Chapter 32
Anna—12 Months Ago
Anna knew she could notleave Simon straightaway after finding out about Melissa. It would be too unexpected; he would realize she had found out, and she couldn’t risk that.
She needed a proper plan. There was still a chance she could avoid Melissa’s fate if she disappeared without a trace.
But disappearing would be a very hard thing to do. He knew where she lived, where she worked, where her mother lived, everything.
In the week that followed her discovery, she set about making an escape plan.
He would surely work out that she knew quite quickly. She found it near impossible to act normal around him, to keep up the pretense of loving him; the energy it took to force everything back to the way it had been before was overwhelmingly exhausting.
She knew she would slip up, given enough time. So she needed to act fast or she would end up as a scattering of bones in a wood somewhere, never to be seen again.
Her first instinct had been to go to the police, of course. But she quickly realized that all she actually had to tell the police were things her boyfriend had said in his sleep and a possible connection to a hiking spot in the Scottish Highlands.
Court cases and criminal convictions, Anna found after a little Googling, could not be won on evidence as ephemeral as “things he said in his sleep.” She had no physical evidence.
She’d read every article she could find. If Simon had been at Lissa’sschool he must have already been eliminated from the investigation twenty years ago. He, like every male in the upper years and on the staff, would have been interviewed, voluntarily DNA-sampled, and found to be of no interest to the case.
Going to the police would only alert Simon and achieve nothing quickly, and she knew what he was capable of now.
The day after she found out about Melissa, she called in sick to work and then spent the next week rearranging her life. She got a new SIM card and phone; she would toss her old one on the day she left. No one from her old life could know where she was going, in case he came asking.
She knew disappearing meant she would have to break contact with her mother for a while, but was that so bad? she wondered.
She would miss her friends, but she could make new ones, she argued to herself.
She emailed her landlord to end her tenancy, apologizing, but offering to pay the remaining two months’ rent up front. Then she placed a cash deposit on a small one-bed flat in Brighton, on the day of the viewing.
The hardest thing to leave was work. She handed in her notice to her manager and stopped going in, citing a change in situation, but the messages she received the next week from her work friends flooded in: Where was she going? What had happened? She made her excuses, blamed her fraught family situation, and told them she’d let them know her new number once she’d got settled. Of course, she knew she wouldn’t be able to do that. She couldn’t risk leaving a trail and besides, if she was honest, none of them had ever been that close. She would disappear easily—something she realized must have been a reason Simon had chosen to get close to her in the first place.
It all would have worked out fine, seamlessly, if Simon hadn’t popped around to her flat while she was out.
Anna’s landlord wished Simon good luck with the move—except Simon wasn’t moving.
The night before she intended to leave, Simon invited her over for dinner.
She was so close to being free of him it wasn’t worth raising suspicions by saying no. She told him she couldn’t stay over; she had an early start.
He cooked for her, and she forced down the food, smiling in all the right places. It didn’t seem like he suspected anything, at least for a while.
“I want to give you something, a present,” he told her, with a seriousness she found unnerving. He led her upstairs to his room, and sat her on the edge of his bed, before pulling a small green jewelry box from his bedside cabinet.
Anna forced down a sudden wave of nausea at the thought it might be an engagement ring.
She let him sink down onto one knee in front of her and raised the box. It seemed like Simon was proposing to her, that he was finally going to do what she had prayed for, yearned for, since they’d met, only now it meant something else entirely. The irony that it might be happening now, like this, was almost too much for her to bear.
He flipped open the box.
It wasn’t a ring but a necklace, a silver chain with a small silver heart gleaming from it, the heart edged with Art Deco spikes, like rays of the sun. It looked almost religious, was handmade and distinctive.
Anna looked up from the gift to Simon, attempting to make sense of the timing, the sentiment of it.
“Do you like it?” he asked, holding her gaze, studying her every microexpression.
“I do,” Anna answered, with a grateful smile, though unnerved by his intensity.
