Where the Memories Lie

 

Where the Memories Lie An image of Chris popped into my head. When I’d found him on the front step had he actually been here planting the necklace?

 

Was he the one Tom had really been protecting all these years? When I’d shown it to him, he’d seemed genuinely surprised, but was he just a good liar, like Tom? We only had Chris’s word that she was even wearing the necklace that day, and he’d been very descriptive about it after all this time. Had he really remembered it that well or had he lied about it so he could plant incriminating evidence to frame Tom or Ethan?

 

I didn’t know what to think anymore. The only thing I did know with certainty was that I didn’t want to be in the same house as Ethan at that moment. I needed some time to get my head around this.

 

I paced up and down. Should I call the police and let them deal with it? But Ethan wasn’t just my husband; he was also the father of my child. Anna had been through enough already in the last week; how would she react if her dad was accused of murder in the midst of everything else? It would shatter her already fragile emotions to smithereens. Somehow I had to protect her from the fallout.

 

I glanced up as Ethan appeared in the lounge doorway carrying a small suitcase, his eyes cold and dark. There he stood, familiar and yet alien at the same time.

 

‘I’m going to stay in a hotel. Tell Anna I’m working in York.

 

I can’t . . . I can’t be anywhere near you right now.’

 

I opened my mouth to scream something back – probably ‘Good!’, which would just sound childish – but my murdering husband etiquette was also apparently in need of some work.

 

But is he really a murderer?

 

I braced myself for the slam of the front door but it closed with a soft click and the Range Rover started on the driveway.

 

261

 

Sibel Hodge

 

Nausea erupted in my stomach and I ran to the bathroom where I was violently sick. My eyes stung and my throat burned as I retched again and again. When I was empty and spent, I sank to my knees on the floor, buried my head in my hands and sobbed. For myself, for Anna, for Charlotte, for Nadia and Lucas, and for a girl whose life had been cruelly snatched away from her.

 

262

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty

 

 

I lay in bed on my side, examining Anna’s sleeping face in the splashes of moonlight that filtered through the window. Her snub nose, the chicken pox scar on her left temple, the beauty spot on her right cheek. I remembered the night she was born. In an attempt to take my mind off the labour pains, Ethan was prancing around in the delivery suite, pretending to be a ballet dancer, doing pliés and pirouettes, singing any songs that were baby related. He started off with Salt N Pepper’s Push It. And I think he gave Queen’s I Want to Break Free a go before butchering Curiosity Killed the Cat’s Hang on in There, Baby. He had me in stitches in the middle of a contraction, although I couldn’t completely laugh my head off because I was in so much pain and trying hard to breathe.

 

How would she cope if Ethan was taken away and put in prison? How could I be the one to put Anna in that position? She would hate me forever.

 

I’d do anything for her. She was my life. My miracle. Anything I could do to protect her, I would do in a second. And wasn’t that what Tom had been trying to tell me, too?

 

The questions chased each other round and round in my head as I curled into a ball. What had gone through Tom’s head when Sibel Hodge