Page 65 of We Live Here Now

“She’s not.” Paul gets to his feet. “She says she wants to live abroad. Maybe go to her niece in New Zealand. She says there are too many memories here. Anyway, the reason I stopped by was that she gave me something for you before I left.” He takes out a lilac envelope and hands it over. “She says it’s only for you.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” I’m surprised though. I can’t imagine why Sally would have anything to say to me. We weren’t that close, I don’t think. Were we?

After Paul’s gone, I make a cup of tea and curl up on the sofa to read the letter. It’s beautiful, neat cursive, written carefully in ink pen.

Dear Emily,

So, Paul has spent all weekend telling me how happy you and Freddie have been recently, and what a positive change there’sbeen in you, and it alarmed me to the point that I figured I’d better write. If you remember everything that happened with us, then nothing in this letter will come as a surprise. But if you find you’re a little muddy and confused in your recent memories when you think about them too hard, which I suspect you are, then read on. The last time I saw you I told you I owed you one. Well, this is it. Me paying my debt.

This may seem like a wild story, but it’s one you found out about, and you set me free. I think perhaps, by luck or design, maybe your husband found out about your blackmail cash and put you in the third-floor room too…

My head starts throbbing and the words blur, but I force myself to read on. What is she talking about?

… but I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to explain this to you one step at a time so you can understand what your darling or not-so-darling husband has done to you.

I read and read as she tells me everything that I suddenly feel like I already knew, and then I go back and reread it all, my head spinning. I look at the last line again.

And when you’ve read this, burn it. For both of us.

I do as she requests and lean forward, lighting the paper with the matches. The sun is sinking by the time it’s ash, and I sit back and stare out the window for an hour or more. It can’t be true, can it? Can it? It’s crazy, but at the same time I feel the very truth of it. I remember a vague feeling of guilt.

Mark and Cat.I was blackmailing Mark, that’s what Sally said. The inside of my skull itches as if there’s a scab over an empty space.

I don’t have any extra money anywhere. The whole thing is insane, but I humor it. If I had an account with money in it, and Freddie knew about it, then where would he hide that from me?

I go to the red room that Freddie uses as a home office and rummage through all the drawers, going against my every instinct that this is lovely sweet Freddie who would never hurt anyone, especially me. I’m about to give up when I pull a drawer free and check underneath like they do in old spy films.

There’s an envelope taped to the underside of it. An envelope addressed to me. My heart in my mouth, I take the papers out and read.

A hundred and fifty thousand pounds sitting there in my name and an awful note from Mark. God, why would I have done something so grotesque? Does this mean that everything in Sally’s letter is true?

Oh, Freddie. Tears sting my eyes, anger and upset and hurt, and I touch my stomach where our little baby is growing.What did you do?

84

Freddie

“I’m up here!”

Her voice drifts down from the third floor and my stomach tightens. Oh god, she’s up in that room. My foot hesitates on the bottom step. I’ve only just started relaxing around her, this new vibrant, joyous Emily, but I still can’t entirely trust the situation.

Some days I manage to persuade myself that none of it really happened, but the strained muscles in my shoulders that still hurt in the mornings are testament to the fact that I did indeed haul my dead wife’s body up three flights of stairs, shut her in the third-floor bedroom, and then scrub the house clean, crying and drinking myself to sleep while trying to get up the guts to call the police before, lo and behold, the next morning she came down them all by herself. I almost had a heart attack. I thought I was going mad.

Sometimes I still think I’ve gone mad. I know I killed her. And yet she’s alive. And she’s her, but different. She’s so much more lovable again; that’s the only way I can describe it. She’s happier and I’m happier. It’s like the old days when we first met.

In the main though, I’ve persuaded myself that I hadn’t stabbed her as deeply as I thought, or maybe hadn’t even stabbed her at all. I did nick myself with the blade, and maybe the blood was all mine from that. Small cuts can bleed a lot. Maybe she simply passed out and Ithoughtshe was dead. Maybe I had a small psychotic episode and hallucinated it all. Anything to convince myself that she didn’t actually die.

Still, we need to sell this house and move on as soon as possible.I can’t live here much longer. It’s all just too odd. While Emily cheating death is in many ways a blessing, I don’t trust this place.

I need to figure out a way to get Mark’s money out of her Jersey account, or at least find a way to make it sound plausible. She doesn’t even remember it’s there. Her memory is hazy around the events surrounding whatever happened in the kitchen, like a cloth has been pulled across it, wiping out anything that links to it. She doesn’t question anything. I told her she’d had a fall in the kitchen and she looked confused for a moment and then accepted it.

Turns out she’s not the only one capable of blackmail. I got more money out of Mark too once I found the video on Emily’s phone and transferred it to mine. I didn’t go too greedy. Just enough to pay my debts. To buy us some breathing room.

“Come up!” Emily calls down, head peering over the top banister, hair falling free around her grinning face. She is beautiful when she wants to be. When she’s happy. “I want to show you something! And I’ve got beer!”

“On my way,” I say. I feel a little uncomfortable seeing where she is, but I shake it away. There’s no way she could know what I did. She’s just got a plan for the top floor, that’s all. Maybe a way to make the house more sellable, or maybe she’s gone back to her idea of renting the third floor out as a private apartment to bring in extra money.

She’s standing in the bright sunshine in cute pink dungarees and hands me a strong Belgian beer, one of my favorites, before wrapping her arms around my neck and kissing me.

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