1
Felicity
On some level I knew I was dreaming, but still I tossed and turned, tangling myself up in my sheets, my vision filled with the image of the rose on my windscreen. Wake up, I told myself. Wake up, now! I couldn’t wake up, but my nightmare began to change, shifting to the memory of the house where Jay had kept me prisoner in Tatchley. I grabbed at my wrist, trying to free myself, listening intently for the sounds I knew would come next. Footsteps. Quiet at first, then louder as Jay approached the top of the stairs. My heart started to pound as he drew back the lock on the outside of my bedroom door. This isn’t real, I told myself. Wake up. Wake up now!
But then a thought struck me. Perhaps it was real. Perhaps my escape from Jay had been the dream and I’d never really left this room. I clawed frantically at my wrist, screaming as my nails scraped the cold metal handcuff. ‘No!’ I screeched at the top of my lungs, and I carried on screaming as I woke up, because I couldn’t remember where I was or that I was safe.
‘Felicity,’ a voice was saying. ‘Felicity, stop. You’re okay. You’re okay.’
I was still making sounds. I was still scratching. The nightmare clung to me and I couldn’t get out of it.
‘Fliss,’ the voice continued, its tone strong yet soothing. Gentle hands touched my arms, but I still didn’t understand so I hit out wildly. ‘It’s me,’ the voice said. ‘It’s Scott. You’re at home. You’re safe. The children are safe. Nobody else is here.’
‘Scott,’ I said slowly. He turned on his bedside light and I put my hands over my face because I was so frustrated and disappointed with myself for getting taken in by these nightmares. Scott didn’t say anything; instead he started stroking my hair. Gradually I moved my hands away from my eyes and let his face come into view, and the sight of him filled me with a fresh surge of relief. His face was open, calm — the face of a man I loved, not the face of the monster Jay had turned out to be. Scott reached down to kiss my forehead and his stubbly beard prickled me. ‘That was a bad one, wasn’t it?’ he said.
I nodded but didn’t reply.
‘You’ve made your wrist bleed.’
I turned my head to look at my arm but as I did our bedroom door opened, revealing two sleepy-looking boys. ‘Mummy?’ said Leo, hugging his cuddly toy dinosaur tightly, while Dennis just stared at me with his eyes huge, fiddling with the hem of his pyjama top and looking like he might start to cry.
Scott was instantly out of bed, putting an arm around each of the boys. ‘Mummy just had a bad dream,’ he told Leo. Then he turned to Dennis, who said, ‘Flissty has too many bad dreams. Why does she scream all the time?’
Scott started to try to explain, and I pulled myself together and got out of bed to cuddle Leo. ‘Did I wake you up?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry, sweetie.’
‘Why are you scared?’
‘I’m not scared.’
He pushed me away, a gesture that tore at my heart, and he moved closer to Scott again. ‘Daddy, stories,’ he said. Scott looked round at me sympathetically. It had become a bit of routine: my nightmares would make me scream and wake up the boys, who would then expect to be read several stories by Scott before they would go back to sleep. ‘I’ll read you a story,’ I said, and was greeted by two small, frightened-looking faces. ‘Okay, you go with Daddy then.’
After they had disappeared upstairs, I sat back down on the bed and crossed my legs. It was unfortunate that the sounds from our room carried so easily to the boys up in their attic bedroom — it seemed that at least fifty per cent of the time I would end up waking them. I sighed and looked at my blood-streaked wrist. All of us had had a lot to deal with in the past months, especially as we’d also moved to our new house.
When Scott came back into our bedroom, he lay down quietly beside me.
‘Did they settle okay?’ I asked him.
‘Eventually.’
‘I can’t believe I’m doing this to them,’ I said. ‘They’re scared of me.’
‘They’re not scared of you. And they’re not angry with you either. Once we were upstairs they both asked if you were okay. They wanted to come back down and cuddle you, but I said you might have gone back to sleep. Leo said, “Poor Mummy.”’
‘I don’t want to be “poor Mummy”. I’m supposed to be looking after him.’
