Rory had the family name, but the talent had skipped his generation. He always needed other people to prop him up, people whose ideas he could steal, whose work he could take credit for. That’s where Daniel came in. I don’t think he even cared that Rory was using him. He just wanted me close. He would have done whatever I said.
When I finish my soak and wrap myself in a towel, the house is silent. Sienna must be asleep. I pad downstairs to her nursery. Vivienne has left the window ajar, the sound of waves crashing outside. There is a smell of fresh linen, of island air. I pull the window open wider until the water fills my ears. I close my eyes, try to fill my lungs with it, with the wildness of outside. Daniel liked fucking me in the studio, the heater glowing orange in the darkness, the red light from the darkroom. But I always preferred to be outside, in the wild, up against the earth, the damp walls. I never feel the cold. He loved my body, the wet taste of me, the smell of the woods in my hair. We thought we were smarter than other people, never using phones and email – too easy to trace. But then he started leaving those notes for me, in places he thought no one would look. Of course, he wasn’t counting on Helen.
I pull the window to, check Sienna’s cot. Vivienne has changed the bedding, retied the edges of the bumpers into exactly even bows, dressed Sienna in a freshly laundered sleepsuit. I watch my daughter, fast asleep, flat on her back, arms out at her sides. She always sleeps in this star shape, as if she has been struck by lightning. I gently blow over her beautiful face, her nose, her cheeks, her perfect forehead. She stirs, her eyelashes flickering a little, her breathing whistling. I kiss her head, then leave her to sleep, closing the door behind me.
As it went on, I started to tire of Rory, for the first time. I knew that Daniel would never mess around, like Rory was doing with that bloody secretary. I knew Daniel would do anything for me. There is power in that. And when I found out I had his baby growing inside me, I felt more certain than ever. That we should leave them. Rory and Helen. Start again, with our child.
Daniel wanted to, but there were complications. We needed money, of course. He wasn’t blind. He knew who I was. He knew it mattered to me, the life Rory and I had: he knew he had to give me those things. And he couldn’t. Not without Helen. All his money was tied to her, to the house. He couldn’t get at it. Not unless he got Helen to remortgage. She’d never agree to it. But there were ways around that.
It hadn’t been hard to sort out the passport. You just had to find the right places. Places where you could meet people, get things done. I found a guy, who knew a guy. We met him in the tunnel. Three months later it was done. Helen’s details, my face.
There had to be some kind of building work, to give us some sort of cover. Daniel was able to get most of it started on a promise. People trusted the Haverstock name, had never known them not to come through. We’d never need to actually pay for it – that was the plan. Of course the lender we found was dodgy – who spends ￡3.6 million on building work? But they got their fee, and it seemed to be going through. As soon as the cash landed, we’d get it overseas, plus anything more we could get from Haverstock. Rory was too busy with Lisa to look at the accounts and see that his firm’s cash was draining away, disappearing into thin, Cayman air.
It was starting to come together. We just needed a bit more time. I hadn’t even really worried when Helen announced she was pregnant again, not at first. They’d been through it all so many times. I knew she would lose the baby, just like she had lost all the others. They were doomed, the two of them.
Except that it was different this time. She kept getting bigger and bigger. I thought you said she couldn’t, I kept saying to Daniel. It got so I couldn’t bear it, that fat bump of hers, under my kitchen table, swinging around in my hammock. It was like she was taunting me with it.
There were moments when I was worried. Daniel told me he was all right, that he could do it, he could still leave her. But I saw him wavering, once or twice. Helen told me about the scan, when the little arm flickered blue and black on the screen. How he’d sobbed when the nurse had told him the baby was waving at him. It had felt like a message, he admitted eventually. Like an arm reaching out to him, telling him not to leave. He was starting to love this baby, his son. I was losing control.
Then everything else started going wrong, too. The money for the building work got out of hand. Daniel was having to take more and more from the getaway fund. For fuck’s sake, I kept telling him, we’re not supposed to be actually doing this building work. Can’t you just say it’s stalled? But Helen was asking questions about why nothing ever seemed to progress. And I was impatient, too. I wanted to know when we’d have the three million, when we’d finally be able to leave. Take it out of the company if you need to, I’d said. Rory won’t even notice. Even when he found out all the firm’s cash had moved to the Cayman Islands, Daniel told him it was all just tax planning and he seemed to accept it. But there was only so long you could do stuff like that before it was discovered. I knew the clock was ticking.