The irony of her choice of phrasing didn’t pass her by. She had changed her surname to Lane in an attempt to escape her former life, now here she was, immersed back in it, and all her own doing.
‘I told you before not to come back, and I meant it. You can’t keep your meddling little nose out, can you? You were always the black sheep of our family. Always the one to question everything. Thinking you knew it all. Leading your brother astray.’
At the mention of Luke, Chloe felt her pulse quicken. She knew that ‘astray’ referred to his relationship with Emily. She hadn’t been the one to lead Luke astray. Luke had been pushed that way by a childhood ruined by rules and routine and punishment. He had sought affection, love, in an attempt to replace all that had been missing whilst growing up. If they hadn’t liked what Luke had become, it had been all their own doing.
‘And now you’ve truly shown yourself up for what you really are. Tabloid whore.’
Her father’s face had turned a deep crimson, as though even the words embarrassed him. He was trembling slightly, as though blaming her for having been reduced to such use of language.
At her sides, Chloe’s hands clenched into fists. What would it feel like? How satisfying might it be if she were to hit him, to launch her fury at him, let him pay for every time he had raised a hand to her or Luke? She had lost her brother, her best friend. She had lost her career.
What did any of it matter now? What was there left to lose?
‘What did I ever do to you?’
An unexpected sadness swept out with her words. This anger she felt wasn’t borne out of hatred. Somewhere, in another life, it had been borne out of love. She had loved her father as any daughter might. He had berated her: she had loved him. He had punished her: she had loved him. He had shunned her and she had continued to love him, still desperately seeking his approval. She had only ever wanted him to stop. She had only ever wanted him to be the man she had once thought he was, back when she had been young enough to be easily deceived.
His face softened, for a moment, and in that moment Chloe saw her other father: the father who had made himself known on rare occasions. He had made sandcastles one summer: a summer over twenty years ago that Chloe was still able to remember despite the fact that she had been so young. He had helped Luke bury his pet gerbil, making a wooden cross to mark the grave at the bottom of the garden. He had read Chloe stories. There had been good times, once upon a time. She might have tried to fool herself into believing it had all been bad, but she realised that was a lie. Nobody was ever all bad, not completely. Wife beaters ran bubble baths and made candlelit dinners. Child abusers played games and told stories, made their victims feel as though there was nobody in the world more special.
Then his expression changed, the soft edges gone, never truly there. And there it was, Chloe thought. There was the lie. You couldn’t be both: both bad and good. You could be good and do a bad thing – you could be bad and do a good thing – but one or the other had to be the true you, the real you, the one that was inherently in you, impossible to ever really remove or disguise.
Any good was a lie, Chloe thought. This was his true version: the one who sneered and gloated and belittled. And she had stopped seeking his approval a long time ago.
‘Why Marcross?’
‘What?’ Her father’s face creased, heavy lines forming across his forehead.
‘Luke,’ she reminded him, as though he had somehow managed to forget the location of his son’s supposed suicide. ‘Marcross. Why there? Had he ever even been there before? Why would he choose there?’
‘You can’t let it go, can you?’ he said, his voice wobbling on the words.
She hadn’t imagined it: he had flinched. It had been so brief that it might easily have gone unnoticed, but she had been looking for it and it had been there. At the mention of Marcross. At the mention of that night.
Something.
‘How can you let it go? He’s your son. Don’t you want to know what really happened that night?’
‘I know what happened,’ her father snapped. He crossed the room towards her, making Chloe start. His hands gripped her shoulders. ‘Your brother killed that girl. Why can’t you accept it? He might not have meant to, but he did. He killed her. He bloody well strangled the life out of her. He knew he wasn’t going to get away with it and he didn’t want to face up to the consequences.’
He was shaking Chloe, his fingertips pressed into the shallow dips above her collarbones. In that moment, she hated what she knew he could see. Fear. Her twelve-year-old self back again, scared of this man. This man she had just wanted to love her.
She did what she had never been able to back then. She fought back. Her knee rose instinctively and slammed between her father’s legs. As he groaned and leaned forward, she shoved him with such force that he staggered into the coffee table and fell back, dazed, on to the sofa. He exhaled loudly through his mouth, breathing away the momentary pain she had inflicted.
There was an awkward moment when father and daughter stared one another out, like some ridiculous cowboy film, each waiting for the other to make a move for a pistol from a back pocket. She had braced herself, expecting her father to react, to make a lunge for her, but he did neither. He sat on the sofa, puffing like an old man as he tried to catch his breath.
‘The porn,’ he managed to stammer beneath breaths.
‘The what?’
‘The porn your mother found.’
Chloe looked down at her father, contempt consuming her. Luke had told her about the magazine his mother had found. He’d been fourteen at the time. He told Chloe how their mother had held his head under water to wash out his eyes. She treated him so cruelly: even more so, it seemed, when neither Chloe nor her father was there to see it.
Was that her father’s explanation for events? Was that his justification for believing his own son had been capable of his girlfriend’s murder?
Just after Emily’s death, Luke had turned up at the flat where Chloe had been living. He had sat on the edge of Chloe’s bed, red-faced and tear-stained, a sixteen-year-old boy suspected of murder. Luke had been inconsolable. He had sobbed through his words, retching on them as he explained how their mother and father had accused him of being depraved. They had wanted him to admit it. They wanted him to confess to what had happened: that he and ‘that girl’ had engaged in some warped, sick sex game and he had accidentally strangled her. He had panicked, left her for dead; gone back. They wanted him to admit to them, and then to the police, exactly what he had done.
‘I swear to you, I never touched her. It wasn’t me, Chloe. I would never have hurt her.’
And Chloe had held her brother’s hand in hers and believed every word he told her.
She still believed him now. She had never stopped. He was an innocent. Nothing like her, regardless of anything their father might say.