder. It tilted, the legs on one side lifting. For an instant it seemed to defy gravity, and Amelia, also frozen in that same suspended pause, was assailed by images. The memory rushed away from her as the metal frame struck her head and she was knocked senseless.

  * * *

  An ambulance, siren screaming. The pain low down in her back, her stomach cramping.

  ‘My baby…’ Her breath rasping, Nicholas holding her hand. ‘Don’t talk. We’re nearly at the hospital. Everything’s going to be all right.’

  Amelia could see the truth in the eyes of the paramedic, who leaned over her and asked her to score her pain on a ratio of one to ten.

  ‘I can’t give you a number.’ She wasn’t sure if the paramedic could hear her or if she had even spoken her thoughts aloud. ‘How am I supposed to calculate such pain?’

  Nicholas clung to her hand. She did not want to listen to him sobbing or look at his tears falling. Crocodile tears, shameless, and she was unable to tell if she was clinging to him for support or if it was the other way around.

  * * *

  The edge was tempting. A bottomless hole waiting for her to fall forward. No space to burrow, no way to escape. Here, there was just darkness. Her baby, gone now, gone like thistledown on a spring breeze, leaving behind a weight too heavy to carry. Nicholas stayed by her side, pulling her back when she strained against him.

  ‘We are one,’ he said. ‘Now, more than ever, we must work to make our marriage stronger. I love you, Amelia… love you… until death do us part.’

  His promises sloughed off her. Dead tissue falling from a marriage that no longer had meaning. She would talk to David Smithson as soon as she was strong enough to face the inevitable confrontation when she demanded a divorce from Nicholas. Living with him was no longer an option, yet she knew how hard she would have to fight to reclaim her freedom. She would move slowly, warily. Wait for the right time to lock him and his possessions out of Woodbine for ever.

  Thirty

  Nicholas was in London on a three-day business trip when I came back to Woodbine to see Amelia one sunny afternoon in June. Love had not served either of us well. I was pale and drained from the ending of a passionate but destructive relationship with a graphic novelist, but I was shocked by the change in Amelia. Make-up could no longer disguise her pallor and her face was gaunt from the weight she had lost. She moved slowly, as if the ground beneath her was unstable and she had to feel her way to steadiness. She was still recovering from her miscarriage but I knew that her loss had simply intensified a grief she could no longer hide.

  I’d left New York by then and was living back in Ireland. My father had died and left me his house in Kilfarran, along with two ramshackle cottages situated beside each other on an isolated headland overlooking the Atlantic. The sale of his house had paid for the renovations of the cottages and the establishment of my studio on Mag’s Head.

  I’d suspected, for some time, that she was very unhappy. For the first year of her marriage, I thought she was grieving over John but I’d soon realised it went deeper than that. Nicholas’s behaviour early on in their relationship had made me suspicious of his possessiveness. I’d chosen to ignore the signs then, and, though I was horrified by what she confided in me that afternoon, I was not surprised. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted as she recounted the accident that had preceded her miscarriage. Had he deliberately pushed the ladder on top of her or had it fallen accidently? She claimed it was the latter but I was unsure if that was what had happened or just what she needed to believe. Otherwise, how could she keep going?

  I told her to leave him before he returned from London. Woodbine was bricks and mortar, I argued. Life was flesh and blood. She could fight him through the courts and have him evicted from her home, but once life was taken that was the end of the story. Then, I offered her an alternative solution. It swept over me in waves of certainty and an acceptance of my own future. I loved Amelia. I would do anything to protect her. But all my pleas were tearfully rejected. She put her hands over her ears, insisted that I must stop making preposterous suggestions. I could tell she regretted her decision to confide in me. By then, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. We had both bared our souls to each other and were unable to return to a safer space where we could convince ourselves that we were exaggerating the awfulness of our realities.

  Amelia agreed to make an appoint
ment the following day to see a divorce solicitor. She promised to keep me informed in detailed letters about any further violence Nicholas inflicted on her. That way, she would create a record of his brutality, along with photographic evidence that we would use to discredit him when the time was right.

