Then an envelope with Adam’s name on it slides beneath the door.
Adam
I pick up the envelope, and Amelia tries to snatch it from my hands.
‘It’s addressed to me,’ I say holding it out of reach. Then I walk into the kitchen, slide into one of the old church pews beside the wooden table, and open the letter. There are several pages all penned by Robin. I might not be able to recognise faces, but I’d know her handwriting anywhere. Amelia sits down opposite. I try to keep my face neutral as I read, but the words don’t make that easy.
How well do you really know your wife?
I lift the letter higher, so that she can’t see it.
It was no coincidence that Amelia started working at Battersea…
When I reach the second page, my fingers start to tremble.
Your paths had crossed almost thirty years earlier, but you couldn’t recognise her face.
‘What does it say?’ Amelia asks, reaching for my hand across the table.
I pull back. Don’t answer.
The police questioned her about a hit-and-run…
I feel sick.
The car they caught her in was the car that killed your mother.
It’s hard not to react when you read something like that about the woman you are married to. Amelia seems to sense that something is very wrong.
‘What is it? What has she written?’ she asks, leaning closer.
‘Some of it is difficult to read,’ I reply. It isn’t a lie.
When I get to the end, I fold the letter and put it in my pocket. Then I get up and walk over to one of the stained-glass windows. I can’t look at Amelia’s face now. I’m scared of what I might see.
I knew this affair was a mistake from the start, but sometimes small mistakes lead to bigger ones. Robin wasn’t just my wife, she was the love of my life and my best friend. I didn’t just break her heart when I cheated on her, I broke my own. The errors of judgement lined up like dominoes after that, each knocking the next one down. When people talk about falling in love, I think they are right, it is like falling, and sometimes when we fall we can get very badly hurt. It was never really love with Amelia. It was a simple case of lust in love’s clothing. Until I made matters even worse than they already were, by marrying a woman I had nothing in common with.
Maybe it was a mid-life crisis? I remember feeling so down about my work. My career had stalled, I couldn’t write and I felt… empty. My wife seemed just as disappointed with me as I was with myself. But this beautiful new stranger acted like the sun shone out of my middle-aged arse, and I fell for it. She came on to me, and I was too flattered and pathetic to say no. My ego had an affair and my mind was too muddled to know it should never have been anything more than that. It should never have happened at all.
It was Amelia who wanted to move in as soon as Robin moved out.
She found the engagement ring that Robin had left behind, and dropped endless hints about how much she wanted to wear it, even though it was never a perfect fit for her finger. Always too tight. She bullied me into signing the divorce papers as soon as they arrived, and she booked the register office – the same one where Robin and I got married of all places – for a quickie wedding without even telling me first. The woman delivered emotional blackmail like a conscientious postman. A second marriage was the ransom I should never have paid.
Something felt wrong, right from the start, but I thought I was doing what was best for everyone involved: cutting off the old loose threads that can cause a new relationship to unravel. I was too stupid or vain to pay attention to the alarm bells sounding inside my head. The ones we all hear when we’re about to make a mistake, but sometimes pretend not to.
I never stopped loving Robin and I’ve never stopped missing her. I’d actually already spoken to my solicitor about my options if I wanted to leave Amelia. But this letter. The idea that she was in the car that killed my mother, then spent all these years spying on us, trying to get close to me… that can’t be real. Surely Amelia isn’t capable of that?
‘Have you ever been in trouble with the police?’ I ask, still staring out the window.
‘What was in that letter, Adam?’
‘Did you used to live on the same council estate as me as a teenager? Go to the same school?’
She doesn’t answer and I feel sick.
The memory of that night comes back to haunt me, as it has so many times before. I remember the rain, almost as if it were a character in the story. As if it played a part, which I suppose it did. The sound of watery bullets hitting the tarmac is ingrained in my mind as a result. The road my mother was walking along was like a snaking black river, reflecting the night sky and the eerie glow of streetlights, like urban man-made stars. It all happened too fast and was over so soon. The horrifying screech of tyres, my mother’s scream, the awful thud of her body hitting the windscreen, and the sound of the car driving over the dog. The noise of the crash was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. It only lasted a few seconds, but seemed to play on repeat. Then there was only a terrible silence. It was as though the horror I had seen turned the volume of my life down to zero.