The three of us stand together by the cliff edge as Gabe recounts Amanda’s last moments.
‘She said that?’ Max asks.
Gabe nods.
Max takes a moment to absorb that. As his eyes grow misty, a desperate sadness washes over me. For a moment I think he might cry, but instead he takes a long deep breath and says, ‘Then what happened?’
‘She was going to take the USB to the media or the police. I tried to convince her not to do that. I was thinking of what would happen if it got out. From what she said, there was some stuff on there that –’
‘That would have been damaging to you,’ Max says.
‘Yes.’
Despite the fact that I’d suspected this, it’s still a shock to have it confirmed.
‘I tried to grab the USB.’ Gabe inhales slowly. ‘But she held on to it. We struggled and I managed to pull it out of her grasp. The momentum of it sent her flying backwards and she went over the edge.’
Max closes his eyes, and sighs.
‘I didn’t mean for her to fall,’ Gabe says, emotional now. ‘I tried to grab her before she went over. But I . . . I couldn’t.’
My instinct is to believe him, but I’m not sure I trust my instincts anymore. As for whether Max believes him, it’s unclear. When he opens his eyes, his expression is hard to read.
‘Thank you,’ he says finally. ‘Thank you for telling me.’
Max steps forward so quickly, Gabe doesn’t see it coming. As he wraps his arms around Gabe, he closes his eyes and squeezes them tight. He holds Gabe for a moment, then he pulls back. As he does, he locks eyes with Gabe, and something passes between them that I don’t understand. I’m not sure even Gabe understands. But there’s something powerful about it. I can’t look away.
In the near distance, I hear the crunch of feet on gravel, the soft lilt of laughter. Walkers approaching. Gabe and I take a step back, and Max looks out towards the ocean.
‘And this is where it happened?’ Max says. ‘This is where Amanda fell?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
He is very close to the edge, I realise as the walkers appear on the path behind us. I’m about to tell him to move back when he says, ‘She was my soulmate, too.’
Then he steps off the cliff.
86
AMANDA
AFTER
One thing I’ve learned about happy endings is that they don’t always look the way you’d expect. In some cases, a happy ending involves the couple walking off into the sunset together. In others, a happy ending is when, after years of lying to themselves, a couple goes their separate ways. I like to think that’s what will make Gabe and Pip happiest. I just hope they know it too.
I watched Max’s final interaction with Gabe. I travelled through every emotion with him, felt every emotion. The bewilderment at Pip’s lie. The anger at what Gabe had done. The sadness of what he was leaving behind. In the end, what I felt most from Max was love. Love for me. Love for Harry. Love for Gabe. Funny how love can remain, despite everything.
Max had confessed to the money-laundering and murder of Arthur Spriggs on the phone to Detective Conroy. He attributed the guilt and stress of this as the main contributor to my death by suicide. He maintained that Gabe had no involvement in any of it. It was the last chance he’d be able to give his nephew, he reasoned, so he had to take it. For Harry.
He’d left the house before the police arrived to arrest him. Now, they’d never get the chance.
So, here we are. Finally, it makes sense, what I’ve been doing here – stuck in this strange space between life and death. I’ve been waiting for him; the love of my life.
And now it’s time to go.
87
PIPPA
One year later
‘Are they twins?’ the woman at the park asks me, as I tandem-push the girls on the swings. She’s been looking at them for a while, trying to figure it out.
Asha beats me to the answer. ‘No,’ she yells from the swing, her little legs pumping hard. ‘Just sisters. Our birthdays are six months apart.’
‘I’m older,’ Freya chimes in from her own swing.
‘I came out of my first mum’s tummy and then she died,’ Asha adds cheerfully. ‘This is my other mummy.’
I smile and shrug at the woman, who is clearly bamboozled by this abundance of information. After a minute, perhaps just for something to say, she says to the girls, ‘Well, you do look alike.’
‘We look like our dad,’ Freya says. ‘Mummy, can we have a snack?’
I didn’t bring snacks. In the past this would have been unheard of, but lately I’ve been much more relaxed about that kind of organisation. I look at my watch. ‘Daddy will be here soon. Maybe he’ll bring some?’
‘There he is!’ Asha shrieks. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’
I glance to my right just as Gabe leaps the low fence into the playground and jogs towards the girls with his arms outstretched. This is how he always greets them after a few days apart – at a running pace. As if he can’t stand one more second away from them. The girls leap off their swings in unison; the feeling is clearly mutual.
He’s even more tanned than the last time I saw him. He must have spent the past few days surfing around the clock. He seems to have come straight from the beach now, as his hair is wet and pushed back and he’s dressed in board shorts and a white T-shirt and sandals. I notice several women ogling him as the girls leap into his arms and he props them on either hip. They wrap their arms around his neck, their legs around his waist.
‘Hey,’ Gabe says to me.
‘Hey,’ I reply.
It’s strange greeting him like this, even a year on. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel sad about it sometimes. There are many things I miss about being married to him – watching him be a dad to our girls most acutely of all. But I can breathe without him. This is something that has surprised me.
The other surprise is that there are so many things I don’t miss about being married to Gabe. The constant worry. A feeling that the ground could shift under me at any moment. The heightened state of awareness I lived in for years, thinking it was excitement rather than recognising it as anxiety. I still don’t know if Amanda’s death truly was an accident, nor do I know what was on the USB that was so threatening to Gabe. Nor do I have to know. Because Gabe’s problems are no longer mine. Gabe is Gabe. And I am me.
What I do know is that the bipolar disorder wasn’t responsible for his actions. In the past, I’d always found it hard to visualise the line where his illness ended and his free will began. Now I see it. His illness hadn’t lied to me. His illness hadn’t covered up his mistakes and said that it was for my sake. That was all Gabe. Which meant we were done.
The police discovered the connection between Gabe and Amanda, of course, and Gabe was re-questioned about it. Initially, it seemed as if they suspected Gabe of playing a role in Max’s death too, but the walkers had put that idea to rest; they had seen Max step over the edge while Gabe was several paces away.
In the end, it was Max’s own statement to the police before his death, asserting that Amanda had been suicidal, that exonerated Gabe.
Gabe and I were both baffled by this, until a few days after Max’s death, when Gabe received a message from Max’s lawyer explaining their familial connection. The letter included the DNA test Gabe had done when he was fifteen years old.