‘Perhaps not.’ He takes out a business card and offers it to me. I don’t take the card and he lets his arm fall back to his side. ‘We can meet at my place of work. Between clinics, so you wouldn’t have to put up with me for too long if I bore you.’ He raises his arm to offer the card again. ‘It’s not often that I invite women there.’
‘How often is not often?’
‘Not often as in never before. You’ll see why if you look.’
Fuck you, Ted, I think. Fuck your games and fuck your remoteness and fuck your impatience.
I squint at Adam for a few seconds. To my surprise, my own arm rises and somehow the card is in my hand. I glance at it. Dr Adam Holderness, Consultant Psychiatrist. He is based in the secure mental hospital outside of town, where Jason Thorne is indefinitely confined. He probably thinks I ought to be an inmate. I suppose it’s inevitable that in a house stuffed with doctors, at least one of them would work there.
‘It’s a great place to meet for coffee,’ he says.
I am making silent fun of myself in a bad bleak way. I decided in the woods this morning that I would write a letter to one of the most horrifying serial killers in recent decades, asking if I can visit him. What normal woman thinks it is good news that she may have improved her chances of getting access to such a man?
I don’t need Adam Holderness for that access, but having him behind me might help. It occurs to me that he probably knows who I am, but is being too polite to say. It is all too likely that Brian or Sadie told him. If so, he must guess that I will be drawn to his hospital by a more powerful force than a love of caffeine or a wish to date him.
I say, ‘Do you find that your acquaintance with Jason Thorne is much of an inducement?’
‘Only to an extremely select crowd. I tend to keep that one quiet.’
I fantasise a picture of Luke, proud of me, and happy, finding you at last, running into your arms, smiling at me over your shoulder. But I cannot stop a vision of what his response will be if the truth I discover is a dark one. And I cannot help but consider that if by some miracle we do find you alive, you will take Luke away from me.
The unexpected thing, though, since I made my promise to Luke this morning, is that the terrible visions of what Thorne might have done to you have stopped. Before that promise, nothing I tried would block them – last week’s headlines brought them on with a relentlessness that I couldn’t figure out how to fight.
‘You know what I do,’ Adam says. ‘How about you? Or is your job classified?’
‘Hardly mysterious. I’m a personal safety advisor and trainer. Mostly I work with victims, but also sometimes with family members of victims.’
‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I remember Brian mentioning that. For a private charity your family founded?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sounds like important work. And difficult.’
‘I get a lot of support from my mother. She does most of the admin, usually the helpline messages.’
‘She must be very organised.’
‘She has on occasion been described that way.’ You would say, If organised means control freak bossy, then yes. But I have already confided more to this man than I do to most. ‘Please excuse me. I need to go, Dr Holderness.’ I use his title and surname to impose formality and distance, but it comes out like a flirtatious tease.
‘What about that coffee?’
‘I like coffee,’ I say. This seems flirtatious too. It is a register I didn’t know I had. It is not the register I was trying for. Again I sound like you.
‘So do I. Goodbye for now, Ella.’ With these words he steps away and disappears into the kitchen so I don’t have to do any more work at extracting myself. It occurs to me that Adam Holderness has an instinct for doing many of the things that I like men to do. Most of them involve not invading my space bubble.
Sadie makes her presence felt in the hallway, though I have been aware of her hovering at the edge of the kitchen, arms crossed and glaring at me, during the last minute of my talk with Adam Holderness.
I say, ‘Why are you so angry? I’m trying to be understanding, but you’re pushing it.’
‘It is no longer possible to trust anything you say.’ She swallows hard. ‘You’re so impulsive.’
‘Sadie—’
She cuts me off. ‘I never know what you’re going to do next. When you’re around I’m constantly on edge. Do you think it’s normal to beat up my guests?’
‘He deserved it.’
‘My boyfriend’s brother deserved for you to knock him over?’
‘I didn’t knock him over. I adjusted things to get him to take his hand off my ass. I didn’t know who he was but it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had.’
‘It was embarrassing. So was watching you crawl all over Adam Holderness. At least he got you to leave Brian alone.’
In a flash, Sadie has moved from ambivalent affection to naked hatred. I have seen her do this to other people. At last, after a period of grace that has lasted longer than I ever expected it to, Brian’s wandering eye has triggered her rage at me.
‘How much have you drunk tonight?’ I say.
‘Two glasses of wine. I don’t need alcohol to see you clearly for what you are.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘Brian belongs to me. I should know by now how little such things mean to you. You never stopped running after Ted while he was married.’
‘That was cruel. You know it’s not true.’
‘How dare you flirt with my boyfriend under my nose? How dare you meet up with him behind my back?’ She steps towards me.
I step away, trying to keep space between us, repeating the manoeuvre I used a few minutes earlier with her would-be brother-in-law. ‘You can’t seriously believe that.’
‘If it’s not about your sister it’s about making sure every man in the room is watching you. You’ll do anything for attention.’
I am starting to shake, but with anger more than hurt. ‘Get out of my way so I can leave.’
‘Are you actually ashamed of the things you do? Do you know how sick you are? You’re sick. Sick sick sick.’
‘I told you to get out of my way,’ I say. ‘Don’t make me make you.’
‘Going to practise your self-defence on me? Or do you only beat up boys?’ She shoves me so hard I crash backwards into the door. I look up to see her towering over me. ‘Get out of my face, you sick fraud.’
A tiny, disinterested part of me is fascinated by the question of whether I only beat up boys, because it is something I have never considered before. I have no doubt that I could send Sadie flying, despite her big advantage over me in height and weight. But could I push back at a woman? Everything about me centres on protecting women, but if my life depended on it, yes. Certainly if Luke’s did.
Sadie does not deserve to know any of this. I choose not to shove back, but I close over, giving her nothing more than the silence she is now earning.
‘You’re so fake,’ she says. ‘Even what you have people call you is fake. You’re not Ella. You’re Melanie. Melanie, Melanie, Melanie.’
‘You