My shoes leave wet footprints on their perfect floorboards as I rush through to the study, but I don’t care. I don’t care if David figures out that I’ve been here. I’m done with him.
‘Adele,’ I say, shaking her shoulder gently. ‘Adele, wake up. It’s me.’ Her head lolls forward and for an awful gut-wrenching moment I think she’s dead, and then I see the very gentle rise of breath in her chest. I grab her hand – her fingers are cold. How long has she been sitting here?
‘Adele!’ I bark her name out. ‘Wake up!’ Still nothing. I’m rubbing warmth into her hand and I think I might have to slap her around the face or something drastic. Should I call an ambulance? Try to get her to throw up? I shake her again, much harder this time, and for a moment I think it’s not going to work, and then she sits up ramrod straight in the chair, her hands gripping the arms. She gasps loudly, as if she’s been drowning, and her eyes fly open.
It’s so dramatic that I stumble backwards. ‘Shit, Adele.’
She stares at me like I’m a stranger, and then she blinks. The tension goes out of her spine and she looks around as she pants, her breath still ragged. ‘What are you doing here, Louise?’
‘I let myself in. You weren’t answering the doorbell and I could see you through the window. Are you okay?’
‘You’re soaked,’ she says, still disoriented. ‘You need a towel.’
‘I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about. How many pills did you take this morning?’
‘Just one. I was …’ She frowns, collecting her thoughts, ‘I thought I’d look in here again, for, I don’t know, something. Anything. Then I felt really tired so I sat down.’
‘I thought you were flipping dead,’ I say, and then laugh, my nerves needing a release. ‘Anyway, his file on you isn’t in here.’ She focuses then.
‘What?’
‘It’s in his office. I went and looked. But first,’ I take her arm and help her out of the chair, ‘you need coffee.’
We stay in the kitchen, clutching mugs of coffee, the continuing downpour outside pattering against the windows as I tell her what I found, talking quietly and slowly so she can take it all in.
‘The thing is,’ I say, in a long pause after I’ve finished, ‘these notes he’s been keeping go back pretty much ten years. I thought maybe he was trying to get you sectioned to keep your money, but that would be a more recent thing, surely? He couldn’t have been planning that all this time. I mean, could he? It doesn’t make any sense.’
Adele stares straight ahead, her face filled with sadness. ‘It makes sense to me,’ she says eventually. ‘It’s an insurance policy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I did have some problems when I was younger, after my parents, after Westlands, but that’s not it. That’s not why he’s got this file. It’s about Rob.’
I frown, confused. ‘What about Rob?’
‘It’s insurance in case I decide to voice my suspicions about what happened to him. Who would anyone believe? The respectable doctor or his crazy lady wife?’
‘I don’t get it.’ This is a new twist in their crazy marriage. ‘What happened to Rob?’
‘Rob’s our unspoken secret,’ she says, and then lets out a long sigh. She looks small in the chair, narrower with her shoulders hunched, as if she’s trying to fold in on herself and disappear. She’s thinner too. Vanishing.
‘I want to show you something,’ she says. She gets up and I follow her as she leads me up the stairs.
My heart is racing. Am I finally going to learn what’s at the core of this marriage that’s entangled me? I follow her into the large master bedroom, high ceilinged and airy, with an en-suite in the corner. Everything in it is elegant, from the metal-framed bed, sturdy and wide and clearly from somewhere like Liberty’s rather than some lightweight chain-brand copy, to the Egyptian cotton duvet set, a deep brown off-setting the olive green of the walls and the rich worn wood of the floor. On a feature wall behind the chest of drawers, three thick stripes of varied greens run from floor to ceiling. I could never be this stylish.
‘It was all magnolia when we moved in,’ she says. ‘Some off-white shade anyway.’ She’s looking at the walls, thoughtful and reflective. ‘I chose these colours to test him. They’re the colours of the woods on my parents’ estate. We never go back there. Not since I was there after Westlands. Not since Rob came to visit.’ She brushes her fingers across the walls as if feeling the bark of a tree rather than cool plaster.
‘He refuses to sell it even though it’s just sitting there, empty and forgotten.’ She’s talking softly, as much to herself as to me. ‘I think that’s part of the reason he’d be reluctant to give control of my money back. He knows I’ll get rid of it. And that’s too much of a risk.’
‘What happened to Rob?’ I ask as my heart races. She turns to me then, wide-eyed and beautiful, and spills out her answer as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to say.