Chapter 5 : The Man I thought I knew
1893 Words
I sat in that car for a long time after he hung up.
The engine was running. The heater was doing its job. Everything around me was completely functional and completely normal and I was sitting in the driver's seat of my own car outside a Marylebone café feeling like the ground had just opened up quietly beneath my feet.
He knew.
He knew.
I turned the heater off. Then on again. Then I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and I breathed the way Harriet had once told me to breathe before difficult conversations.slow, from the stomach, not the chest. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
It helped approximately nothing.
Catherine.
It had to be Catherine. She was the only other person who knew — apart from Rose and Harriet — and she had just spent forty minutes sitting across from me presenting herself as someone on my side. Someone done being used. Someone who just wanted to do the right thing.
And then she had gone straight to Dominic.
I laughed. It came out short and hollow and not particularly funny.
I had believed her.
Forty minutes. That was all it had taken. Forty minutes and a cup of tea I didn't finish and I had sat there thinking — she's not so bad. She's just a woman who got hurt. Just like me.
Rose had told me. She had said it clearly. whatever she tells you, she's telling you because it serves her. Rose had said it and I had nodded and walked into that café and believed every single word anyway.
I pulled out into the road.
I drove home.
And the whole way there I tried to figure out what Catherine's angle was. Because there was one. There was always one. She had handed me information about the contract, about my father, about the foundation of my marriage — and then in the same breath she had called Dominic and handed him the one piece of information I was not ready for him to have.
Why?
What did exposing both of us to each other accomplish for her?
I didn't have an answer yet. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty — I had walked into that café thinking Catherine Bennett was my problem.
She was something far more complicated than that.
I got home at two.
Dominic said tonight. That gave me a few hours and I used every single one of them.
I called Harriet first and told her Dominic knew. She was quiet for a moment and then she said — "Right. Change of plan. Before he comes to that house tonight I need you to understand something. You hold more power in this situation than you think you do. Don't let him walk in there and take it."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the contract your source described if that's real and provable — changes the entire nature of your divorce settlement. It means you entered that marriage under false pretences. That has legal weight, Lydia. Significant weight." A pause. "But only if you don't let him rattle you tonight before we've had the chance to build properly."
"So what do I do?"
"You listen," Harriet said. "You give nothing away. You let him talk and you remember everything he says and you call me the moment he leaves."
I wrote that down even though I didn't need to.
Listen. Give nothing away. Call Harriet.
Simple enough. Except nothing about Dominic Kane had ever been simple for me. Even now, even after everything, the thought of him sitting across from me in our. No. my — living room made something in my chest do things it had no business doing.
Three years. You don't just switch that off.
I wished you could.
Rose arrived at four with wine she knew I couldn't drink and chocolate she knew I could and she sat on the kitchen counter while I cleaned things that didn't need cleaning because I needed to do something with my hands.
"She told him," Rose said. It wasn't a question.
"She told him."
"I'm sorry." She said it simply. No I-told-you-so. That was Rose.
"Don't be. It's useful actually." I put down the cloth I had been using on the already-clean countertop. "Now I know exactly what she is. No more guessing."
"What is she?"
I thought about it for a moment. About Catherine in the café, steady and unhurried. About the way she had looked at me when she talked about being acquired. The tiredness in it. The almost-honesty.
"Dangerous," I said. "Not in the way I thought. Not loud. She's the kind of dangerous that sits quietly and waits and then moves when you're looking somewhere else."
Rose was quiet for a moment. "And Dominic?"
"He's coming at seven."
She straightened up. "I'll stay."
"No." I shook my head. "I need to do this alone."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she got off the counter and came and put both hands on my shoulders and looked at me the way she had when I was nine years old and terrified of something I can't even remember now.
"You are the strongest person I know," she said. "And I know you don't feel like it right now. But you are."
I nodded.
She pulled me into a hug, quick and tight.
Then she grabbed her bag and her undrunk wine and she left, and the house settled into the particular quiet of late afternoon, and I went upstairs and changed into something that was not what I had worn to meet Catherine.
Something that said this is my house.
And you are a guest in it.
He arrived at seven exactly.
