Chapter 8

Marcus had always been useful. Ethan had helped him out of a bad situation once, years ago, and Marcus had an exceptionally good memory for favours.

"I need someone," Ethan said. "To get close to a woman. To — seduce her, if that's the word."

Marcus didn't ask questions. He made a call. Three days later, he sent a name and a photograph.

Jake Mercer. Personal trainer. Very successful at exactly this kind of assignment.

Ethan gave Jake Melissa's photograph, her schedule, her habits, her preferred beauty spa.

"A month," Jake said, looking over the photo. "Easy."

He was right. Melissa was at Serenity Beauty Spa when they met. Jake called her darling and asked her advice on skincare and had her laughing within twenty minutes. Within three weeks they were texting. Within four, they were at The Cavendish Hotel.

Ethan got the notification at six-seventeen on a Thursday evening.

He sent one message to Sebastian's phone: a room number.

Then he waited in the corridor, his back against the wall, and listened to the door come off its hinges.

He didn't go in. He listened to the sounds of Sebastian's rage and Melissa's terror and something heavy being thrown. He looked at his shoes. There was a mark on the left toe that he tried to rub away with his thumb.

The noise stopped.

Sebastian came out first. His hands were covered in blood. His face was a mask. He walked past Ethan without saying anything, which Ethan had not expected.

Jake, he knew, had already left by the service stairs.

Ethan looked through the open door. Melissa was on the floor. She wasn't moving.

He called an ambulance.

He watched them load her in. She had a broken jaw, a fractured orbital socket, three cracked ribs, and a spinal injury that the paramedics would later describe as catastrophic. She would not walk again.

Sebastian was arrested at the hotel entrance.

"Domestic incident," Sebastian told the officers. "Nothing serious."

Ethan stepped forward. "I'd like to press charges on behalf of the injured party," he said. "I'm her son-in-law. She told me earlier this week that she was frightened of him."

Sebastian looked at him.

"You," he said. "You set this up."

Ethan said nothing.

"I'm your father."

"You told me," Ethan said, "when I was in hospital as a child, that I could die for all you cared. I've thought about that a great deal since."

He went home.

Sebastian was given fifteen years.

Melissa came home from the hospital unable to move below the neck. Vivienne managed the care for a while. Then Vivienne didn't manage it. Melissa was moved to Sunnyside Care Home.

Ethan went once.

She had been there six weeks. She was thinner than he remembered. Her eyes had a quality he hadn't seen in them before — something lost and searching.

When she saw him, she reached for him with her eyes.

"Ethan." Her voice was a thread. "The nurses here — they don't take care of me properly. Please. Take me home."

He stood at the end of her bed.

"Do you remember," he said, "the day you stood in my mother's doorway and told her to leave?"

Melissa's expression shifted.

"That was between your mother and me," she said quickly. "That has nothing to do with — I never treated you badly. Not once. The times you stayed with us—"

"You were trying to manage me," he said. "So I'd be useful. I know."

"Ethan—"

"You said — at the time, you said that in love, the one who isn't loved is the intruder." He paused. "I used to think my mother was unreasonable for holding onto that. I understand it now."

Melissa started to cry.

He left before she finished.

He walked out into the grey morning and stood on the pavement for a while, not going anywhere in particular. He thought about lighting a cigarette, even though he didn't smoke — his mother had never let him touch them, had told him they were bad for his health, had been right about that and most other things.

He had told her she needed to let go. He had told her it had been twenty years. He had said, without understanding what he was saying, that the wounds should have healed by now.

A wound doesn't heal because time passes. A wound heals because the thing causing it stops. And for his mother, the cause had never stopped — it had just changed shape. It had become Vivienne's face. It had become Ethan's silence at that dinner table.

He had been the knife.

He crouched on the pavement with his head in his hands and stayed there until a pigeon landed next to him and looked at him with mild professional interest, and he stood up.

Vivienne wanted a divorce.