by Jo Watson
“Oh,” I said, quite taken aback by his statement.
Silence engulfed the room. This time, I could almost imagine a melancholic tune playing. A sad solo violin, the bow dragging slowly against the strings, causing that agonizing, heart-piercing sound that reverberated through my entire being. The sound had such a finality to it, as if it were the very last note played by the orchestra before the curtain came crashing down.
“Where are the letters from my grandmother to whoever this is?” Mike said, after the silence. His tone was much calmer than before. I almost wished he was still angry with me, because this tone made me feel like he had decided on something and he’d resigned himself to it.
“I don’t have them,” I murmured.
“But you have her diary?”
“Yes.”
He stood up again and walked over to me. I felt the bed dip next to me as he lowered himself on to it. Another silence stretched on between us. It was the silence that two strangers would share. This broke my heart, because we weren’t strangers, not after what had happened between us last night. We’d been so close, connected, but I guess we weren’t like that anymore. And it was my fault. I’d messed everything up. I was a mess. I waited for him to speak, trying to imagine what he was going to say, or what he was going to ask me, but I wasn’t expecting what came next, even though I probably should have been.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, now,” he said.
I started to nod my head. I was trying to hold back my tears, but it wasn’t working. “I’ll start packing.” I stood up and rushed over to my suitcase.
“I don’t just mean leave here,” he qualified. “I mean, I’m going to have to ask you to leave this town and to never come back again.”
“And . . . what about us?” I stuttered, heart shattering into small shards, piercing my lungs, making it hard to breathe.
“What about us?” he asked. “There doesn’t get to be an us when it’s based on lies and deceit, like this.”
“But last night was—”
“It was.” He cut me off again. “But, let’s face it, it wasn’t really real, now, was it?”
“It was real for me,” I said.
“Yeah, I sort of thought that, too, until I woke up this morning and realized that everything about you is a lie.”
I inhaled sharply. Yes, that was the sound of my heart breaking.
CHAPTER 51
One hour gone, four and a half to go. I was in my car again, driving back to Johannesburg. Mike had escorted me to the town limits once more, and, this time, there had been no kiss goodbye, no lingering look, no I wish we’d met under different circumstances. I was sure he wished he’d never actually met me. Truthfully, I wish I’d never met me. The new me. This me that lied and manipulated and was devious and deceitful. But that still didn’t change the fact that my heart was breaking, right now. It had broken before, but not like this. This felt nothing like what Blade Sanders had done to me.
Blade was my famous and charismatic editor and ex-boss—even his name was charismatic—the man I’d admired more than I can say. He was a journalist supreme, going undercover in crime rings and cracking open some of the country’s biggest stories. It all added to the legend and mystique of the man who had given me my dream job, plastered me with praise and compliments and poems, and then stolen my young, naïve heart.
Let’s keep it a secret at work, he’d said. Wouldn’t want anyone here to think I favor you, he’d said. The secretiveness had made it that much more thrilling. Those late-night moments in printing rooms. Stolen kisses in the elevator, the basement, on his desk, under it, in the locked boardroom. Late-night calls, sexting at our desks . . . It was all so thrilling for my younger self. I had been so naïve.
But all the secrecy had had nothing to do with our work situation, and everything to do with the fact that he had a live-in girlfriend. How had I not known, when apparently it was common knowledge? She was the editor of one of South Africa’s bestselling women’s magazines.
It’s over between us.
We don’t even sleep in the same bed.
We haven’t had sex in years.
The lines that he’d kept feeding me had kept me hanging on for so long. Looking back now, I can’t believe I bought it all and allowed myself to become the mistress in a bad movie for another year. In my defense, I was a star-struck twenty-five-year-old. At that age, you’re still just teetering on the precipice of true adulthood, and any shove in any direction can either set you back or propel you forward. Well, I was pushed back—especially on the Monday morning he’d come to work engaged to be married. He’d announced it nonchalantly in our regular Monday-morning meeting . . .
Got engaged.
How? someone asked.
Took her to her favorite restaurant. Put the ring in the bottom of the champagne glass.
What does the ring look like?
Very simple and elegant. Princess cut. One and a half carats.
Did she cry?
She did. She did.
It was as if the whole world stood still in that moment. The boardroom table that I’d been resting my elbows on vanished and I fell through it, like a ghost moving through a wall. I felt like all the blood had drained out of me, leaving me cold and empty, and the coffee cup fell from my hand. The hot, black liquid spread fast over the polished table and dripped off the edge, on to the carpet. I still remember that sound, that frantic drip, drip, drip, drip. At the time, it was the loudest sound I’d ever heard.
