The Lies We Told(86)

‘Oh, Luke.’

‘I still dream about it,’ he said. ‘I dream about it all the time. Waking up in that car, the knife, that fucking room. I have flashbacks every day.’ His voice broke and he began to cry. ‘I don’t think it’ll stop. I don’t think it’ll ever stop, Clara.’

She’d put her arms around him then and they’d stood for a long time, her holding him as he cried, the feel and smell and touch of him so familiar she had to fight hard not to give in to the sudden longing she felt.

‘You could have died,’ Luke said. ‘She took my keys. I didn’t know she was going to go to the flat and look for those pictures of Emily. I don’t even know how she knew they were there.’

‘What did she want with them?’ Clara asked.

Luke shrugged. ‘I guess she wanted to make sure you didn’t twig she wasn’t Emily. Or else … I don’t know, she seemed kind of obsessed with her, maybe she just wanted to destroy them, fuck knows what was going on in her head. She came back saying she couldn’t find them, that if I didn’t tell her exactly where they were, she’d burn the place down. So I told her they were in the filing cabinet, but she said she’d looked and they weren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘And then she went back and set fire to the flat.’ His face crumpled, ‘She came back that night stinking of smoke, crowing over what she’d done, I was so fucking scared that you’d been killed.’

‘They had slipped behind the drawer,’ Clara told him, ‘I found them by accident.’ She stared at him. ‘But I don’t understand why you never showed them to me.’

‘I rescued them from the house when Emily first disappeared, when Mum was hiding every last one of them away. I wanted to save them for myself. I never looked at them though, I couldn’t bear to. Her going missing was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was too painful to look at them, so I put them away out of sight.’

A soft breeze swept across the fields, and they walked on until they reached a stile where they sat for a while, looking out across the meadow. The hazy sky was streaked pink and gold as the day faded into twilight. It was perfectly still, perfectly silent, the smell of the earth and grass filling her nostrils, the dying sun warm on her skin. She would miss this place.

‘How are your parents doing?’ she asked.

For a while he carried on gazing up at the sky, but at last he said, ‘Dad’s moved out. Mum, unsurprisingly, doesn’t want anything to do with him since all those other students came out of the woodwork.’

Clara nodded. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

He was silent for a while. ‘What my mum’s had to put up with from him, lying and covering for him for so many years. I hate him for what he put her through.’

‘I know,’ Clara murmured. Uneasily though her thoughts returned to that night in Hannah’s horrible flat, to when Hannah had accused Rose of her mother’s murder. She had seen it, just for a second, Rose’s reaction, the flicker of guilt in her eyes, gone almost before it was there. She glanced back at Luke and firmly pushed the thought away.

Suddenly he took hold of her hand. ‘I love you, Clara,’ he said desperately. ‘I love you so much. Please don’t leave me, I can’t get through this without you.’

‘Why on earth would you want to stay with me, Luke,’ she said, ‘when I was clearly never enough? When you slept with Sadie behind my back?’

‘But you are enough!’ he cried. ‘I don’t know, I can’t explain it … Clara, I’ve always known that I’m a selfish idiot, that I do the wrong thing, that I hurt people. And then there you were, always so good, so decent and honest, and I wanted to be like you. I thought maybe I could learn to be a better person if I was with you. Sadie was a mistake, a stupid one-off mistake. Please, Clara, give me another chance.’

‘But it wasn’t one-off!’ she said.

‘I slept with her once, I swear, Clara. I know that doesn’t make it OK, but it was a terrible, stupid mistake that I regretted immediately.’

She thought about this. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said simply. ‘Mac told me it went on for a while.’

Luke shook his head, his face desperate. ‘But that’s not true, I don’t know why he would say that. I told him it was only once and that’s the truth!’

But she had pulled her hand away. ‘And then there’s Amy, Jade, Ellen – the way you treated them.’

His eyes widened. ‘I admit I behaved terribly to Amy. I was so scared of letting my parents down, they were still so devastated over Emily. But Ellen was a complete nutcase. She lied, Clara, she fucking lied! I kissed her once, when I was drunk, when Jade and I were going through a rough patch. She wanted more, she wanted me to stay the night with her, and when I said no, she just … I don’t know, she started this vendetta. She made the whole thing up.’ His face was pleading. ‘For God’s sake, Clara, I’m telling the truth!’

Clara looked at him sadly. ‘But that’s the thing, I have no idea whether to believe you, and I don’t want to live like that, wondering whether I can trust you or not. I just can’t.’

A miserable silence fell between them. At last Luke spoke. ‘Do you think I’m like him?’ he asked quietly. ‘Because of what happened with Sadie. Do you think I’m as bad as my father?’