The Soulmate(33)

He knew the buttons to press, the things I needed to hear. It was cruel and comforting and humiliating in its mind-fuckery.

‘Let me prove how sorry I am by getting help and becoming the man you deserve. The father Freya deserves.’

It’s shocking how easy I made it for him. How, despite what he had told me, I actually felt hopeful. He wanted to get help. He needed it. And so, at what should have been the lowest point of my life, I felt my heart lift. This was what I’d been waiting for.

I made an appointment for him within the hour.





29


AMANDA

AFTER



I am starting to wonder where I am. It’s not heaven or hell. Not even purgatory. I’m still on earth, but removed; everywhere and nowhere at once.

It makes me question . . . what’s next? Or is this it? Will I spend eternity like this, suspended between life and death? I wonder if it’s to do with the suddenness of my demise. The unexpectedness of it. Perhaps someone upstairs is scrambling to complete the paperwork? Or maybe I won’t be going upstairs at all.

I am, after all, no angel.



Max is in my wardrobe again. It’s the second time he’s been in there today. I’m not sure what he’s doing, and judging by his uncertainty he feels the same. He opens a drawer, pushes my underwear to one side, closes it again. What does he expect to find? Then he just steps back and stares at my dresses, my jeans, my neatly folded T-shirts. He’s already looked through the photographs on my camera and those I saved to my computer recently. Clearly he hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

He hasn’t been in the office all week. Not surprising, some might say, given his wife’s unexpected death, but it is surprising to me. The office, after all, is Max’s church. His yoga studio. His place of work, but also his place of equilibrium. In the past twenty-five years, the only time I’ve seen him spend this long away from it was when we were on holiday and after his hernia operation. I wonder if I should be flattered.

It’s the visit from the police that’s got him rattled. The young officers, a man and a woman, arrived a couple of hours ago with my wallet and jewellery and other personal effects. They told Max my car would need to be collected, and they provided its location.

‘It’s on a small residential street, but the residents have been informed that it is there, so there’s no rush. And there are car collection services you can use, if you don’t want to do it yourself.’

They handed him my keys, a heavy bunch made heavier by the brass penguin-shaped keyring I’d added to make it easier to find them in my handbag. Max always laughed at my keys.

‘One day the ignition will fall out under the weight of those things,’ he said, even though it had been years since I’d driven a car that required me to insert keys.

As he took them from the police, he turned them over in his hand. It must have looked like he was examining them with sadness, but I knew better.

‘Where is the USB?’ he asked.

The keyring USB had been a present from Max. It was silver and engraved with my name and had enough capacity to store all of my photographs. USBs had always eluded me; they were impossible to find when you needed them and then lost a moment later. How many times had I strode around the house, asking Max where my USB was?

‘Now you’ll always know where to find it,’ he’d said when he gave it to me. ‘And everyone will know it’s yours.’

The ladies at tennis had laughed at the gift. That’s what you get for your birthday when you’re married to Max Cameron? I understood the joke. It was funny. But it was also perfect. I never took it off my keyring, unless it was plugged in to my computer.

‘This is all we were given,’ the young police officer said. ‘But I’ll make a note to ask about it.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ Max said.

After they left, he’d gone to my study and opened my computer again. Apart from the photographs, which he’d already seen, there wasn’t much there that would interest him. Mostly I used my computer to edit photographs, google handbags and search for exercise workouts. He’d tired of it quickly and that’s when he went to the wardrobe. Eventually he tired of that too.

‘Why did you take the USB with you to jump off a cliff?’ he says out loud.

In the master bedroom, he sits on the bed and picks up the framed photograph on my bedside table. It had been taken the Christmas before last. We’d spent it in the Whitsundays on a yacht, just the two of us. In the picture, I am wearing a red kaftan and we are each holding a glass of champagne. He closes his eyes for a moment and rests the photograph against his chest.

He returns the photograph to the bedside table and then, as if on a whim, he opens my top drawer. It is there, next to some bobby pins and a bottle of multivitamins for perimenopause, that he sees the article about ‘the hero of The Drop’ with a picture of Gabe Gerard’s handsome face.

Max pulls the article out of the drawer. He recognises the picture, of course. He was the one who’d showed it to me a few weeks ago. He’d been pleased to see that Gabe was doing well, and so had I. But that didn’t explain why the article is now in my bedside drawer.

Max puts a hand to his temple as he tries to make sense of it.

‘Amanda,’ he whispers, ‘what did you do?’