  Later, we went outside to the garden to hang the glass butterflies from the apple tree. She held the ladder steady as I attached them to the branches. I’d crafted each one with love and their glittering hues rippled a rainbow across her upturned face. They swayed in the breeze as we made our way along the overgrown path at the end of the garden. We pushed through the overgrowth in search of the ice house. There it was, its red arch almost obscured by briar and ivy. That same mouldy atmosphere when we opened the door. The cobwebs and the cushions, the burned-out candles, the old curtains still hanging from the wall.

  * * *

  This scene, so instantly familiar, brought me back to an evening when I told Amelia about my father’s accusation. I was fifteen then and had carried it like an echo in my head for all those years. He’d seldom mentioned my mother’s name or divulged any information about the catastrophic event – my birth – that had caused her death. He’d snap at me if I questioned him about her or asked to see photographs of myself as a baby. The reason for the latter, I would later discover, was that he had never taken any. I spat out the words he’d shouted at me in his drunken fury. It was the first time I’d spoken them aloud and Amelia listened until I could speak no more.

  She put her arms around me. We would search for my mother’s medical records and lay his lie to rest, she said. In the flickering intimacy of the ice house, I kissed her. A kiss of gratitude that turned into something else. Something neither of us were prepared to name at that stage. Her lips moved when she felt the brush of mine, but they did not open or surrender to my hunger. I pulled away and stared into her eyes. They glistened in the candlelight, tears at the corners ready to fall. Regret. Her eyes, not her lips told me I had to let the hope die, if I was to save our friendship.

  That was the first time I acknowledged my yearning and accepted that this was not an erratic hormonal urge; it was something more profound. Something that would shape my future. I no longer had to pretend to enjoy the pulsating fumbling of teenage boys that I’d found to be amusing or irritating but which had never awakened me as Amelia did during that first hesitant kiss.

  A week later, we found my mother’s medical records among the clutter of old documents in my father’s attic. Some secrets are best left beneath the eaves; some need to be dragged into the light. My anger grew as I read through the notes and discovered that I had just been delivered by emergency Caesarean when she, Anna Rossiter, the mother I would never know, suffered a fatal post-partum haemorrhage. How could I, a baby still gasping for breath, have caused her death? Why not blame the act of love between my parents nine months earlier? Or their mutual friend who’d introduced them to each other two years previously? How far back could I go on this interlocking chain reaction – back to the Garden of Eden, perhaps? That alluring apple? I felt light-headed, as if my father’s words had finally escaped from a poisonous crevice in my mind.

  We stopped using the ice house soon afterwards. So many projects to be undertaken and the dreaded Leaving exam hanging over us like the sword of Damocles. Excuses that made sense and prevented us from confronting what we were still unable to understand. In time, I confided in Amelia. Not the full truth – that I loved her and believed my feelings would never change – but a truth that would fork our lives in different directions.

  As I grew more confident in my own skin, I told my father what I’d understood that evening in the ice house. He refused to believe me. There’d never been anything like that in his family, he said, as if lesbianism could be laid at the door of genetics. He waited for my ‘confusion’, as he called it, to pass. When I showed no signs of bending to his will, he told me I’d degraded my mother’s memory. She had sacrificed her life for an ‘aberration.’

  After that, it was impossible to live with him. I was twenty when I moved to New York and changed my name by deed poll to Annie Ross. I continued my training under an eccentric Italian who had learned his craft in Venice. In time, I became confident enough to establish the Clearwater Stained Glass Design Studio.

  I was happy in New York, free in a way I would never be in Kilfarran. Heartache doesn’t warm the other side of the bed and my expectations were not as demanding when I lowered the bar. Then, it was easier to settle for second best, third and fourth. They left me, those wonderful women, some tearful, some angry, all claiming I lacked commitment to our relationships. They were right. I remained unlucky in love, a woman in constant search of happiness. Was that where I went wrong? Should I have remained faithful to an ideal? Yearned for the moon? For her? No, that was not my nature but when my future changed in a way I’d never envisaged, the Big Apple proved too frenzied and challenging for me to continue living there. I needed the peace and isolation of a cottage on a rugged headland where, on a clear day, I could look across the ocean and imagine I could see America.

