Page 76 of Beautiful Ugly
Kitty smiles and nods. “I do.” The smile fades. “The only problem is what you did to Abby. I need to know why.”
I am my own worst enemy but I am also my own best friend. I say nothing.
“We can sit here all night if you want,” Kitty says, lighting another cigarette. “I’m not going anywhere and neither are you, so—”
“I loved Abby but she was going to leave me,” I blurt out.
Kitty frowns and exhales a cloud of smoke. “Why would you think that?”
“I found a pregnancy test in the bin at our home. It was positive.”
“You didn’t want a baby?”
“I’d had a vasectomy to make sure she didn’t get pregnant, so I knew she had been cheating on me. She’d been behaving strangely for months, and was always coming home late. Abby was clearly having an affair. She was siphoning off money from our bank account, and was secretly plotting to abandon me, just like my parents did. Everyone I love leaves me in the end. I loved her so much it hurt. All I wanted was for us to be alone together.”
“So you pushed her off a cliff?”
“Ifsheleft me, so would you have,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell me that you would have carried on being my agent if your goddaughter divorced me. You would have abandoned me too. It wouldn’t have just been the end of my marriage, Abby leaving me would have meant the end of my career. But if shedied, if it looked like she had killed herself like her mother did, then I thought you’d feel sorry for me and be my agent forever.”
Kitty’s cigarette hovers in midair. She stares at me as though she thinks I am unhinged.
“I still don’t understand why you thought Abby was going to leave you?”
“She was pregnant with another man’s child, of course she was going to leave me.”
“Oh, Grady,” Kitty says, her voice dressed in disappointment. “I guess there is no cure for human nature.”
“She should have been at home with me, waiting for the call about my book being a bestseller. I am sorry for what I did, more sorry than you’ll ever know. I just snapped.”
“I believe that you’re sorry, but you didn’t just snap. You planned the whole thing. You knew that Abby was recording all of her incoming calls because of the threats she had received. Those recorded calls were the biggest piece of evidence the police had, listening to her describe the person lying in the road while she was on the phone to you at home a mile away. But you weren’t at home, were you? You walked to the cliff road after the call with your publishers and me. And you knew exactly where Abby was and what time she would arrive there, because of the app you installed on her phone.”
“If she hadn’t been ‘working late’ again it wouldn’t have happened. She was probably with him, the father of her child. I’m not the only one to blame.”
“There was no other man, Grady. Abbywaspregnant, but shewasn’tsleeping with someone else.”
My defense briefly loses momentum, but the betrayal I felt then and now soon reignites.
“I’ve seen the baby and I don’t think it was an immaculate conception,” I say.
“The money that she’d been withdrawing from your joint bank account was for IVF, using a donor, and in secret, because she desperately wanted to have a baby before she was forty, and she knew that you didn’t. Abby wanted to tell you but only if it worked, and then when it did, she didn’t know how. She didn’t want to spoilyourbig moment the week your book became a bestseller, so she was going to tell you the next day. Abby loved you, only you. She just wanted to give you the family you never had growing up. You had it all but you were too busy worrying about what you didn’t have to notice.”
I feel like all the air has been forced out of my lungs.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“I’m sure you are, but I’m not here for an apology. Abby loved you. And now she hates you. And so do I,” Kitty says. “I bet you’ve spent your whole life since then looking over your shoulder. Without a body being washed up, you must have wondered if she was out there somewhere, and worried yourself sick that all of this might come back to haunt you. And now it has. No wonder you couldn’t sleep. And no wonder you couldn’twrite. Sometimes I think you’ve been punished enough already, that there might be another way for you to make up for what you did. Other days, I’d happily let them bury you too.”
“I’m not a bad person. I just did a bad thing.”
“Do you think you’re agoodperson? Abby hitched rides all the way to the Scottish Highlands after you did what you did. She was pregnant, scared, heartbroken, and alone. All she had were the clothes on her back and a survival instinct, which guided her home to Amberly. The person she loved most in the world tried to kill her, and I think something got broken in her mind. She didn’t want to be a journalist anymore, she didn’t want to save the world from itself anymore, she just needed to save herself. She waited for the ferry on the mainland, and Sandy knew who she was the second she saw her. She and Midge took her in and helped her to start again with a new job and a new life. They helped her when the baby was born too, took her to the hospital on the mainland. And now she has a new family. I don’t care if you’regood. My client list would be rather short if I only represented good people. I only care whether you can write.
“Abby is happy here, Grady. It’s her home again now. And it could be yours too, but only if you can carry on writing books I can sell. The island needs an income or they’ll have to open to tourists all year long, and nobody wants that. Can you do it?”
I stare at her. “I just want to go home and for things to be how they were before.”