“Do you know why?”
“I’ve always had my suspicions,” he says. “Which I fear are about to be realized—he said he had something to tell me.”
“That he doesn’t want to take to his grave with him?” I ask, careful to curb my mounting alarm. Jacob’s still on very shaky ground and the last thing he needs is someone to come along and throw a hand grenade at his feet. Especially if it’s just to assuage their own guilt by burdening him with it instead.
“Mmm,” he murmurs thoughtfully.
“Just be careful,” I offer. “And whatever he has to say, try not to let it affect you.”
He forces a smile. “I don’t think there’s anything that anyone can say that will shock me anymore.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I say to myself skeptically.
“I’ve never noticed that before,” he says, changing the subject and nodding his head in the direction of the print of the New York skyline hanging on the wall.
“It’s been there a month or so,” I say, clearing my throat. “A client bought it for me.”
“I was pretty sure you were from the east coast, but thought it might be Philadelphia.”
“No, born and bred in New York,” I say. “Well, Long Island, to be specific.”
“Ah, I remember going there when the kids were little,” he says, smiling fondly at the memory. “It was a great day. Until we couldn’t find the restaurant we’d booked, and then all hell broke loose.”
He looks at me, his eyes full of sadness and regret that the good memories he has are so quickly marred.
“When you think of her now, how do you feel?” I ask.
He sighs and sits on the sofa again. “Deep down, I know she is a bitter, twisted woman, who at best is psychotic and at worst downright dangerous.”
A small step forward.
“But I must have been the driving force of her anger and temper,” he goes on. “It started with me and finished with me—and I will never forgive myself for what went on in between.”
Two steps back.
“You did everything in your power to protect the children,” I remind him. “The fact that you still have a relationship with them now, when she barely sees them, is testament to that. They don’t blame you for what she put them through, so why would you?”
He shrugs his shoulders and looks at me with sad eyes. “As I said, I guess it’s just going to take me some time to stop taking the rap for her behavior and apologizing for everything I do.”
“How do you think she’s holding up?” I ask. “Do you think about that at all?”
He nods. “I keep wondering what’s going through her head. She must have been so shocked when she came home to find me gone. She wouldn’t have believed it possible, and the fact that she doesn’t know where I am will have her going out of her mind. Everything in her life is controlled; we all have our place in it and if we’re not where she wants us, there’s hell to pay.”
“Do you honestly believe she would come looking for you?”
“As I say, I’m sleeping with one eye open.” He forces a smile. “But when I think about it rationally, I know she’s going to have to look really hard to find me because, thanks to your help, I couldn’t have covered my tracks any better than I have.”
He looks at me as if searching for confirmation and I nod. Even with the keenest eye and the most dogged determination, she’d have a job to find him.
But as I think of the lengths we have gone to, I’m struck by the thought that she, the woman who doesn’t even have a name, might be prepared to go one step further.
I glance at the cabinet that holds my clients’ deepest secrets, the drawer that should have protected Jacob’s thoughts and fantasies still ajar, and a sudden chill wraps itself around me.
“So again,” he goes on, oblivious to my rising panic, “it’s just going to take some time for me to relax and know that she’ll never find me.”
A breath catches in my throat as I wonder if she already has.
3
As much as I hate to admit it, I barely hear anything my next few clients say, so distracted am I by the sickening realization that someone might have been in my office.
As soon as I’m alone, I hastily lock the door and set about trying to quieten the thumping in my chest that’s reverberating in my ears. I go through the L–R drawer again in a desperate search for Jacob’s file. It has to be here somewhere.
I check every other drawer, allowing for the possibility that I’d somehow put it back in the wrong place. But it’s not been haphazardly thrown among the A–Ks or the S–Zs, which, for someone who has a set place for everything, is somewhat of a relief. I can’t believe I’d rather the file have been taken than have my normally meticulous business practices questioned.
I try to convince myself that I might have taken his folder up to the house, though even as I’m walking up the path I know how unlikely that is, especially with what’s been going on. I wouldn’t have risked Leon seeing it, even in all its innocence, as whether I want to admit it or not, I have gone out of my way to avoid talking about any of my clients in the past week, for fear of the conversation turning to the man who needed somewhere to stay. Would I confess that the same man was currently ensconced in our flat? That I’d valued Jacob’s safety more than Leon’s wishes?
I sometimes wonder why Leon can’t see it from my side, especially after everything I’ve been through. He knows that this is more than just a job to me; that it’s my life’s work to save everyone I can from situations they don’t deserve to be in. But, like my clients say, “You’ll never understand what it feels like to be in that position until you’ve been there yourself.” Little do they know that I have, and Leon would do well to remember that every once in a while.
Perhaps then, I wouldn’t feel the need to keep things from him; to hide the fact that I got Melanie Langley pushed up the emergency rehousing list, by agreeing to take on three Women’s Aid cases in return. Or that I voluntarily man the Domestic Abuse national helpline one afternoon a week.
He can’t understand why, when I’ve come from where I have, I would want to take myself back there, through someone else’s experience. But that’s exactly why I do it. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing, any more than Santa Claus could stay at home on Christmas Eve.
“I just want to be able to protect you,” Leon had said to me after my run-in with Sarah’s husband. “You can’t chase all the monsters away. You’ve defeated your own—he will never darken your door again—but you can’t save everyone.”
But couldn’t I at least try?
Though now, as I sift through the disarray of paperwork on the dining table, seeing no sign of Jacob’s case file, I can’t help but wonder if he was right after all.
Could Jacob’s wife be so driven to know where he is that she’d come to my office and steal his file? It’s unlikely; she doesn’t know I even feature in her husband’s life, least of all that I’ve been privy to everything that she’s done to him.
Whenever he came to see me, he had gone to painstaking lengths to get here without been seen or followed. He always made sure to leave the school by the back door and had taken two buses, so as not to move his car from its prominent parking space in front of the assembly hall.
He’d leave his phone at work too, so that she couldn’t track him, because as soon as he was on the move and going in any direction, she’d be calling him, asking where he was going. He couldn’t even go to get a sandwich without her questioning him, so there was no way he was going to let her find out he was seeing me.
I rifle under Leon’s books and papers, which have taken up residency on the dining table over the past few weeks. I lift my laptop up and check the chairs, all the time trying to quell the sense of unease that is snaking its way up from my stomach to my chest.
“What you looking for?” asks Leon, taking me by surprise. I hadn’t even realized he was in the house.