Page 82 of The Wedding Proposal

‘So I separated our finances, opening accounts in my sole name so that I could control my own money. He was really angry.’ She flinched to remember the way that Ricky had roared his fury into her face. ‘Ricky’s manipulative. He never hit me but he was a master of emotional abuse. He’d stoked the tension between my parents and me, yet learned from them how to wield disappointment and guilt as weapons I’d respond to. So I pacified him by taking over paying the bills and rent while he kept whatever he earned for himself.’

‘Why didn’t you leave?’ Lucas’s voice was bleak.

‘Because of my parents.’ She went on doggedly, miserably. ‘It sounds stupid and weak but they were just waiting for me to fail. The more obvious they made that, the more I couldn’t face admitting that they were right, that marrying Ricky hadn’t been a whirlwind fairy-tale romance but a huge mistake. That our marriage had become nothing more than mutual disappointment and separate lives. You’re probably having problems understanding this because your parents brought you up to believe in yourself. My parents did nothing but fill me with doubts.

‘I had my work. I put in long hours at the office; then when the last people were leaving the building and I had to go, too, I brought work home to fill the rest of the evening. Ricky was hooked on laziness, hanging out with mates I didn’t like and didn’t trust.’ The old, ugly feeling washed over her, the shame of finding herself tied to a man who had begun to spend his life with a lager can in one hand and a TV remote in the other. ‘Ricky was rude and boorish, particularly in front of these shifty new mates who began to turn up to smoke and drink with him. They picked arguments with me. They called me “Ricky’s yuppie”. If I was working at the kitchen table I’d try to ignore them but they’d jeer and swear until they drove me up to my room or even out of the house.’ She shuddered.

‘Work became all I had. I climbed the ladder. I had a position of responsibility and over the next two years my security clearance level became high. I was trusted and respected, fast-tracked, skipping up the grades. But the downside was that Ricky and his horrible mates felt more and more like a secret I had to hide.’

She risked a glance at Lucas’s parents and her voice all but dried up. The condemnation on their faces was clear. She turned back to Lucas hopelessly. He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before.

Slowly, she sank back, feeling tried and judged and declared guilty. She completed her tale listlessly. ‘Long story short, one day the police turned up at the house. Ricky wasn’t there and probably hadn’t been for a day or two. I spent so much time avoiding him that I hadn’t thought too much about his absence. The police were looking for him. Once they were happy that I didn’t know what was going on or where he was’ — she threw a defiant look at Fiona — ‘they told me that complaints had been made. Ricky had been selling stuff on the internet. Some was stolen goods, the rest didn’t exist at all.’

Her voice had become small and flat. Defensive. ‘I was scared to death it would affect my job. The more information the police shared, the more I began to suspect that he’d stolen data from my laptop, harvesting e-mail addresses to create mailing lists and sending out invoices for fictitious services. Some companies simply paid without checking. I think I fucked up. I must have left my laptop open when his raucous mates had driven me out of the house and one of them had been clever enough to use data held on my machine or even up in the cloud. I could imagine a nightmare inquiry and me losing my job. The only part of my life where I had respect.’

Deep breath. ‘There was some forging of cheques,’ she admitted. ‘But not by me. When he left, Ricky cleared my account. I’d kept my internet banking password away from him, obviously, so he just did things the old-fashioned way, taking my cheque book and forging my signature on a succession of cheques made out to him, until the account was empty and they began to bounce. Because I wanted this horror story to go away, I took that on the chin, closed that account and opened another in a different bank to render any other cheques he wrote useless.’

Lucas was silent.

Elle forced herself further into the nightmare. ‘I had no choice then but to tell my parents Ricky had left. Our relationship deteriorated further when they didn’t have a word of support for me. Just all the “We told you so!” guff I’d been afraid of. So I didn’t tell them about the police being after Ricky. It was just too . . .’ She paused. Swallowed. ‘Bettsbrough’s a small town. If word had got out that the police were looking for Ricky it would have made the nightmare worse. When my company moved to larger premises in Northampton, I went too.’