Scott was silent for a time, then he said, ‘I am so angry with Vicky. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for putting that rose on your car.’
I looked away from him, a dull ache in my stomach. Even now I was sickened by the thought that Vicky wanted to hurt and scare me badly enough to do such a hateful thing, but I said, ‘We have to try.’
Scott propped himself up on his elbow and looked at me with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. ‘I don’t know how you can not want to kill her.’
‘I’m too exhausted to be angry any more.’
‘We lost our baby because of her.’
Fresh pain bloomed inside me at his mention of it, but I refused to give in to anger. ‘We can’t blame her for that. Blaming her makes it feel even worse. I don’t want to believe she’s pleased I’ve lost the baby, or that she would want something like that to happen.’
‘But do you really think the stress of believing Jay had found you and Leo didn’t contribute?’
‘I don’t know!’ I said, frustrated by his question. ‘Why does somebody have to be to blame? We don’t know why it happened. It just … it just did!’
His face softened and he stroked my cheek. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go on at you. I’m sure you’re right that what she did had no bearing on us losing the baby. I just … I feel like this is my fault. You’d never have crossed paths with Vicky otherwise, would you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. But if it was a choice between having you and Dennis and putting up with Vicky, or being alone, you know which I would choose.’
He sighed. ‘You don’t deserve all this. She doesn’t even seem sorry for what she did. All she’s sorry for is that she got caught.’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to think about it, or talk about it. I wanted to forget it had ever happened. But Vicky’s “prank” — as she’d called it to justify her actions — had cost me dearly, there was no doubt about that. I hated her for it, but despite my disgust at her actions I had to admit, when the police had discovered it was her, relief had won out over anger. I was just so glad that it hadn’t been Jay.
2
Scott
‘How are you holding up?’ Martin asked, as he followed Scott into the living room of the new house. Although they’d been there a few months now, there was still a cardboard box in the corner yet to be unpacked, and squares of various paint samples on the wall.
‘Felicity’s getting there,’ Scott said. ‘She’s managing to go to work again now, but I have to drive her there and back. She’s doing well, though. She’s trying to come off her anxiety medication.’
‘That’s good,’ Martin said, ‘but I asked how you are doing?’
Scott was taken aback by the question. He never spent much time thinking about himself, just trying to stay strong for Felicity. After finding the rose, she’d had a complete breakdown, and though the police had quickly found a witness who’d seen Vicky placing the flower on Felicity’s car, the damage had already been done. Felicity was crushed, and though she was beginning to show signs of recovery, he had to watch her struggle every day. He admired her courage in carrying on at all; her efforts in trying to get through the day were like those of somebody trying to put together a broken glass with their bare hands — everything she did looked painful, and the pieces never quite seemed to fit.
Scott realised that Martin was still waiting for him to answer. What should he say? He didn’t even know how he was doing; he just carried on and tried not to think at all. ‘Okay, I guess,’ he said weakly.
‘Really?’ Martin said. ‘Because I’ve barely seen you recently. I know you’ve been doing up the house, and that there’s been a lot to deal with, but you’ve never even properly explained what happened that affected Felicity so badly.’
Scott quickly tried to summarise — the rose, Vicky, the fact he’d told Vicky that Tim was going to split up with her before he died.
‘Do you think that’s why she did it?’ Martin asked. ‘She was trying to get revenge on you for telling her the truth about Tim?’
‘I think so. She’s been weird about the thing with the rose; she says it was a prank, but … I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you play a prank on somebody about—’
‘We did hide underwear under her and Tim’s bed to try to split them up, remember.’
Scott sighed. He did remember, all too well. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and believe me, she has brought that up more than once, saying that what she did with the rose was no worse than what we did with that stupid lacy underwear, and maybe she’s right. I don’t know. The thing with the rose, though, it just seems … twisted. Sick. She said she didn’t realise it would be so upsetting for Fliss, and I know she didn’t realise the full extent of what Jay had done, but I’d told her Jay was a rapist. I said he was violent. How much worse did it have to be before she realised it wasn’t an appropriate topic for a joke?’
