It did not take the police long to uncover the extent of Dominic’s deceptions. My parents and Bea showed them the emails and texts he had been sending from my accounts, pretending to be me. There were messages to Bea smoothing over the conflict we’d had before I left Bristol, telling her what he knew she wanted to hear: that I was looking for a job, that Dominic had opened up to me about his relationship with Daisy, that our marriage had turned a corner. Messages to my parents describing how busy I was, visiting nurseries, getting the house sorted, attending job interviews. Messages asking them to look after Leo for just a few more days, each message extending the time I would be apart from him little by little so as to arouse the least suspicion. Messages obfuscating the requests for our address, continuing the pretence that we wanted it to be a surprise for them too, that we didn’t want to share it with them until the day they’d be visiting. Every message innocuous in itself, the collective impact only visible once you surveyed them from a distance, like a pointillist painting whose image becomes clear only when you step back from the canvas. And yet, both Bea and my parents had been worried, had sensed something was wrong; but while I seemed to be insisting everything was fine, there was little they could do.
It took a few days to pluck up the courage, but when I read Dominic’s messages to my family, masquerading as me, it was like someone stepping over my grave. The language was so familiar, the tone so authentic. I could hear myself in every single one and yet I knew I hadn’t written a word of them. It was like seeing myself in a photograph at a scene for which I knew I hadn’t been present.
The police have since told me it is likely Dominic had been reading my private correspondence for months, that the reason he’d been able to mimic me so accurately was that he’d been snooping through my accounts for some time, until my writing style was almost as familiar to him as his own.
I have thought so much about it since: Dominic reading my private texts and emails without my knowledge. It has left me with a sense of violation, knowing that the liminal space between us – between myself as an individual and myself as a wife – has been breached.
The police are also, they have told me, reinvestigating the circumstances of the car crash. Something Dominic said in one of his police interviews – they wouldn’t tell me what – aroused suspicion that the accident deserved re-examination. But a part of my brain won’t allow me to think about that, is not yet ready to brave the implications of what it would mean.
A chocolate Labrador runs up to the buggy, tail wagging, and Leo squeals with glee. He leans forward, strokes its fur. ‘Doh doh.’
‘That’s right, it’s a doggie.’
We stroke the dog and I’m reminded of something Dominic told me when I first came home from hospital: about being on Hampstead Heath on Christmas morning, a cocker spaniel scampering around my ankles. It was, I realise, just another of his lies. I had never been to Hampstead Heath before Dominic took me there the weekend after the accident.
Over the past five months, I’ve come to realise that so much of what Dominic told me were pure fabrications. Not just the seismic lies: the deaths of my parents and our son, my job as a librarian, our twelve-year marriage, our life in London. Equally insidious were the subtle, day-to-day lies: my supposed love of nineteenth-century novels, Wagner operas, Wes Anderson films. My affinity for the sculpture gallery at the V&A, a building I had never even visited before Dominic sent me there on a fool’s errand. My choice of chicken salads over plates of pasta. Each twisted preference designed to destabilise my sense of identity, to shape me into the wife he wanted me to be: compliant and isolated, uncertain and dependent. A wife who mirrored his interests, as though he were Pygmalion and I Galatea, carved from ivory, every sweep of my desires a product of his creation. A woman who didn’t dare leave the house for too long in case I missed his calls: those regular daily interactions designed to keep me at home, entirely reliant on him. I remember all those mornings desperately trying to read Our Mutual Friend and the crushing sense of failure when I couldn’t seem to enjoy it. I remember the anxiety that I had lost a part of myself in the crash, the part of me that had loved Dickens and Trollope, Strauss and Mahler. And yet, all along, that version of me had never existed.
There are still mornings when I wake up with a sense of horror that someone could be so single-minded, so manipulative, so pathologically controlling. Days when I cannot imagine what he thought the end point might be.
With the help of my parents and Bea, I am slowly beginning to rebuild myself, to rediscover the person I was before. The person I really am. Fragments of memory began to reappear soon after I returned to Bristol: familiar people and places were like daily sparks, igniting fresh memories. Sometimes, just little things: the waitress in the café where I always met Bea for coffee, the church hall where I took Leo for baby sensory classes, the swing seat in my parents’ back garden. Other times, the memories have been more profound. On Leo’s first birthday in early December, I suddenly remembered giving birth to him, the memory so visceral it was like being handed back an absent limb.
My therapist, Lena, has said that regaining my memory is a bit like gluing back together the broken pieces of a china cup: there may always be the odd hairline fracture if you look closely enough, but with sufficient care in the reconstruction, those chinks should be barely visible to the naked eye.
‘Bye bye, doh doh.’ Leo waves to the dog’s swishing tail as it tires of being petted by a fourteen-month-old with gloved fingers.
I pull Leo’s hat down where it has risen over his ears, defend him against the winter breeze nipping his skin. He smiles at me with such guilelessness that the muscles in my chest tighten with a determination to protect him.
Dominic is not allowed to see either Leo or me. He was interviewed four times by the police before being charged with controlling and coercive behaviour, and offences under the Computer Misuse Act. The first magistrates’ hearing is next week and we do not know yet whether he plans to plead guilty or not, whether he hopes to diminish the possibility of a full jury trial by acknowledging what he has done. But in the meantime, his bail conditions stipulate that he cannot contact me, cannot come within a two-mile radius of my parents’ house. A panic alarm has been installed by the front door, fitted by the police after they relayed a set of statistics to me: how two women every week in the UK are killed by a partner or ex-partner. How over half of all women killed are the victims of someone with whom they’ve been in a relationship. They are the kind of statistics I wish I could unlearn but know I never can.
And yet, even with these precautions in place, I still worry about what might happen in the future. Whether, if Dominic is not found guilty, he will be back in our lives. I have studied the conviction rates, know the rarity of success. I have read the newspaper articles about men who escape justice, again and again, only to seek out new victims, abuse more women. I have spent hours scouring the forums of domestic abuse charities, horrified by the familiarity of the stories people share.
Peering over the handlebar of the buggy as I push onwards through the park, I look at Leo’s face: at his dark hair, arresting grey-green eyes, dimpled chin. It is impossible not to see the echo of Dominic in him. More than an echo. An imprint, as if someone has taken the mould they used for Dominic and created a smaller version in the shape of his son. It is hard, sometimes, to look at Leo and not be reminded of all that has happened, all that could still happen. It is hard not to fear what Leo may have inherited from his father beyond their physical resemblance: something malign, intangible, unseen. The desire to control, to domineer, to intimidate.