Because She Loves Me (36 page)

I hope you can forgive me.

Yours,

Andrew x

Epilogue

I walked into the coffee shop and looked around. There she was. She was as beautiful as ever, her red hair catching the spring sunshine that flooded the room. The bruise on her forehead had faded. Whether the scars inside would ever fade, I didn’t know. My own psychological scars were still livid. Raw. I was on heavy
painkillers
 – not codeine – for my ruined eye. The surgeons had broken the news within hours of the ambulance speeding me to the hospital. There was nothing they could do. Not this time.

Everyone told me I would adjust to living with one eye. The human body is clever like that. It overcomes obstacles, it adapts. And I could cope with the physical damage. It was everything else Rachel had done that kept me awake, tormented by nightmares. I had PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. I was seeing a psychotherapist, and just like the counsellor who had eventually helped me after my parents’ death, it was doing me good. It was early days, but the vivid flashbacks – the scalpel, Rachel’s leering face – were growing slightly less frequent. Harder to deal with was the lingering sense of guilt. Everybody told me that it wasn’t my fault I had attracted a murderer, a psychopath. But I was the hub that connected the victims: Karen, Sasha, Kristi, Harold, Henry. I could only thank God that Rachel had never targeted Tilly, who was also in shock after everything that had happened. I guess Rachel didn’t see my sister as a threat. Maybe, somewhere in that twisted mind, she was genuinely fond of her. Who knows? Any chances of finding out for certain had died in a pool of blood on my bedroom carpet.

We, especially Tilly and I, had been all over the papers and TV for a week or so. Rachel’s face was on the front page of every newspaper, and the case was inevitably linked by the media to the Dark Angel case. Another carer gone bad, though Rachel’s death count was far lower than that of the Dark Angel, Lucy Newton. Then Lucy Newton herself knocked Rachel off the front page when her appeal against her sentence reached the court. They say she could get off on a technicality. Something to do with botched DNA evidence.

But I digress.

‘Hi Charlie,’ I said.

‘Hey.’ She didn’t smile.

I sat down opposite her. I wanted to kiss her cheek, give her a hug. No, actually I wanted her to give me a hug. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Not after everything I’d done.

‘Thank you for agreeing to meet me, to talk to me.’

She had replied to my email several days after I sent it, three days when I drove myself half-insane checking my inbox.

She stared at me now, her face serious, appraising. Then, suddenly, she seemed to relax, and she smiled that soft smile I’d always loved so much. Her red hair caught the sunlight and she had a faint tan that gave her skin a honeyed glow. How had I ever thought she could be a killer? Looking at her now, I was reminded of two things: one, that I still loved her as much as ever; two, that I had blown my best chance of happiness. I would never again feel like I had in those early weeks of our relationship. Here was my other half, torn from me once by Zeus, torn from me a second time by my own hand.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ Charlie said. ‘You look like a pirate eyeing up a mermaid.’

I laughed, then felt the urge to cry. The waitress came over and I ordered a latte and a slice of chocolate cake. I had lost a lot of weight during the last month and had been instructed to eat and drink more fat and protein, to try to regain my strength.

‘I knew you’d look good with an eye patch,’ Charlie said. ‘It suits you.’

‘Thanks. I’ve got a contact lens in the other eye. It looks too weird having glasses and an eye patch.’

She smiled again, but it slipped away quickly.

‘So,’ I said. ‘How have you been?’

She shrugged. ‘Not bad. I mean . . . I guess I’m doing OK. Considering . . . everything.’

Considering she had killed someone, had watched her boyfriend, who had accused her of being a murderer, being tortured.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘I know it’s been much worse for you.’

‘Yeah, but I’m not going to get competitive about it.’

Finally, I’d made her laugh.

My coffee came and I added three sugars.

‘Where have you been the last couple of months?’ I asked.

‘Florida.’

‘Really?’ I had imagined her holed up in her flat, like me, watching TV and drinking.

‘Yeah. Miami, to be precise. Plus I travelled around a bit. I just needed . . . to escape. To feel the sun. To be a stranger.’ She looked down.

‘Did you read everything in my email?’

‘Yes. Through my fingers. It’s just so . . .’ She shook her head, lost for words.

‘I know. But do you . . . understand?’ I swallowed hard. ‘Why I did what I did?’

Charlie looked at me. She didn’t answer my question. ‘Andrew, I want you to understand something. About me being jealous . . . I don’t know what Fraser told you about me. But whatever it was, he was a liar. He always lied when we were together. About everything. I loved him at first and he destroyed our relationship by lying, lying, lying. He slept with at least three other women while we were together and denied it. It was like he had a disease that stopped him from telling the truth. But the thing was, I thought it must be me, doing something to men to make them cheat on me. I already told you about Leo.’

I nodded. That was the boyfriend who had previously been unfaithful to her, the break-up causing her to turn to sleeping pills.

‘I thought about this a lot while I was away. The stuff with Fraser and Leo . . . that’s what made me so jealous and paranoid when I was with you. It was learned behaviour from my relationships with them. I thought you must be the same as them. That every man I met would let me down, betray me.’

‘I would never have betrayed you, Charlie.’

The look she gave me stabbed me in the heart.

‘Maybe not in that way.’ She sighed. ‘When I told Fraser I was leaving him, he couldn’t cope. He thought he was the one with all the power, that he would choose when to leave me. I spent that week between our first date and when I contacted you trying to deal with him. He was going psycho, threatening to kill himself. It was a real mess.’

