A Traitor to Memory

Gideon deserved what other people had and took for granted, Libby told herself. He deserved friends. He deserved love. He deserved a family. He deserved a life. But he wasn't going to get any of that as long as Richard kept him under his thumb and as long as no one was willing to take positive action to alter the relationship Gideon had with his frigging father.

Libby stirred at that and realised her scalp was tingling. She rolled her head against the cupboard door so that she could look at the kitchen table. She'd left Gideon's car keys there when she'd dashed into the kitchen to admit defeat to her attack of the whites, and it seemed to her now that her possession of those keys was meant to be, like a sign from God that she'd been sent into Gideon's life to be the one who took a stand.

Libby got to her feet. She approached the keys in a state of pure resolution. She snatched them up from the table before she could talk herself out of it. She left the flat.

22





YASMIN EDWARDS SENT Daniel across the street to the Army Centre, a chocolate cake in his hands. He was surprised, considering how she'd reacted in the past to his lingering round the uniformed men, but he said, “Wicked, Mum!” and grinned at her and was gone in an instant to make what she'd called a thank-you visit to them. “Good of those blokes to offer you tea time to time,” she told her son, and if Daniel recognised the contradiction in this statement from her earlier fury at the idea of someone pitying her son, he didn't mention it.

Alone, Yasmin sat in front of the television set. She had the lamb stew simmering because—bloody fool that she was—she was still incapable of not doing what she'd said earlier she was going to do. She was also as unable to change her mind or to draw the line as she had been as Roger Edwards' girlfriend, his lover, his wife, and then as an inmate in Holloway Prison.

She wondered why now, but the answer lay before her in the hol-lowness she felt and the budding of a fear that she'd long ago buried. It seemed to her that her entire life had been described and dominated by that fear, a gripping terror of one thing that she'd been entirely unwilling to name, let alone to face. But all the running she'd done from the Bogey Man had only brought her to his embrace yet again.

She tried not to think. She wanted not to ponder the fact that she'd been reduced once more to discovering that there was no sanctuary no matter how determinedly she believed there would be.

She hated herself. She hated herself as much as she'd ever hated Roger Edwards and more—far more—than she hated Katja, who'd brought her to this mirror of a moment and asked her to gaze long and gaze hard. It made no difference that every kiss, embrace, act of love, and conversation had been built on a lie she could not have discerned. What mattered was that she, Yasmin Edwards, had even allowed herself to be a party to it. So she was filled with self-loathing. She was consumed by a thousand “I should've known's.”

When Katja came in, Yasmin glanced at the clock. She was right on time, but she would be, wouldn't she, because the one thing Katja Wolff wasn't blind to was what was going on within others. It was a survival technique she'd learned inside. So she'd have read a whole book from Yasmin's visit to the laundry that morning. Thus, she'd be home on the stroke of dinner time, and she'd be prepared.

What she'd be prepared for, Katja wouldn't know. That was the only advantage Yasmin had. The rest of the advantages were all her lover's, and the single most important one was exactly like a beacon that had long been shining although Yasmin had always refused to acknowledge it.

Single-mindedness. That Katja Wolff had always had a goal was what had kept her sane in prison. She was a woman with plans, and she'd always been that. “You must know what you want and who you will become when you are out of here,” she'd told Yasmin time and again. “Do not let what they have done to you become their triumph. That will happen if you fail.” Yasmin had learned to admire Katja Wolff for that stubborn determination to become who she'd always intended to become despite her situation. And then she'd learned to love Katja Wolff for the solid foundation of the future she represented for them both, even while held within prison walls.

She'd said to her, “You got twenty years in here. You think you're going to step outside and start designing clothes when you're forty-five years old?”

“I will have a life,” Katja had asserted. “I will prevail, Yas. I will have a life.”