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“You didn’t want to touch me because of something you don’t care for?”
“The point is the wedding band, Hannah. Of all the faults I have, adultery isn’t one of them. Or wasn’t, before you.”
Walking backwards, I sit in the chair, and let a sigh drop out of me. A small chuckle follows it for reasons unknown. I don’t know why. It’s not funny. Nothing is about this room or this house. It’s miserable and troubled, angry and rage filled, but just getting these words out, being honest with the one woman who’s changed everything for me, is lightening my sense of morose pessimism.
“Why marry her if you don’t love her?” she suddenly asks, still looking at Heather.
My brow arches and I watch some more, waiting for her to work that out on her own. She’s already met the reason why. It only takes a few minutes looking at Heather’s features again, of her staring at the blonde hair on the bed before realisation dawns.
“He is your son, isn’t he? Charlie?”
As always, the thought saddens me beyond all rational reasoning, and I find myself looking at her stomach and imagining what the reality of fatherhood could have been if I’d found her before my life happened to me.
I stand and walk over, ready to clean up the last of those tears if she’ll let me touch her now. She still moves away from me, her ass bumping into the bed. “No, Hannah. He isn’t.” Neither biologically nor by way of me pretending to be. “She lied well. And I believed her.”
Chapter 18
Hannah
I’m shivering. Cold. Or lost. My hands still grip tightly around me, as if they’ll somehow shield me from the woman behind me and the man in front. They won’t. Nothing will now. Truths? Here they are. A wife.
He looks lost with me. For once, his whole aura seems less intense than it normally does, as if he’s just a normal man trying to talk and make me understand. He isn’t, though. And I don’t know that I want to understand anymore. What reason is there to understand anything? I glance at his hand, unable to see the imprint of a wedding band, and sigh. There isn’t a future here. Not in this scenario, no matter how much that tears at my heart.
I wanted my honesty – I got it.
Turning to look at her lying there again before he moves closer, I try to ignore the need that’s still in me, and dart my gaze over her features. Nothing like me. Taller. Prettier. Even in this sleep she seems to be in with tubes coming out of her, I can see the beauty that must have had him captivated. The soft sound of a ventilator wheezes quietly in the background, as I stare at her blonde hair, and more machines bleep and pulse almost silently around us. It’s peaceful. Serene. It makes me wonder what she was like when she was awake, what it was other than this perfect body and face that drew Gray towards her. Perhaps that’s all it was. A rich bachelor and a pretty young server.
“How long has she been like this?” I ask.
“There was a car crash a month before Charlie was supposed to be born. We saved him. I’ve been trying to bring her back ever since,” he replies quietly, inches from my back.
My eyes close, as I feel his breath on my neck, his presence all over me again. “I don’t care about her, Hannah. I never have. I just want to know why she lied to me about Charlie being mine. I would never have married her if …” His hand brushes over my arm, as his voice trails off, a subtlety in it I’ve barely felt before from him. I look down at it hovering there gently, watching the slight tremble coming from something that is normally so sure of itself. “If it’s the whole truth you want, it’s you that I care about. I have never cared about anyone the way I do about you, nor have I known missing someone before you.”
The hand leaves me, as I move sideways away from him to stand on my own again. That’s how I feel now – on my own. Nothing here is connected anymore. It feels empty of that and messy, regardless of how much my heart’s speed is increasing with his words and trying to accept this.
“None of this explains the other women,” I murmur, remembering their faces, their words. “Why? What did you do to them?”
He sighs. “Still more?”
“Truth?”
He nods and moves a tube a little, switching a button off on a machine before he comes back to stand in front of me. “Alright, sit down.”
I edge over to the chair, unsure what’s coming but damn sure I need to hear it to make sense of what’s happening here. He’s so still when I look back to him. Impossibly still. Nothing but focused eyes and his serious face bestowing thoughts I’m not looking forward to hearing.
“It was research, Hannah. Heather’s body functions well enough. Her mind doesn’t. I’ve been trying to stimulate it into action for years. The combination of drugs I began with had varying results, but nothing particularly proactive until I attempted to lodge myself inside her mind.”
What does that mean?
He leans on the side of the bed, crossing his arms as if delivering a lecture. “I trialled myself first, not particularly caring for the end result as long as I got my answers. Unfortunately, my answers were two weeks in a hospital bed barely able to function because of the combinations of drugs I used. It didn’t work. No answers. I needed something that wasn’t comatosed to trial on. They were it. I wasn’t much use to myself, or her, if I couldn’t breathe successfully on my own.”
“So you used them so you could get answers? That’s monstrous.”
That same level of indifference crosses his eyes, dead eyes clearly not giving a damn for what damage that might have caused. “We all have lengths we will go to to get our truths. They weren’t relevant other than what statistical evidence I could get from them.” His hands go to his pockets, not an ounce of contrition visible because of my disapproval on show. “After a while, results were better. More useful. You already know what they do to stimulate. You’ve felt some of the combinations.” A sickness rises in me at the thought, tears threatening my eyes again. “The trials aren’t so monstrous when you’re in the middle of the enjoyable results, are they?”
I frown, complicity chasing around my veins trying to find acceptance in this. There isn’t any. All the fun and frivolities, all the fantasy and blurred, dark corners. All these feelings I have for him, the need and sensation of love that continues to bury it’s way inside my heart, it’s because of those women and the things they must have gone through, the confusion they must have felt.
Shame makes me look at the woman on the bed, my mouth floundering around words I can’t find, thoughts I can’t process.
