‘Christina?’ said Ethan.
‘Sorry,’ said Christina. ‘What were you saying?’
He said, ‘Nothing really. Just that I didn’t pick it. That first day we interviewed him, I knew he was hiding stuff from us, but when he looked at that photo of his wife, I thought, No way did he do it. He loves her.’
‘I never thought he didn’t love her.’ Christina adjusted her engagement ring so the diamond was centred again on her finger.
But she’d always known he’d killed her.
That was the cruel knowledge that she would carry down the aisle on her wedding day along with her bridal bouquet of white roses and blush-pink gardenias: it was possible for both things to be true.
chapter fifty-five
Valentine’s Day
Stan Delaney had always known that women had the power to draw blood with their words. It was his mother’s favourite hobby: to knife the soft stupid defenceless egos of her husband and her son.
Don’t tell the boy he’s going to play at Wimbledon one day, he’s dumb enough to believe it. The two of you are as dumb as dog shit.
Not every day, just most days. Not when she was drunk, when she was sober. That’s when she got nasty.
She’d jab her finger at the side of her head and smile her beautiful smile at her husband and say, The lights are on, but nobody’s home, isn’t that right, my love?
Stan’s father had no arsenal of clever words with which to defend himself. He quailed and recoiled. He smiled stupidly as if his wife had made a joke that was too clever for him. He shut down and went silent. He took it and took it.
He took it and took it until one day he didn’t take it anymore.
Fourteen-year-old Stan ran to his mother where she lay crumpled and still on the floor, and it was good that he did that. He could always tell himself that his first instinctive response had been to run to his mother, to put his body between her and his father, but he also could never forget the first tiny, terrible, traitorous thought that came into his head:
She deserved it.
So faint, so tiny, he sometimes pretended he’d imagined he thought it. It happened so fast, but it also happened so slowly, and it was so long ago, who knew what he’d really thought at that moment? You couldn’t rely on memory. It was an unreliable source.
*
Stan was just like his father. He’d always known it. Not clever and quick like his mother. Not clever and quick like his wife. Not good at school. Thick as a brick. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.
*
At the age of seventy, he felt his wife’s flesh beneath his hands as his father’s colossal rage and humiliation, his pain and hurt, ballooned within his chest and exploded behind his eyes.
chapter fifty-six
Now
‘I think they’re going to arrest my dad any day now,’ said Claire Geer’s ex-husband, his eyes on the early-morning glitter-blue of Sydney Harbour. There was a croissant flake on his lower lip, and something so childlike and anguished about the way he said ‘my dad’。
They sat side by side, with takeaway coffees and almond croissants in white paper bags, on a park bench overlooking the ferry stop where Troy had kissed her for the first time. She wondered if Troy remembered this, if he’d even deliberately suggested this location for that reason. Surely not. He had big, terrible things on his mind right now.
Claire reached over and moved the crumb from his lip with her fingertip. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘We heard the police have CCTV footage from the neighbours across the street.’ He stopped. ‘That apparently shows something . . . very bad. I can’t even imagine what.’
His voice shook.
‘Jesus,’ said Claire. The coffee tasted sour in her mouth. She rested the takeaway cup on the bench next to her and looked at their bare legs, stretched out side by side in front of them. They both wore shorts. Their legs looked like the legs of a couple with a sunshiny weekend ahead of them, not a divorced couple with seedy infidelity behind them and a potential tragedy in front of them, not to mention an awkward procreation arrangement.
Claire Geer was thirty-four years old. She had long curly red hair that everyone commented on, a world history degree that didn’t interest potential employers or anyone really except for her father （he was a history teacher）， and an unexpectedly fulfilling career in the US in health administration, or not that unexpected because she was the kind of girl who made the best of things, whose school reports and job references always mentioned her ‘positive attitude’。 ‘I bet you were a cheerleader,’ her new husband had said when they first met, and of course that wasn’t a thing in Australia and Claire couldn’t even do a cartwheel, but she’d let him categorise her as a sunny, sweet Aussie girl. She was nearly the girl he believed her to be. She was a people-pleaser, as sunny and sweet as an Australian summer. No need to mention the humidity or mosquitoes, the bushfires or hailstorms. She loved Geoff dearly, but not in the helpless, hopeless way she’d loved Troy. The point of history was to learn from it, not repeat it.