He leaves, locking the door behind him. Although I’m glad that Mrs Goodrich sent the email, because it means I’ll get to see Millie again, uneasiness settles in. We’ve never been summoned to the school before. Millie knows she mustn’t say a word, but sometimes I wonder if she really understands. She has no idea of how much is at stake, because how could I ever tell her?
The need to find a solution to the nightmare we are caught up in—the nightmare that I let us be caught up in—presses down on me and I force myself to take deep breaths, not to panic. I have almost four months, I remind myself, four months to find that window of opportunity and to somehow get me and Millie through it by myself, because there is no one to help us. The only people who might have been able to—because some primal maternal or paternal instinct may have told them I was in trouble—are now on the other side of the world, encouraged to move there even more rapidly than they’d intended by Jack.
He is so clever, so very clever. Everything I have ever told him, he has used against me. I wish I’d never told him of my parents’ horror when Millie was born. Or how they were counting the days until I fulfilled my promise of having Millie to live with me so that they could finally move to New Zealand. It allowed him to play on their dread that I would somehow renege on the promise I’d made and that they would end up having to look after Millie themselves. The weekend he asked me to take him to see my parents, it wasn’t to ask my father for my hand in marriage but rather to tell him that I’d been talking about Millie going to New Zealand with them, as I wanted to get married and start a family of my own. When my father had almost died of shock, Jack suggested it might be an idea for them to emigrate sooner rather than later, effectively erasing the only people who might have been able to help me.
I sit down on the bed, wondering how I’m going to get through the rest of the evening and then the night. Sleep won’t come, not when there’s the meeting with Mrs Goodrich hanging over me. Looking at it objectively, it would be the perfect opportunity to blurt out the truth, that Jack is keeping me prisoner, that he means untold harm to Millie, and beg her to help me, to call the police. But I have already been there, I have already done that, and I know to my cost that at this very minute Jack will be planning my downfall should I so much as breathe differently during the meeting. Not only will I end up humiliated and more desperate than I already am, Jack will make sure to exact his revenge. I hold my hands out in front of me and the shaking that I can’t control tells me what I’ve only just begun to realise but what Jack has known all along—that fear is the best deterrent of all.
PAST
‘What do you mean?’ I asked as I sat on the edge of the bed in our hotel room, wondering why, when he had given me the choice of going to the hospital to see Millie or carrying on to Thailand with him, I had believed, despite everything that had happened since our wedding, that he was still a good man.
‘Exactly what I said—there is no housekeeper.’
I sighed, too tired for his rigmaroles. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’
‘A story. A story about a young boy. Would you like to hear it?’
‘If it means that you’ll let me leave, yes, I’d love to hear it.’
‘Good.’ He drew up the one chair in the room and sat down in front of me.
‘There was once a young boy who lived in a country far, far away from here with his mother and father. When he was very young, the boy feared the strong and powerful father, and loved the mother. But when he saw that the mother was weak and useless and unable to protect him from the father, the boy began to despise her, and rejoiced in the look of terror in her eyes as the father dragged her down to the cellar to be locked in with the rats.
‘The knowledge that the father could instil such terror into another human being turned the boy’s fear of him into admiration and he began to emulate him. Soon, the sound of his mother’s screams coming up through the floorboards became music to his ears, and the smell of her fear the richest perfume. Such was the effect it had on him that he began to crave it, so that when the father left him in charge the boy would take the mother down to the cellar, her pleas for mercy as she begged him not to leave her there only serving to excite him. And afterwards, as he drank in the sound of her fear and breathed in the smell of it, he wished he could keep her there for eternity.