Page 129 of A Dark Fall

I want to return his smile, but the lump in my throat is almost suffocating, and the tears are threatening to appear again. So, I turn my back on him and face the sink instead.

“How was the zoo?” I ask in a voice I don’t even recognize. How was the zoo? Has there ever been a more banal question asked at such a moment?

“Busy, overpriced. But he loved it. Think penguins are his new favorite thing now. Spoke about them all the way home.” I hear the note of concern in his voice.

With my back still turned, I nod, reaching my hands under the water to rinse them before squirting them with some more hand soap and repeating the process.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

I swallow and bite down hard on my lip to stop the tears from rolling down my face.

“Alex?”

Christ,I need to hold it together here. We can’t have any kind of conversation if I’m an incoherent mess.

Suddenly, I feel his hands on me, and he spins me around to face him. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?” His eyes are narrowed with worry.

Oh, Jake,you should be worried. I have no clue how to start this conversation. “Tell me about the time you were in prison” isn’t appropriate, and “Did you beat and rape the woman who stabbed you?” aren’t words I will ever be able to say to him.

“Alex, answer me. What’s wrong?” His voice is louder now, and it jolts me into myself.

Drying my hands on the dish towel first, I walk over slowly to the dining table and lift the envelope, turning to hold it out to him. He looks down at it with some confusion before taking it from me. Then, keeping his eyes on mine, he opens it and pulls out its contents.

For the first time, I see the file isn’t overly large. There are maybe ten or so bits of paper, a few with a different shinier material that I can see are photos. My stomach turns as I consider what those photos might be of since I can only see the reverse of them.

I don’t pay much attention to the bits of paper anyway as Jake leafs through them. Instead, I watch his face. Outside of sex and anger, his eyes have always been difficult for me to read, so adept at hiding his emotions from me, so I expect them to give nothing away here either.

How wrong I am.

They widen with shock and disbelief, the sun-kissed flush draining quickly from his face. Then his eyes darken, his nostrils flaring as a hard line settles over his mouth. When he looks up at me again, he’s utterly furious.

“Where the fuck did you get this?” he asks. As always when he’s angry, his rough East End accent peppers every single syllable.

I frown, deciding not to answer that question. “Is what’s in there true? Is that you?”

His mouth twitches as his gaze deepens. He doesn’t say anything for several long, torturous seconds. “What do you think?” he asks finally. “You read it. Is it me?”

How do I tell him I was too much of a coward to read it? I look down at my hands.

“Well, I’m gonna guess by the way you can barely fucking look at me, you think that it is.”

“I never read it.”

When I look up, he’s smiling coldly. “You’re a fucking liar. Why wouldn’t you read it?”

I narrow my eyes on him. He has the nerve to callmea liar? “Believe what you want, Jake, but I never read it. I never read it because I wanted to hear it from you. I always wanted to hear it from you.” Except, deep down, I wonder if I am indeed a liar, because I never wanted to hearthisfrom him.

His eyes soften, and he blinks a few times before he begins to chew his lip hard from the inside. He’s thinking. About how to do this, perhaps. About what to say. How best to present it to me. Which words to choose. How much toshare.As he does, I say the same thing over and over in my head. A mantra.Please tell me the truth. Please let the truth be something manageable. Please tell me the truth. Please let the truth be something manageable.

“So, you know nothing about what’s in here?” He holds the papers up.

“Mark told me you were in prison and that you had a criminal record. That’s all I know,” I lie. I can’t mention the woman. I’m not ready to go there yet.

His eyes narrow and darken again. “Mark?Who the fuck’s Mark?” He rolls the name around in his mouth for a moment until he remembers. I know the second he does because his eyes snap back to me. “Dan’s brother? He gave you this?” He’s nodding now, so I see no point in confirming what he just said. “Course he fucking did.” He squeezes his eyes closed with his fingers then runs a hand over his mouth and licks his lips. “Fucking hell.”

“Was he lying?” I ask after what feels like a long period of time.

He turns his head and looks at me, studying every inch of my face for what feels like hours before finally, he shakes his head. “No. He wasn’t lying.”