  * * *

  That afternoon, when we closed the door of the ice house on our memories, neither of us mentioned the kiss. Had Amelia forgotten it, crushed it under kisses from the lips of others? Men like Nicholas, who had brutalised their love, or Jay, who had loved her so briefly before they were separated by his warring parents?

  He’d returned to Kilfarran to visit his father and came with Mark that evening to Woodbine? They arrived with wine and pizzas and it seemed, for a short while, as if time stood still and it was like old times again… almost.

  Amelia drank too much and danced with me, laughing as we reminisced about the dance school we had attended in our teens. As we moved together, tuned in to the same internal rhythm, I felt the slow burn of an old desire but I’d learned to hide my longing in the strength of her friendship.

  When she danced with Jay I watched the spark between them reignite. Theirs had been such a short-lived passion, yet there was something so familiar about the sight of them together that the years in between seemed inconsequential.

  We’d never understood how Jay’s father had persuaded his mother – whom he had met when he was a student working in Californian vineyards for the summer – to marry him and move to Kilfarran. California was sunshine and surfboards. Ireland was dulled by mist and history – but perhaps it was this colonised history that kept her here. Dolores Lee-O’Meara was African-American, a genealogist specialising in tracing the roots of those, like her, who were descended from African slaves. For seventeen years she’d tried to fit into this small village on the slopes of the Wicklow hills but she missed the sun and dreaded the drawn-out Irish winters. When Trevor O’Meara stubbornly refused to leave his sheep-breeding farm to move to California, she left him, taking her son and daughter with her. After their departure I’d comforted Amelia and reassured her that broken hearts mend. Watching them together that night at Woodbine, I wondered if either of them had really recovered from that summer when they exchanged hot-blooded kisses in the shade of Kilfarren Woods.

  In the taxi on the way back to the village, I told Jay the truth about Amelia’s marriage. Was I right or wrong? Did my revelation change the direction of their lives or had destiny preordained what was to come? All I can say in my defence is that sometimes right and wrong don’t matter. It is fate that determines the outcome of our decisions.

  Jay loved Amelia. Perhaps he could achieve what I’d been unable to do and rescue her from a precarious and ugly future.

  Thirty-One

  Amelia had already cleared away the wine bottles and the pizza cartons when Nicholas Skyped from London.

  ‘Are you alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I’m alone.’ How easy it had become to lie to him – though, strictly speaking, she was being truthful. Mark was on his way back to Dublin and Leanne had left for Kilfarran Village in a taxi with Jay, who was flying back to California in the mo
rning.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Nicholas looked concerned, or was it suspicion that crossed his face? She could no longer tell the difference.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You don’t look okay, Amelia. Have you been drinking?’

  Yes, suspicion – as always. ‘A glass of wine,’ she replied. ‘No need to stay off alcohol now, is there?’ Her words, instantly regretted, hardened his expression.

  ‘Are you blaming me again for the accident―?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Sooner or later, we have to talk. But for now, you need to rest. Yvonne will come over tomorrow with food.’

  ‘There’s no need for her to call.’

  ‘There’s every need.’ His eyes narrowed as he brought his face closer to the screen. ‘Have you seen yourself in the mirror? You’re drunk.’

  ‘I had a glass of wine, Nicholas. I’m far from being drunk.’

  Could he detect her panic? Suspect that Jay’s arrival had lifted her from the dulled apathy she had been unable to shake off since the loss of her baby?

  ‘If you say so, Amelia. You can’t blame me for worrying about you when I’m away from home. It’s lonely here without you. Have you any idea of how desperately I miss you? I love you so much.’ His mood changes could occur in the middle of the mildest conversation and she could never gauge when his tone would soften or harden.

  ‘Do you miss me?’ he asked. His question was pointless. No matter how often she answered it, the constant reassurances he demanded from her would never be enough to satisfy him.

  ‘Yes, I miss you.’

  ‘Then say it as if you mean it.’

  ‘I’m tired, Nicholas.’

  ‘Too tired to talk to your husband?’