I heard the car first — that specific sound of his engine, low and expensive — and I stayed sitting in the armchair by the fireplace and I did not go to the door. He had a key still. I had not asked for it back. He let himself in and I heard his footsteps in the hall and then he appeared in the doorway of the living room and stopped.
He looked — different.
Not bad. Dominic Kane never looked bad, that was one of his particular cruelties. But there was something around his eyes. Tightness. Something that might have been guilt or might have been calculation. With him I had never been entirely sure where one ended and the other began.
"Lydia," he said.
"You can sit down," I said. Like I was the one who lived here. Because I was.
He sat on the sofa across from me. Leaned forward with his elbows on his knees the way he did when he was trying to look open. Approachable. I had seen that posture a hundred times across a hundred conversations and I knew what it meant.
He wanted something.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Fine," I said. "You said you wanted to talk."
He looked at me. Something moved across his face — a flicker of something I couldn't name. "The baby, Lydia."
"What about it."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
I held his gaze. Steady. "We were divorced, Dominic. The papers were signed. You had moved on." I paused. "Quickly."
He had the grace to look away briefly. "I deserved that."
"You deserved considerably more than that," I said pleasantly. "But we can start there."
He was quiet for a moment. Turned his ring over in his fingers — habit, except he wasn't wearing it anymore. Old habit then. Something about that tiny detail, that absent ring, the automatic gesture of a hand reaching for something no longer there — something about it cracked something small and stupid open in my chest and I hated myself for it.
"I want to be involved," he said. "With the baby. I want—" he stopped. Looked up. "I know I have no right to walk back in here and make demands. I know that. But this is my child."
"Yes," I said. "It is."
"So what do we do?"
I looked at him. This man I had loved with embarrassing completeness. This man who had stood at an altar and made promises in front of everyone we knew and apparently in front of a business contract neither of us was supposed to know about.
"Before we talk about the baby," I said carefully, "I want to talk about something else."
Something shifted in his expression. Subtle. "What?"
"I want to talk about my father's company," I said. "And the Kane family. And the arrangement that was made three years ago."
The silence that followed was enormous.
Dominic went very still. It was the kind of still that told me everything I needed to know. No confusion on his face. No furrowing of the brow, no what are you talking about. Just — stillness. The stillness of a man who had been waiting for something to arrive and had just watched it walk through the door.
He knew that I knew.
"Lydia—" he started.
"Don't," I said quietly. "Please don't do the thing where you try to manage me. Not tonight. I'm tired of being managed."
He closed his mouth.
I let the silence sit for a moment. Then — "Was any of it real?" I asked. And I hated that I asked it. I hated that after everything I still needed to know. "The beginning. The flowers and the phone calls and the — was any of it real or was it just — performance? For the deal?"
Dominic looked at me for a long time.
And then he said something I did not expect.
"It started as performance," he said. Quietly. Without flinching. "But it didn't stay that way."
I stared at him.
"I know that doesn't fix anything," he said. "I know it probably makes it worse in some ways. But you asked me if it was real and I'm not going to sit here and lie to you. Not anymore." He held my gaze. "I did love you, Lydia. In whatever broken way I'm capable of loving someone — I loved you."
The fire crackled.
Outside, a car passed.
I sat there with that sentence inside me and I felt it do damage the way only true things can. Not the clean damage of a lie revealed. The messy, complicated damage of something real wrapped around something rotten.
He loved me.
And he had still done all of it.
I opened my mouth to respond —
And my phone rang.
I looked at the screen out of reflex. An unknown number. I would have ignored it. I almost did.
But something — the same small cruel instinct that had made me reach into his jacket pocket at the gala — made me pick it up.
"Lydia Ashford?" The voice on the other end was a woman I didn't recognise. Professional. Clipped. The voice of someone who delivered information for a living.
"Yes," I said slowly.
"My name is Dr. Patel. I'm calling from St. Mary's Hospital." A brief pause. "I'm calling regarding your father. Edward Ashford. He was brought in this evening." Another pause, shorter this time.
"He's had a cardiac arrest. You need to come now."
The call went shut.
- Writer
