The First Mistake(96)

‘Nathan, you’re . . . you’re not making any sense,’ stutters Alice, feeling as if she’s being suffocated by his words. ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’

‘A million pounds for Japan is what I’m due. It’s rightfully mine. It’s what I should have had all along.’

‘Why?’ asks Alice.

‘Because Tom and I are cut from the same cloth.’

Alice shakes her head. ‘You couldn’t be further from the man he was if you tried. You’re nothing alike.’

Nathan throws his head back and laughs. ‘And yet so similar, don’t you think?’ He waits for Alice to take the bait, but she looks at him, dumbfounded.

‘Come on,’ he exclaims. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you how similar we are? How our profiles match in certain lights? How our mannerisms mirror each other?’

Alice can’t separate her lucid thoughts from the living nightmare she finds herself in. She thinks back to seeing Nathan walk into the garden of the psychiatric unit; feels his warm eyes taking in his surroundings before they settle on her. They’d seemed gentle, familiar. Had she been drawn to him because there was a comforting resemblance to the man she’d just lost?

Had the way he sometimes ran his hand through his hair reminded her of someone else? Had his slightly lopsided grin subconsciously infiltrated her brain, masquerading as someone else’s? Had she fallen for him because he seemed so much like Tom?

‘Wh-what are you saying?’ falters Alice.

‘I’m Tom’s brother,’ says Nathan bluntly.





46


The floor feels like it’s falling away as Alice’s legs buckle beneath her. She lands heavily and tries to focus but everything around her is spinning.

‘Alice!’ she hears a woman cry, but it sounds muffled and a long way away. She turns towards the direction she thinks it came from, though she can only see the blurred outline of two bodies close together.

‘Y-you . . . you can’t be,’ she croaks, her mouth feeling like it’s filled with cotton wool. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Well, you’re looking at the impossible,’ he says.

‘You’re Daniel?’ she asks, unable to process the question, let alone the answer.

‘Oh, so he did talk about me,’ says Nathan acerbically.

Alice can barely speak, the words that are circling in her head are banging against the sides of her skull.

‘When did you know?’ she asks. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were when you found out who I was?’

‘Oh darling, I’ve always known who you were,’ he says patronizingly. ‘As soon as Tom died, I came looking for you.’

‘No, no,’ says Alice, shaking her head, refusing to believe what he’s saying. She thinks back to that day in the unit. He was there to see someone else. He was there by chance. ‘No, you’re lying. You came to see someone else.’

‘I came there to see you,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be desperate by then, and you were. You would have clung to anyone who showed you sympathy.’

Alice is still shaking her head vehemently.

‘That was the easy bit,’ Nathan goes on. ‘If I’d known I’d have to wait all this time to get the money, well . . .’

‘But . . . but why?’ Alice manages.

Nathan’s face clouds over. ‘Did you honestly think it was fair that the inheritance from my parents, our parents, should all go to Tom?’

The Evans family had split into two uneven factions before Alice and Tom had even met. It seemed they’d done all they could to help their volatile and capricious son and brother. And by the time Alice was welcomed into the family fold, there was little to show for Daniel’s existence aside from a few childhood photos on the mantelpiece.

Alice remembers them being the ironic backdrop as her and Tom, along with his heartbroken parents, sat in their dining room, stunned by the news that their youngest son had been convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison. His mother’s face was crumpled with grief, as if she’d lost the only child she’d ever had, and his father’s stiff upper lip was close to collapsing.

‘I don’t want that boy’s name mentioned ever again,’ he’d said. ‘He’s been trouble ever since he was sixteen and there’s no part of me that’s surprised to find him in the position he is now. It’s as if this was always going to be his path. Well, long may he walk it, but he’ll be doing it on his own.’ He’d put his arm around his wife and she fell into him, her agony unlike anything Alice had ever seen.

‘You can’t just freeze him out,’ Tom had said softly. ‘He’ll always be your son.’

‘He’s no son of mine,’ his dad had said.

‘They disowned you,’ Alice says to the man she no longer knows. Her eyes regain their focus as she stares at him. There is no part of him that she recognizes as her husband. ‘They wanted nothing more to do with you.’

‘But Tom would have put them up to that. I know he would.’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ says Alice. ‘He tried to do the exact opposite, but your parents wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘I only have your word to take for that.’