The Guilt Trip(71)

If he thinks she’s about to feel sorry for him, he’s got another think coming. “So, you’re saying she’s deluded? That everything she’s just said is garbage?”

“Yes!” says Jack. “Yes, she’s got it in her head that something’s going on, but you know what she’s like, Rach. She’s mad.”

She wonders if he thinks repeating himself will make her believe him more. It doesn’t. It just makes him sound as if he’s clutching at straws.

“So this is why you didn’t want Will to marry her?” says Rachel.

Jack nods.

“So, what about Rick?” she asks.

He looks at her with a perplexed expression.

“The man you said she’d had an affair with,” says Rachel, having to jog his memory yet again. “Does he even exist?”

Jack shakes his head. “No, I just needed to give you a reason for why I hated her so much, but without having to admit that I’d been stupid enough to kiss her.”

“You said I’d be destroyed,” says Rachel. “I heard you.”

“Yes, because that’s the kind of thing I have to say, to keep her from losing her mind and going on the rampage. I really don’t know what she’s capable of, and right now it’s a balancing act, at least until we get through this and are back at home. I don’t want Will to know that I kissed her, even though it was before they even met.”

It’s a long shot, but Rachel wonders if there’s any way he could be telling the truth. Every single seed of doubt that has been sown into her mind has been planted by Ali. From having to retrace her steps to find her passport, to her being in their room, to inviting herself on Jack’s run, to finding his watch in her drawer. It’s all been one-way, with Jack having played no part in any of it.

And she does know what Ali’s like; she’s a liar and a fantasist who will stop at nothing to get what she wants, even if it means taking down the people she supposedly loves in the process. Look what she did to her own mother. God knows what led to the horrific events of that night, but Rachel can bet her bottom dollar that it was Ali’s selfishness that has resulted in Maria being bound to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Nothing is as it seems in Ali’s world, so why would Rachel think she and Jack could escape the storm that seems to prevail wherever she is?

“You have to believe me,” Jack pleads, as if reading her mind. “You know what she’s like. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. She can’t stop herself. The woman is a pathological liar.”

Rachel laughs at herself for wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. She knows that if any of her friends were in this position, she’d scream at them to “wake up!” But somehow, when it’s your own marriage on the line, it’s not so clear cut.

“That’s what I’ve been dealing with,” he says. “Haven’t you ever asked yourself why she’s no longer working for me?”

“She just said that she had to leave because it all got too much,” says Rachel, reading between the lines.

“I got her fired,” says Jack bitterly.

“You fired her?” says Rachel, shocked at the admission. “You said she gave her notice in when she was offered the new job.”

Jack shakes his head.

“What grounds did you fire her on?” asks Rachel.

Jack sighs heavily. “She just wouldn’t leave me alone, but I could hardly go to the boss and complain that I was being sexually harassed by a woman, could I? He’d laugh me out of his office.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asks Rachel.

Jack looks down as the advancing tide fills his footsteps as quickly as he leaves them. “Because you’d probably do the same,” he says.

Rachel likes to think she wouldn’t, but without knowing what she now knows, she has to admit that she might have.

“So … so what did you do?” she asks.

“I had to do some digging,” he says. “To see if I could find something, anything, that meant I could fast-track her out of the door, and out of my life.”

“So, what did you find that proved conclusive enough to fire her?” asks Rachel.

“She lied,” says Jack, bluntly.

Rachel tuts and shakes her head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“She put down a fictitious job on her résumé,” Jack goes on. “I was determined to get something on her that would stick, and I did.”

“How did you find out it was fake?”

“I just called all the employers she said she’d worked for and they all stacked up, except one, who said they’d never heard of her.”

“So, there’s a gap in her career that’s unaccounted for?” asks Rachel.

“Two years,” says Jack.

“What could she have been doing that meant she had to make something up?”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Jack. “It gave me enough to dismiss her on the grounds of obtaining employment fraudulently.”

“But don’t you want to know why?” muses Rachel, feeling that they might be on to something; something big that could be the death knell for Ali’s hours-old marriage. “Aren’t you intrigued to find out what she’s hiding? Because she’s definitely hiding something.”