CHAPTER 69
I stopped Mike before we walked back into the police station. We hadn’t spoken since taking Petra back. This whole thing, right down to being inside April’s sunflower-soup nursery, had felt so emotionally draining, and now I was just exhausted.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, knowing that he probably didn’t.
He shook his head.
“Must have been hard, being inside that nursery,” I said, persisting a little, when I probably shouldn’t have. Perhaps I was overstepping a line here.
But when he turned in his seat and started talking, I knew that I hadn’t overstepped. In fact, before he’d even started, I got the sense that he wanted to get it off his chest.
“April and I broke up a long time ago,” he said to me.
“Is she the one who left you for someone else? The one we spoke about at the bar? The one whose bangs you didn’t notice?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We were high-school sweethearts. We both grew up here.”
“Oh. Oh!” I said. I hadn’t realized that their story had so much history.
“When we finished school here, we both went off to the big city to study. She’d always dreamed of going to the city and becoming something great, you know?” he said.
I nodded. I could relate to that. Becoming something great, something other than myself—Pebecca Thorne—was what I strived for most.
“Honestly, I don’t think I actually wanted to leave, but she’d convinced me that we’d have this big, glamorous life in the city. Big dreams and ambitions and . . .whatever. We were these kids that grew up in a small town and we had no idea about the world out there. But we went.”
“Where?”
“Cape Town. We both went to study at UCT.”
“What did you study?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Well, that’s a good question.”
“What do you mean?”
“April always knew what she wanted to be—she wanted to be an architect—and she had this idea in her mind that I should become a great businessman.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know—because ‘CEO’ and ‘architect’ sound like real jobs. The kind of jobs that successful grown-ups that live in a big city have.”
“So you studied business?”
“For three years, then I dropped out. I hated it. After that, I tried politics, followed by a little bit of psychology and some law. By the time I’d done the rounds a few times, she’d graduated as an architect and wanted to start creating that life she’d dreamed about—that ‘we’d’ dreamed about.”
I listened as he spoke, the words just flying out of his mouth now.
“Only, I couldn’t really give her that life. I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. She was wanting to buy a house and take on jobs at architectural firms with those long, triple-barrel names, like Watson, Livingston, Clifton.”
“Clifton?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’m sure you can figure that one out,” he said.
“She left you for Clifton?”
“Anthony Clifton, partner at the architectural firm. The guy had what she wanted: money, prestige and a shiny sports car. Of course, by this stage, I was such a disappointment to her, because I was just going round and round in circles and not living up to that dream ‘we’d’ shared as stupid kids that knew nothing about life.”
“It washerdream,” I offered up.