She tried to smile at Lucas, but her bottom lip shook. ‘I settled there and I’d got a promotion along with the relocation. Ricky seemed to have disappeared from my life and I chalked the whole thing up as a horrible experience. I met you. Everything was going wonderfully.

‘Too wonderfully.’ She stopped to turn her gaze deliberately to the lawyer and the magistrate. ‘This scruffy guy in a baseball cap and a hoodie approached me one day outside my office, begging for change. It was like my worst nightmare when I realised it was Ricky.’ She looked around at each of her audience in turn. Fiona and Geoffrey wore matching sceptical expressions. Lucas was beginning to look as if he was watching a road crash.

She sighed. ‘I’d done something incredibly stupid. I’d updated my Facebook profile. Northampton was listed as where I was living and as I was still working for the same company it didn’t take him long to find me. He just hung around outside the building. He wanted money, of course. He looked at my suits and my car and he saw where he could get it.’

Meeting Lucas’s gaze was getting harder and harder, not because she knew herself to be guilty of anything worse than gullibility and panic, but because his eyes weren’t telling her that he understood that she was innocent. ‘That’s why I began behaving oddly,’ she whispered. ‘He threatened to tell you exactly what he’s told your mother. That I was the one who had practised deception and fraud and everything, and he’d been blamed. He’d been living in Spain, like some big-shot criminal, because he knew someone there with a bar. Till he fell out with the friend; then he came back to the UK.’

Fiona made a noise that might have been a tut of disbelief.

At that tiny, scornful noise, hope began to shrivel inside of Elle. ‘If we’d had a big wedding, he would’ve turned up. He knows how to sniff out information. That’s why I wanted to go to Vegas and get married,’ she explained, dully. ‘I thought it would halt his plans. I must admit I didn’t credit him with enough tenacity to walk into a lawyer’s office and try and blackmail her.’

Bitterly, Elle laughed. ‘In a way, you were right to be suspicious of the man you saw me talking to outside work. That was Ricky. He’d cleaned himself up but came by regularly to threaten me with exposure, with implicating me in his crimes. I couldn’t see a way out. When you went off in your jealous rage, I didn’t argue when you said we were over. At least that way, I thought, Ricky would leave you and your family alone. Turns out I was wrong.’

A long silence followed her last words. Elle stared at the tabletop where the beer she hadn’t touched was leaving a condensation ring.

Finally, Lucas stirred. He sounded dazed. ‘I can’t get my head around this. I thought it was something to do with me not proposing properly.’

Elle turned to stare at him, thrown by this change of direction. ‘Not what?’

‘When I suggested we get married. I thought I hadn’t made it sound important enough. Just blurted out that it would be better if we got married if we were going to America.’

‘Oh.’ Elle tried to force her mind back. ‘I suppose it was pretty ordinary. But I was probably distracted by the knowledge that the wedding would be a target, a reason for me to be threatened and coerced.’

He winced. ‘Why didn’t you tell me when it was happening?’

Elle smiled, though she saw his firm jaw and satin hair only through a haze of tears. ‘Because I didn’t think you’d believe me.’

‘You didn’t trust me to.’ His voice was hoarse.

She had no energy left for diplomacy. She shook her head. ‘Your parents hated me. They didn’t try to hide that they’d expected better for their son than a silly girl who’d been married and divorced young, and no high-status contacts to counterbalance her naivety. You’re very much their son. Judgemental. Sure of what’s right and what’s wrong. Intolerant of mistakes. So, no, I didn’t trust you to believe in me. Not then.’ A lone tear tracked down her cheek. ‘I started to tell you once we’d—’ She glanced at Fiona and Geoffrey. Fiona looked pale. ‘But you told me you didn’t need to know, so long as I’d never cheated on you. And I thought that I was safe, that Ricky didn’t know where I was and couldn’t hurt me any more.’

Lucas opened his mouth.

But Elle’s phone began to ring. She slipped it from the front pocket of her dress to press ‘Decline’. Then she saw The Briars on the screen. Her finger hovered. She pressed ‘Answer’ instead.

* * *

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