Her Perfect Life: A gripping debut psychological thriller with a killer twist. Sam Hepburn
and she went crazy. She … threatened me. She said she’d tell you and the board if I didn’t let her work on one of my projects.’
‘So did you?’
He swallows. ‘The Copenhagen clinic. But I won’t have to see her. I put her with the team working on the atrium and I’ve handed that side of things over to Geoff.’
As if this is penance enough, he kneels down and reaches for her. Her hands fly out, pushing him away, startling them both with her strength. ‘You’d never have done this to Louise!’
He jolts at the accusation, a shock response as if he’s been struck. She can see he’s steeled himself for fury, tears, distress. But not for this. She doesn’t care. He searches for words to deny it but the effort breaks him down into sobs. ‘It’s not about Louise.’
‘I’ve never been enough for you.’ She shunts away from him, pushing her heels against the slate floor. ‘I was always second best.’
He crawls towards her, appalled, dumbfounded. ‘No! You’re you and Louise … was Louise.’
She turns her head away, trying to hide her tears, but her fingers clutch her top, clawing the thin fabric in an effort to gain control. ‘And what about this bloody intern?’
‘She’s nothing.’
‘So you were willing to risk everything we have for some scheming little nothing?’
‘Christ, Gracie, what do you want me to say? I was drunk … I feel like shit …’
‘So that’s it? You got laid and she got a plus point on her CV?’
He drops his head and scrapes his hand down his face. ‘It wasn’t just about getting on a project. She’d got it into her head that she and I had … some kind of future … and now she’s lashing out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s threatening to make a formal complaint.’ He closes his eyes. ‘To tell the board and the press a pack of lies about me offering her work, pretending I was going to leave you … getting her drunk and fuck knows what else.’
Gracie waits until he looks at her. She stares into his eyes. Dark brown eyes, that shift and dither. There’s a screeching in her head, a feeling of weightlessness.
‘That’s what this confession is about, isn’t it? Damage limitation!’
‘No!’
She throws back her head. ‘If you’d managed to buy her silence, you’d never have told me.’
‘Gracie—’
She glares at him, daring him to lie.
‘I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’
At least he hasn’t denied his cowardice. But the angle of his head and the tilt of his shoulders trigger a creep of suspicion. ‘How many others, Tom?’
‘Christ!’ He turns away, furious. ‘How can you even ask?’
In that moment she sees a stranger. A lean-faced, dark-haired stranger in a black T-shirt and expensive jeans who has no idea that he has broken something he can’t mend; something precious that was hers and Elsie’s, as well as his. Can’t he see that this drunken fuck with a pushy intern nearly half his age has made a rupture in their lives – clean, complete and total – with everything that has gone before?
‘What’s her name?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alicia.’
‘Alicia what?’
‘Sandelson.’
She struggles to her feet. He moves towards her.
‘Don’t come near me!’
He lifts his hands and watches her leave.
That night Tom sleeps in the spare room and Gracie lies awake, listening to the drum of the rain and picturing Alicia touching her things, lying between her sheets, pushing her face into her pillow and she wonders how she will survive. Yet when she tries to imagine a life other than this one she has built with Tom all she sees is a vast emptiness devoid of joy or comfort or hope. This is the way she had felt in the bleak, lonely months before she met him, the way she’d thought she would never have to feel again. She reaches for her mobile then lets it drop. Daphne is in Milan, probably in bed with her latest lover, and even if she picked up what would Gracie say? What’s happening inside her is too frightening, too visceral to explain, even to her closest friend.
She slips out of bed and tiptoes downstairs, past the photographs that hang on the open brickwork. Stark looming images, shot by Louise, charting the first stages of the creation of the house. Gracie thought she knew them, every line and shadow; the demolition of the old wharf, the bulldozers arriving in a scarred expanse of moss-grown debris, spindly saplings thrust into the wind, the writhing tree root washed up by the tide, dead but for one determined shoot of green. But tonight, in the dim light of the lamp left on for Elsie, they seem alive, taunting her with renewed power and vigour; her own face, puffy with crying, a wavery distraction in the glass. Her eyes fasten on the photo of the tree root. Taken the day Louise found the plot of land, the shot has been reprinted on a thousand posters and postcards, variously interpreted as an image of hope, regeneration and a dogged refusal to die. The Observer magazine used it in their memorial tribute to Louise’s work, along with the most haunting of the worn faces and desolate landscapes she’d taken for them in Bosnia, Albania and Darfur. Gracie’s legs buckle. She reaches for the wall, imagining Alicia pausing here on her way to the bedroom, halted by this picture. Did Tom stand behind her, holding her shoulders, kissing her neck as he’d once kissed Gracie’s when she’d stopped, drawn by this same photograph, in the hallway of his flat in Holloway?
She pulls away and stumbles down to the kitchen. She feels the cool slate beneath her feet, sees the pearly shadows of the raindrops speckling the white of the walls and the square of sky above the light well, all realised exactly as Louise had envisaged them, the DNA of her vision imprinted not just in the design and structure of this house but in the subtle ageing of the wood, the ever changing reflections in the angled glass and the long slow weathering of the stone.
Gracie sits in the dark for nearly an hour before she drags herself back to bed. She closes her eyes, too tired to fight it now. Cogs uncouple in her head, dismantling her defences, and she sleeps. For a while she hovers in a restless dark. And then it begins. The dreadful pitch into a ruined landscape where she runs and runs from someone she can’t see until the way is blocked by an iron gate fastened by a padlock and chain. Forced on by a brush of breath on her neck she swerves away, stumbling through the doors of a blackened warehouse and spiralling down a stone staircase until she senses a flutter of movement in the shadows and trips and falls like dreamers do, to wake with a buck of panic, struggling to scream. She reaches for Tom. Her bed is empty. He is not there to turn in his sleep, pull her to him and murmur that she is safe.
She rises and moves around the house, tormented by reminders of the contentment she has lost – a snapshot of the three of them stuck on the fridge, their joint names on a school permission form, their shirts and socks entangled in the dryer, all cruelly untouched by the savage unravelling of her grief. She takes down the snapshot and gazes at the faces – hers, Tom’s and Elsie’s – trying to envision a future untainted by the fear of losing everything she loves.
Over the next few days Tom gives her time, something he’s been careless about for a while. He talks animatedly about the layout of her next cookery book and her plans to open a second branch of her café bakery, sending her details of properties he’s found on the internet. She feels his helplessness – the tightened lips and weary exhalations signalling his irritation.