The Soulmate(50)

‘I might just swap it out now,’ he said. ‘It’s been driving me mad.’

‘No. Not electrics, Gabe, it’s too dangerous. I’ll call the electrician.’

‘We don’t need an electrician to change out a light, Pip!’ he said, kissing my forehead. ‘It won’t take me a minute to sort it out.’

His confidence was persuasive. Maybe he was right and it was no big deal. After all, what did I know about changing lights? Besides, I had two toddlers at my heels who wanted lunch.

‘All right, if you’re sure.’

There were worse things than having a husband who was handy, I told myself as I made toasted sandwiches. Some women would kill to have a husband who did things around the house.

The sandwiches were nearly done when the electricity cut out. From the kitchen at the back of the house, I heard the unmistakable thud of a body hitting the ground.

I’d never run so fast in my life.

When I reached the front porch, the ladder was on its side and so was Gabe, several metres away. He blinked at me dumbly for several seconds. Then he began to laugh.

I didn’t understand it. He’d had the ADHD diagnosis. He was taking his medication. But Gabe was spiralling again. I could feel it in my bones.





50


AMANDA

BEFORE



I came home one night from dinner with some girlfriends to find the gates open and several cars parked in our driveway. They were not the prestige cars owned by most of our friends. There was a Mazda, a Subaru and a hotted-up 1975 Ford Falcon with tinted windows – this last I recognised as belonging to Baz. It was unusual for our security guard to park in the driveway. Even though it had been years since Arthur Spriggs’s men had invaded our home, unexpected guests still made me nervous. I called Max from my car.

‘I’m in the driveway,’ I said, when he picked up. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Fine. I’ve just got a few colleagues here for a meeting.’

Max sounded distracted, though not alarmed. It reassured me, even though Max rarely held business meetings at home after hours. Then again, things had been busy now that NewZ was trying to enter the streaming sphere. It was a big undertaking which had been the focus of the past couple of years and had involved some late nights at work. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Max might need to bring work home – but, still, it seemed odd.

The house was quiet when I let myself inside and I assumed Max and his colleagues were in Max’s office. By this time, I’d become quite good at snooping, so I slipped into my study which abutted the office and put my ear to the wall.

‘How the hell did you even develop a relationship with this contact?’ I heard Max bellow, so loud that I could hear him quite clearly.

‘The usual ways,’ came the softer, but not feeble, response. I recognised the voice as belonging to Gabe Gerard. ‘I know it was unorthodox, but you said to find the money wherever we could.’

‘Great. Did you look in dumpsters too?’

‘Max, could we just focus on –’

But Max wasn’t listening. ‘How did this get through compliance, Mei?’

‘I red-flagged it when I vetted it.’ It was a young woman’s voice now. ‘I couldn’t verify the funds; they came from multiple holding companies on the Cayman Islands. I said it was suspicious.’

‘So how did it get through? Who signed off on it?’

‘You did.’ Gabe’s voice is smaller now.

Infuriatingly, the landline chose this moment to ring, and I hurried down the hall to answer it. It was a phone survey, which I declined to take part in. I got off the phone as fast as I could then stood by the hall table thinking about what I’d overheard. They’d been talking about business, clearly; nothing out of the ordinary there. Yet the conversation had felt strangely charged. I hadn’t heard Max sound so upset since . . . since the business with Arthur Spriggs, I realised.

I was still standing there when the door to Max’s office opened.

‘Thanks, Mei,’ I heard Max say, his tone polite but brisk. ‘Baz will show you out.’

I’d almost forgotten Baz was in there. That was strange. Baz was responsible for our personal security; why would he be invited to a business meeting? I pretended to rifle through a drawer in the hallstand while Baz walked a young woman to the foyer. He gave me a brief nod of acknowledgement on his way back to the office. When he closed the door, I returned to my study, but the voices were faint now, and I couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. Eventually, I gave up and went to bed.

‘That was a late one,’ I said when Max joined me later. I was sitting up under the covers with a novel in my lap. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m not sure you want to know,’ he said, as he got undressed.

I raised my eyebrows to indicate that I did.

‘All right.’ He finished unbuttoning his shirt and sat on the bed. ‘You know the streaming service we acquired a few months back?’

‘Of course.’

‘It was very expensive. Getting the finance was tricky. For a while we thought it wasn’t going to fly.’

‘I remember.’

‘Gabe Gerard managed to pull it off, though. At the eleventh hour he found an investor who came forward with fifty million dollars.’