‘Did you sleep with him that week?’

She was taken aback. ‘Would it matter?’

‘I guess not.’

‘For the record, I didn’t. I couldn’t stand him anymore.’

‘But that night, the night we first went out, you went home with him?’

‘I didn’t have a choice. He texted me, saying he’d seen me with you, that he was going to talk to you. I knew he’d tell you all sorts of lies about me and, well, I liked you. I didn’t want you to go off me. I spent that night trying to dissuade him from jumping off Waterloo Bridge. Maybe I should have let him.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you about that.’

‘You don’t need to apologise.’

‘When you met Fraser you must have wondered what the hell I’d ever seen in him. I wonder that now too. But he was charming when we were first together, before I realised what he was really like. He comes across as an utter mess now – he sold all our furniture to buy drugs – but he’s clever. When I was with him he basically enacted psychological warfare against me. He targeted every one of my insecurities, completely emotionally abused me, manipulated me, turned me into a mess. That’s the state I was in when I met you. Desperate for a normal relationship, to start again with someone . . . normal. Someone nice. But I was fucked up. I wasn’t ready for another relationship. But I thought that you could heal me.’

I didn’t know what to say to this.

‘It’s like the thing with Kristi,’ she said. ‘Offering her money. It was such a stupid thing for me to do. But when I saw how pretty she was, I kept imagining the two of you together. I was so in love with you, Andrew. I would have done anything . . .’ She laughed harshly. ‘Well, obviously not anything.’

But I knew what she was thinking. How far do you have to travel to go from what Charlie did to what Rachel did?

I knew the answer to that. A long way. A very long way indeed.

‘Anyway,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think, to look at myself, and I know that I have a problem. I know that the way I reacted when you stayed over at Sasha’s, a lot of the other stuff I did, accusing you of fancying other women . . . I know it’s not normal or healthy. You were right when you said I should see a therapist. So I’ve done it – I’m doing it. It was the first thing I did when I got back. And it’s good.’ She stared at the table. ‘I don’t want to be that person, the person who Fraser and Leo fucked up. I’m not going to be that person anymore.’

‘That’s . . . really good to hear.’

‘How’s Tilly?’ Charlie asked, changing the subject. It felt like it had taken a lot for her to say what she’d just said. ‘I’ve been meaning to call her since I got back.’

‘She’s all right. She’s got another personal assistant. A guy called Matt. He’s really hot, apparently.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me? She must be in shock, though, after what happened.’

‘I’m still waiting for it to fully hit her. But when it does, I’ll be there for her.’

‘That’s cool. But how are
you
?’

I fiddled with the bowl of sugar, twisting it round. How could I answer that?

‘I’m getting better,’ I said. ‘I’m going to start working for Victor. At long last. And I’ve put the flat on the market too. Hoping to find someone who never watches the news.’

I wanted to tell her that I would get better much quicker, would be able to cope better, if she was by my side. But the words stuck in my throat.

‘And you? What are you going to do?’ I said, swallowing.

She pulled a face. ‘I don’t know. I think I need a change of scene. Maybe I’ll go backpacking or something. Go to Australia.’

‘I’ll miss you if you go,’ I said quietly.

She stared into her coffee. ‘How can I forgive you, Andrew? You thought I was a murderer. You told the police that I killed someone.’

‘I know, but that was—’

‘I know. I understand the reasons. I really do. But I would never have done that to you, whatever. I would have talked to you first. I would never have betrayed you like that.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

She stirred the coffee with a wooden stick. ‘You broke my heart, Andrew.’ She smiled humourlessly. ‘That hurt a lot more than when that nutter threw me into the chest of drawers.’

‘I’m an idiot,’ I said.

‘You are. A real fucking twat.’

She smiled.

It took all my strength to say her name. ‘Charlie . . .’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘How do you know what I was going to say?’

‘You were going to ask if we could give it another go.’

I didn’t respond. She was right.

‘But I can’t, Andrew. Not after what you did. You don’t trust me.’

‘But I will, I would. This time.’

She shook her head, looked at me with those soft, beautiful eyes.

‘I’m going to go now, Andrew. It was lovely to see you again. I think I needed to. But please don’t try to follow me.’

I fought back tears. ‘Charlie. I love you. Please don’t go.’

‘I’ll see you,’ she said, her voice so quiet and soft I could hardly hear her.

And she walked out of the coffee shop, leaving me sitting there, all the people at the tables around me trying not to look at the sad guy with the eye patch whose girlfriend had just walked out. It sounded like he’d done something terrible. He deserved it. Besides, she was gorgeous. She could have anyone.

The coffee tasted bitter, despite the sugar. The sunshine had dimmed. The people around me looked ugly and mean. The music on the coffee shop stereo, one of my favourite songs, sounded tuneless, discordant.

Maybe I hadn’t realised quite how much hope I had held for this meeting. I loved Charlie. Now that I’d lost her, I loved her more than ever.

And Rachel – although she couldn’t have me herself – had won.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the table, counting the stray sugar grains, but the waitress came over and asked me if I wanted another coffee. I nodded. I didn’t want to go home, back to my cold, haunted flat, the place that nobody wanted to buy. I would stay here as long as I could, among people. There was a couple in the corner, sitting close together, and from the way they looked at each other, the proximity of their foreheads, the touches and the smiles, I could tell they were in love. I tried not to feel envious. But all I wanted to do was cry.