Silent Child(83)

I thought of my nightmares after Aiden was taken. I thought of that image forever haunting me: Aiden floating beneath the tumultuous waters. Aiden in the still, calm part of the river with his lips blue and his skin white.

Jake’s fingers gripped the knife even tighter. He lifted his arms in animation as his excitement grew. “This was my chance. I knew what it would do to you, and I knew I had to do it. The slate had to be wiped clean, Emma. I needed you to be that broken girl again, the one I fell in love with. You’d become too assured in your role as a mother. I saw how you played with Aiden in the park, and I saw you slowly becoming a family with Rob. You even had the friends I saw us having, Josie and Hugh. It wasn’t fair. It was all supposed to be for us.”

“What did you do?” I whispered.

“I pushed him,” he said.

“You did what?”

“I pushed him into the river.”

I turned to my son. He was blank faced and staring right at me. There were no answers in that face, only more questions. I reached out to touch him, before retracting my hand. Then I moved to face my husband.

“What happened after you pushed him into the river?” I asked.

Jake shrugged. “I went back to the school.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s because you’re stupid. You’ve accused me of kidnapping your son, but why would I do that? I never wanted him, I wanted you. Aiden just gets in the way. With him around you have no time for me, or the baby growing inside you. He’s an obstacle to me.”

“Who took him? Tell me. I need to know,” I begged.

Jake just laughed. “I don’t know. Some chancer who was nearby and saw a kid drowning in the river. They must have fished him out and thanked God because it meant they could keep him in their sick little dungeon or whatever.” He was so casual and callous that my stomach lurched and I tasted bile at the back of my throat.

“It wasn’t you,” I whispered.

“Of course not,” he said. “I wanted him out of the way, like I wanted your parents out of the way.”

I threw my head into my hands. I’d slept in the same bed as the man who had tried to kill my son, and who had also succeeded in killing my parents. My skin was full of ants. My body was cold, down to the core. I shivered, but I had to keep my head. I had to try and stay in control. I had to put all of that aside and focus on saving the lives of the people in the house.

“You said you were going to finish what you started ten years ago,” I said, lifting my face to meet his gaze. “What did that mean?”

The laughter faded from Jake’s face and instead his eyes glassed over like marbles. Without his usual amiable grin, he was frightening. He angled his chin down, and dark shadows flooded his eyes, turning him into the cliché movie villain. But this wasn’t your average bad guy. He was my husband and the father of my child. He was the man who rubbed my feet at the end of the day and brought me a hot chocolate when I had my period. He was the man who laughed at my jokes and teased me when I mispronounced a word. He held my hand through horror movies and chatted to my friends. He listened to me when I talked about my past and he was a shoulder to cry on when it was the anniversary of my parents’ death. He had been everything to me, but all of it had been a complete and utter lie.

“You’ve ruined it all, Emma.” The cold edge of his voice was like a razor blade running down my spine. “I can’t fix it anymore. I can’t break you into the woman I need you to be. It’s too late for us all. I’m going to finish what I started ten years ago, and then I’m going to move on to you.” He took a step forward with the knife gripped in his hand.





42


There’s a kind of strength in weakness that comes from hitting the absolute lowest you can go. There have been many moments in my life where I’ve hit such depths that I thought I would never claw my way out of them. Jake talked about owning the darkness within him and taking what he wanted, but he wasn’t the only one in that room experienced with dealing with darkness. When I look back on my time in that room, I realise that Jake had made the same mistake over and over in his life, and that was underestimating me.

Because he was wrong about me.

I wasn’t a broken bird always coming back for a beating. I wasn’t someone he could break over and over again without a fight. I’d never fought because he’d never given me anything to fight. He’d taken the best of my life and tossed it away but he’d never shown me what I needed to be shown. He’d never revealed himself for the person he really was. But now that he had, I could fight him. I finally had a physical manifestation of all the pain I’d suffered for the last decade.

When he rushed at Aiden with the knife, I knew what I had to do.

As Aiden cowered away from Jake, I threw myself between them, holding my hands up to shield my son. Jake’s knife caught the palm of my hand and I screamed as it tore through my skin. But I didn’t give up. I pushed against the knife with one hand, my skin sliced open by the blade, and reached up to hit Jake on the nose with the other.

The blow caught Jake off guard and he staggered back, giving me a slight reprieve. My injured hand was covered in blood but I couldn’t let my eyes linger on the wound, because Jake was readying himself for another attack.

“I was going to kill you last,” Jake said. “But this works too.”