How to Kill Men and Get Away With It(72)

‘Hello,’ she says, in a voice a few octaves higher than I am expecting. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I’m here to visit Adam Edwards?’

‘Ah yes, lovely Adam.’ She stands up. ‘Let me show you through to his room.’

I follow her down a carpeted corridor.

‘You’ve not been here before, have you?’ she asks me, not curiously, just making conversation.

‘No … I … well, no. I’m a bit ashamed actually.’

‘Okay, well just prepare yourself in that case. He’s worked with some of the best physios in the country, but he’s still unable to do more than communicate by blinking.’ She gives me a sad smile and pats my arm. ‘Do you know him well?’

‘Oh.’ I don’t know what to say. ‘We were close friends.’

She opens the door of a room and can’t help but take a sharp intake of breath. She gives me another pat on the arm, probably trying to reassure me.

‘Look, Adam, you’ve got a visitor. That’s the second one this week. Isn’t that nice?’ She turns back to me. Her name badge says Laura. ‘I’ll make you a cuppa, shall I?’

I nod, grateful, and watch as she turns, leaving me alone with the most painful piece of my past.

And I’m not prepared for this. My breath catches in my lungs every time I try to inhale.

Adam is propped up in a chair, held up by a kind of harness thing. I haven’t seen him since that night at his house. The night I boiled with white-hot fury after seeing those messages from Saskia.

It’s been almost eight years since I last saw this man, this man whom I was once so completely besotted with. He is still beautiful, thinner, but it just has the effect of making his cheekbones look even more incredible. His eyes haven’t changed, those dark pools that I used to think I’d be able to drown in. But as they fix on me, standing in the doorway, the only expression they show is terror. He has a tracheotomy tube in his neck to breathe, and another in his stomach, which I assume is how he’s fed.

I did this to him.

‘Hey, Adam,’ I say, edging closely towards his chair. He starts blinking frantically, but it’s only me and him now and I don’t know what he’s trying to say. ‘Don’t be scared,’ I speak softly. ‘I’m not here to hurt you.’

I sit myself down on the bed, making sure that I’m in his eyeline. We stare at each other for what feels like several lifetimes. A rivulet of saliva trickles from the side of his mouth. I look around the room and see a box of tissues on a table next to his bed. I take one and gingerly wipe the drool from his face. He doesn’t flinch – because he can’t – but he closes his eyes, trying to block me out. ‘Adam. I’m so sorry.’

His eyes stay closed and I wonder if he’s also thinking about the last time we saw each other.

I was furious, full of a vicious anger after seeing the messages between him and Saskia. He’d been lying to me for months. Lying, even when I was trying my best to look after him while he was in the depths of depression. I’d dedicated so much time and so much of myself into loving him. The humiliation stung as much as the anger and – when he came back downstairs – ready for our night out, I flipped. I’d already grabbed one of his fucking awful fibreglass trophies – some kind of best debut novel award – as he sat down on the sofa, waiting for me to bring the drink I’d pretended to be fixing, I swung it at the back of his head. There was a crunch as the bone at the base of his skull caved. He howled from the pain and stumbled forward, trying to catch hold of the arm of the sofa. But his brain was no longer sending the right signals to the right body parts and he ended up sliding down until he was slumped against it, his eyes boring into mine, asking me why.

‘Fucking Saskia?’ I’d dropped down to my knees so I was level with him. ‘Fucking. Saskia.’ He kept on staring at me. ‘Well, at least say something. At least try to deny it.’

But no words came. Only a trickle of blood from his mouth. I stood up and backed away, horrified. Panicking, I grabbed my bag, shoved the murder weapon in it. I frantically looked around the room, also grabbed his laptop and a couple of other expensive-looking bits – some headphones I think – and his phone, which he’d dropped during his descent to the floor, and I fled.

I ran out into the street, thinking I should call an ambulance or something.

I meant to.

I wanted to but, in all honesty, I thought I’d killed him. I thought it was too late.

It was Saskia who found him, of course. She’d probably started to panic that he’d changed his mind and wasn’t going to break my heart and leave me after all.

But he wasn’t dead.

I didn’t visit him in hospital while surgeons tried to put his brilliant and broken brain back together. Instead, I read about it online. The police assumed it was a robbery gone wrong, that Adam had disturbed them mid-looting. He’d been attacked and left for dead. But they hadn’t hit him hard enough to quite kill him. The blow to the head had caused a massive stroke, which was what had left him like … this.

It was sometime later when I read about him again – although I thought about him constantly. An article in a Sunday supplement. A stylised shoot at Saskia’s home. It turned out that his brilliant brain wasn’t damaged at all. It was fine. But he couldn’t walk or talk. Or write. In fact, all he could do was blink and think. And I knew how badly those periods of ‘just thinking’ got for him. I remember thinking that, for someone like Adam, this was worse than death. All that creativity and brilliance combined with all that darkness and pain. And now without any outlet for it at all. He’d once told me, during a particularly dark depression, that his head was the scariest place to be.