I’d lost it—broken down in front of everyone in the room. Tears and snot and trying to gulp in air between sobs. Thinking back on that moment now, I cringe at the sheer embarrassment of it all. He’d pulled me out of the room, dragged me into his office, slammed the door and we’d gotten into a screaming match. Everyone heard, and when I walked out of his office, five minutes later, broken, bruised and rejected (didn’t I know I was only a bit of fun?), I had to do this walk of shame across the newsroom floor. Later that day, I’d gotten it into my head that I needed to call her. She needed to know. One woman to another, I needed to tell her, to save her from the biggest mistake she would ever make: marrying him. I wish I’d had someone to sense-check that thought, though. If I’d had a good friend or a close family member to turn to, maybe they would have saved me from that moment. Because it turned out to be a big mistake.
Of course I know. Just like I known about all the others, she’d said.
What others? God, I had been so stupid.
She’d laughed. Did you think you were the only one he was fucking? Do you think you mean anything to him? Look at you. You’re just a junior writer who is fucking her boss. How pathetic can you be? You’ll never get anywhere, after this. Your career is doomed. No one likes the girl that fucks her boss.
It was true, what she said. No one likes that girl, especially the boss she’d been fucking. He tried to get me to leave. Said it was awkward, now, in the office. He even offered me a retrenchment package, but I refused to go. I had something to prove, now. To her, to him, to all my colleagues who now looked at me like I was just sleeping my way to the top—as if I was a talentless writer and this was the only way I would make it. My refusal to leave was what ultimately led to my downfall. The big, public downfall. The one where I wrote that big, political story and “misquoted” our finance minister.
Mr. Mcube said that budget cunts were coming.
It had been printed like that and you can imagine what happened next. Think funny Facebook memes, think a lawsuit, think the whole country laughing at that unintentional joke. Thing is, my copy hadn’t said that when I handed him the article to go to print. I had written “cuts”—let’s be clear about that, there was no “n” in the version I submitted. See what a problem just one wrong letter can cause?
He’d deliberately changed it so he had a reason to fire me and then publicly humiliate me and kill all my future prospects as a journalist. He’d take some slack, too, as the editor, but he’d manage
d to emerge on the other side with his reputation fairly intact—his biggest mistake was trusting a too young, too overzealous journalist.
My stomach twisted at the memory, but I continued to go down the dark rabbit hole of my thoughts. In fact, I was so far down the rabbit hole, I was about to drink the potion to make me fit through the door, when . . .
I heard the siren. It must have been going for ages, because I’d been vaguely aware of some red and blue lights.
“Fuck! What now?” I pulled over at the side of the road. I was sure I hadn’t been speeding, but, then again, I had been so deep in thought that I might have been, and this car was naturally fast—you had to really concentrate to keep it moving slowly . . . God, why did I buy it?
The police car stopped behind me and I started scrambling for my license. I swung around as I felt the shadow of the man beside my car. I opened my window and launched into it.
“Hi, officer. I hope I wasn’t speeding.” The sun was behind him and I shielded my eyes so I could see his face, but, when I did, my jaw fell open.
CHAPTER 52
“Mike, why are you . . . ? What have I . . . ?” I asked.
He took his sunglasses off and ran his hand through his hair. He looked pained. He leaned one arm on my car and suddenly I heard him tap his fingers against the roof, like some frantic beat.
I waited for him to speak, but the silence and the tapping continued.
“I read some of the letters and the diary,” he finally said. “And, the thing is . . .” His voice trailed off and he didn’t speak again.
“Thing is?” I asked, after what felt like a torturous wait.
“I was with my grandmother when she died.” He stopped tapping his fingers; the sudden silence acted like an exclamation mark to those words. “I was holding her hand when she passed.”
“I . . . I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that,” I replied. I could see the pain etched into his face as he stared off past me and the car, as if he was looking down a dark tunnel, trying to see what was at the end of it.
“I’m not saying it because I want you to feel sorry for me; in fact, it was probably one of the most special moments of my life. To be with someone, like that, when they are at their most vulnerable and . . .” He paused and swallowed, as if the words were sticking in his throat. “It was a privilege to be there at the end with someone I loved.”
“Of course it was,” I whispered, trying to hold back my tears.
“She told me something, though.” He finally tilted his head down and looked at me. Our eyes met with the intensity of a thousand galloping horses. Hooves hitting the ground hard, kicking up dust. Thunderous. Painful.
“What did she tell you?” I asked, unable to look away from him.
He tapped the roof again. “There had always been these whispered stories when I was growing up. I mean, I knew snippets. I knew she hadn’t loved my grandfather when she’d married him, that it had almost been this arranged marriage. I’d always gotten the feeling that there was more to the story, but no one spoke about it. It was as if no one was allowed to speak of it. Our family had a secret, I just didn’t know what it was . . . until I read those letters and her diary.” There was a long pause again, and I waited for him to say what he needed to say. “She loved someone once, someone she wasn’t allowed to love.”
“She did.” I nodded.
Then he looked away again. “You know what she said to me, as she was holding my hand and taking her last breath?”
“No.” I shook my head, tears starting to form in my eyes as I pictured the scene he was describing.