Martin was silent. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he told Scott eventually. ‘It’s so messed up. So that’s all she ever said, that it was a prank?’
‘Kind of.’ Scott thought back to the arguments he’d had with Vicky about it. ‘It kept changing. She seemed almost like she was annoyed we were so angry with her to begin with, like there was something more to it. Then she was acting like it was all a big joke, or like Felicity deserved it.’
‘Well, if there’s one good thing to take from this, it’s that at least it wasn’t Jay.’
‘I still worry about him. A lot. Much more than I let on to Fliss.’
‘Perhaps you should get away from here for a day,’ Martin suggested. ‘Get a change of scenery.’
Scott didn’t answer straight away. It certainly sounded tempting. It had been a while since he’d done any rock climbing, and he was starting to miss it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said when he finally spoke. ‘I’m still concerned about Felicity. It’s not that she needs me with her every second of the day, but I prefer to be somewhere close by. So that I can come quickly if anything happens.’
‘You can’t do that for the rest of your life,’ Martin said, ‘and Felicity wouldn’t want you to, either. She’s not like Vicky — she doesn’t want you to be at her beck and call.’
‘She might not want it to be like that, but even she admits she needs it at the moment. Look, I’ll mention it to her. But I can’t promise anything.’
***
‘What were you and Martin talking about?’ Felicity asked sleepily, woken up by him getting into bed.
‘I was just telling him about Vicky, and about how you are.’
She turned her lamp on and Scott sat down beside her. ‘What did you say about how I am?’
‘I told him the truth. It doesn’t help to lie to people, and nobody thinks any the worse of you for having a tough time.’
‘It makes me so embarrassed. I don’t want to just be “the woman with the violent ex”. I don’t want everyone to think I’m nothing but a bag of nerves who jumps at every shadow. Even though that is who I am half the time.’
He smiled at her reassuringly. ‘Nobody thinks that. You don’t have to be ashamed of how you’re feeling at the moment.’
‘I just want things to be normal.’
‘Well, on that note,’ Scott said, ‘Martin reckons I need a change of scenery.’
‘I was thinking you hadn’t climbed anything in a while,’ she said, ‘unless you count going up a ladder to clean out the gutters.’
Scott laughed. ‘Well, we wouldn’t do anything too major, just go somewhere for a day. Probably quite a long day, but—’
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Honestly. I know you’re worried that as soon as you leave Vicky will do something, or … or Jay is suddenly going to turn up, but I was on my own for two years before I met you. I can do it. And I’ve made a decision. From tomorrow I’m going to start driving myself to and from work again.’
He nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘I get so obsessed with the idea that Jay is following me, but I’m being ridiculous. I’m imagining it because I let Vicky get inside my head and it threw me back into the past again, but it’s not real. It’s all in my head.’
‘Well, if you do want to talk any more about what went on with Jay, whether it’s with me or with a … professional, you know that you can.’
She gave a small smile, without warmth. ‘I told you I tried that before. I can’t … I can’t talk about it. Not any more than I have already. Not any details.’
‘If you were able to say more of it out loud, perhaps those memories wouldn’t have so much power. Perhaps they wouldn’t come back to you as nightmares.’
‘I’m doing my best,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll be able to open up, eventually. But in the meantime, of course you should get out of Alstercombe for a day. Go and enjoy yourself. If I get in a pickle, I’ll call Natasha.’
Scott was instantly reassured. His sister had been an absolute rock through their turbulent few months, looking after Leo and Dennis when necessary, bringing them meals straight after the rose incident, when they had both been too stressed to even think about food, let alone cook it.
‘There’s something else I’ve been thinking about too,’ Felicity said. ‘I want to do a barbecue for everyone, when the weather warms up. For Natasha and for all your friends and family, to say thank you for their support.’
‘That’s a great idea.’
She looped her arms around his neck. ‘I love you,’ she told him. ‘And we’re going to get through all of this. We’ve got through the worst already — now things can only get better.’