Well, I’d listened to the first message on the machine, which was from Rob, telling me I might hear bad things about him, telling me not to believe them until he’d had a chance to explain. He didn’t say much more than that, but I could tell by his voice it was serious, and of course the next message was from Fintan, who was more informative, more distraught.
Fintan had never had a strong father figure in his life, or a mother figure either, for that matter. He’d looked up to Rob in a lot of ways, and to me too. I could always expect a call from him every few weeks. This wasn’t that, of course. This was him calling to tell me that my ex-husband had been taking advantage of those poor girls from the charity. And obviously we were separated, but it still hurt. And I could tell how scared Fintan was, so I was calling him back when I heard a car outside. I hung up and went out to see Rob parking up. We didn’t have plans, we hadn’t properly spoken in years. He got out of the car looking like an old man and started shouting, “There’s something you need to know,” just like that, not even a hello. I told him I’d already heard, but he shook his head and said, “No, this is important. About Zoe, a break in the case.” I told him to go home and sleep it off, but he went on, some stupid story about that stupid tape. How it supposedly changed everything and now I had to do something for him. I started to walk back inside, but he grabbed me—he’d never grabbed me before, he looked insane, I could smell drink—and he said if I couldn’t do it for him, then I could do it for Zoe. He said no one would listen to him or take his calls because of the allegations. He said he’d been smeared, but I could still go to the press, to the police, and get the case moving. I said, “Stop,” but he kept on, so I said it again and again and again, until I was screaming in his face.
I said, “You did this to us, Rob, all of it. You filled Zoe’s head with your dreams. You made her hate herself for what she wasn’t. You set her on the path to that pig Anderson. You turned her and her sister against each other and forced me to choose between them. If Zoe’s got a killer, it’s you.” He let go and I walked back inside and called Kim. I didn’t look back, and I never have since. I heard the car start a few minutes later and I’ve never seen Rob again. I’m afraid I don’t expect to.
SARAH MANNING:
Rob Nolan called me repeatedly, pressing me to use my contacts, to get the police to arrest Kim and Andrew. I told him I wasn’t working for the police anymore, and anyway, it wasn’t that simple, but he wasn’t listening. Once I got off the phone, I thought about what I said to you before, about who benefits from all this. An affair gives Andrew and Kim a powerful motive to push Zoe aside, no doubt, but with the allegations against him in the press, it was Rob Nolan who really stood to gain from that video’s release. I mean, put it this way. His bad behavior wasn’t the big story that day, was it?
CHLOE MATTHEWS:
When I saw the story about the girls from the Nolan Foundation, it reminded me of that day on set of the reconstruction. Somehow, all the girls who came forward really resembled Zoe, and that day when Rob kissed me, I’d been fully dressed up as her. Yeah. Unnerving. I felt like no one was really paying attention to that, though. It all got overshadowed by the video, Andrew and Kim.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Well, nothing I say about this is going to sound particularly impressive. I don’t want to change minds or justify what I did. It wasn’t good, I don’t like myself for doing it, and I don’t forgive myself either. All I can do is tell you the truth that, yes, I slept with Andrew while he was seeing Zoe. Yes, I wore my sister’s clothes, and yes, I asked him to call me by her name. And people should know that I was the one instigating, not him. I’d fallen for Andrew when we first met. I’d imagined a future, but I’d managed to put all that away and forget about it before what happened to me inside the van. After it, though, I was a mess. We recorded the video, like, a week or so later. You can tell because I’ve still got blond hair in it, I never have since. Zoe wasn’t speaking to me. Now I know that’s probably because Andrew said my name while they were together and probably because she was busy spending another man’s money, but at the time, I didn’t.
At the time, I thought we’d lost each other.
Stupid as it sounds, I felt the same thing when those men let me go and I was thrown out of that van. I never go a day without feeling grateful. I was grateful then, but at the same time, it was another rejection. It’s fucked up, but I convinced myself they’d wanted Zoe instead of me, just like everyone else. And afterward, I felt like I’d almost died because I hadn’t developed my own looks or personality. I started drinking too much, I stopped sleeping, and I just wanted to overwrite this shit thing inside my head with something I actually wanted. I wanted Andrew. I saw the way he looked at me, and I thought, Why not? Why shouldn’t I have something for myself for a change? And somehow, in all that, it became important that he call me Zoe. There was a part of me that had always wondered about being her: would things feel different, feel better? I thought if I could make myself look enough like her and sound enough like her and be enough like her, then it might feel like we weren’t doing anything wrong. Maybe it would solve all my problems? Obviously, it didn’t. Afterward, I think we both felt horrible, Andrew and me. Then as we were getting dressed, Alex walked in on us. She’d told me she was out for the day. The flat was meant to be empty. We froze.
SAM LIMMOND:
I didn’t see the story when it broke, but someone pointed it out to me a few days later. It made sense of what Al said at the time, about walking in on them doing something. She’d thought Zoe was acting strange, and she came away thinking that Andrew was abusing her or something. I guess it was actually just Kim shitting it, thinking they’d both been rumbled.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Andrew saved my life. He put his arm around my shoulder and pretended I was Zoe. I was dressed like her and just about held it together for a few minutes until we could get out of there. Alex was no idiot, she could see something was wrong. I was walking on eggshells for days after, but either she never knew or she never said anything.
The final part of my confession is that I didn’t tell Andrew I’d filmed us together. I knew it could never happen again, so if it worked, if it made me feel good, I wanted to be able to relive it. And I wanted to know once and for all if I really was so different from my sister or if it was all in my head. When I did watch the video back, I hated the person on the screen, I hated myself, and it was probably the next day that I cut all my hair off and dyed it black. I realized I needed to let all this second-best shit go and become my own thing. In a fucked-up, roundabout way, it really helped me come through one of the worst times of my life.