“She told me that she was going to die with only one regret. And that regret was that she had never spoken her truth and told her story. She’d kept it locked up inside and held on to it, a secret, for so many years. At the time, I didn’t really know what she was referring to, but, now, I guess I do.” His voice was overflowing with emotion. He was struggling to get the words out and I was struggling to keep the tears in. “She told me . . .” He paused. I actually heard the breath and the words sticking in the back of his throat. “She told me to always follow my heart. To love who I love without fear of judgement, and to never keep it a secret. To scream my love from the rooftops and let the world know, because she hadn’t let anyone know.”
The tears could not be held back anymore and they trickled down my cheeks. He started walking away from the car, and I watched as he stood in the middle of the empty road and looked up at the sky. He put his hands on his hips and stared, as if he was trying to find some answer that would come down to him from the clouds. And then he started walking back towards the car.
“What do you need to tell this story?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You obviously need something, or you wouldn’t have been running around stealing Persian cats and breaking into secure estates. Just what is it that you are actually looking for? No more lies. Tell me the truth.”
“I’m looking for clues,” I said. “Things to give me more insight into what they were both like. I wanted to see the places in the letters. I wanted to see the engraving under the willow tree, the room under the stage. I wanted to see all of that so I could get a better sense of them. I was also trying to figure out how their story ends, because it seems to end so abruptly in the letters, but there’s got to be more to it. It can’t just end like that.”
“She gets married to someone else,” he said. “That’s how it ends.”
I shook my head. “You’ve read those letters—their story could not have ended there. It just couldn’t have.”
“So you think there’s more?”
“I do. And I also think there’s another stash of letters somewhere.”
“Inside her favorite book?” He raised his eyebrow at me.
“Yes.” I reached up and instinctively touched the scar on my forehead.
“So, basically, Becca, you came here with the express purpose of taking someone else’s story and making it your own,” he said.
I nodded. So ashamed. “Yes,” I admitted.
He tapped on the roof of the car again. “Are you calling this a work of fiction?” he asked.
“Yes.” More shame.
“Could you say it was based on a true story? Could you say that, in your book?”
“Yes. I could. I don’t see why not.”
“So, you could put her story out there in the world, like she wanted it to be?” he asked.
“Well, it would be a creative interpretation of it, since I don’t have her letters.”
“So you would be filling in the blanks?”
“Yes. But as accurately as I can. Which is why I have been traipsing around your town.”
He looked down at me and nodded. There was another long pause. It looked like he was holding his breath. I held mine, too.
“I think she would want this story out in the world,” he said.
I straightened up in my seat. “What . . . ? What are you saying?”
“She couldn’t tell it when she was alive, but you can tell it now.”
“You want me to keep writing it?” This was the last thing I’d expected to hear.
“But if we do this—if we do this—there are going to be some rules,” he said.
“Sure. Whatever. Yes, I agree,” I gushed.
“If you come back to Willow Bay with me, consider yourself in my legal custody.”
“Huh?” I looked at him and blinked a few times.
“If you come back with me, if I let you back into my town, into my house, consider yourself under arrest. You’re not to go anywhere or do anything without me. You’re not to leave my side. And, when this is over, when you have it all, I still want you to go.”
I started to nod. “Yes. Sure. Whatever you say,” I agreed.
“And I want to be very clear, here: I’m not doing this for you; I’m doing this for her. She never got to tell her story and it was her one regret. This is for her. That’s it! Nothing more.”
I nodded again, even though my heart felt like it was being ripped out by claws. “I understand,” I whispered.
“Are you sure? Because I don’t know if you do understand. Last time I thought you understood, you turned your car around and came straight back into town, like a hurricane.”
“This time, I understand. I get it. I won’t do anything without your permission. I won’t do anything else to cause trouble.”
He huffed loudly and then put his head in his hand. “This is probably a monumentally bad idea. I’ve never met someone who causes so much trouble and chaos wherever she goes. And now I’m bringing you back. I must be mad.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
“Sorry for what?” he asked.
“Everything,” I said quickly, meaning it completely.
He tapped the roof of my car again—harder, this time. “And this thing between us . . .” He cleared his throat. “This thing . . . is not a thing anymore. You understand that too, right?”
Jesus. Final dagger through once-beating heart. “I understand.”
“Good.” And, with that, he walked back to his car and climbed in.
I started my engine and waited for him to pull off. He did, and indicated that I follow. I made a U-turn on the long country road and headed straight back to town for the second time. This time, though, I had a police escort, and I was to consider myself in his custody.
CHAPTER 53
“Wow,” Ash said, looking down at the letters and wiping the tears away that were running down her face.
“Wow,” Emelia, who had just been introduced to me as Ash’s girlfriend, also said. We were all sitting around the table in the kitchen, drinking cups of warm tea and eating biscuits.
Ash looked up at me, wide-eyed, and I wondered if she was going to be as angry with me as her brother was. “Wow,” she simply said again.
