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I pull the card from my pocket and swipe it through the lock to the laboratory, waiting for it to open the door for me like it did with his study. It doesn’t, and the sound of feet running through the apartment downstairs shortly afterwards makes me realise that Jackson’s been alerted to an alarm of some sort. I wait for his arrival and then stare at the door again.
“Mam?” he questions.
“Can you open the door please?”
“Mam, I can’t do that. No one but Mr Rothburg is allowed in there.”
“Why?”
He looks confused, as if he doesn’t have an answer for that. I do. It’s because this is where the sinister happens, where the files and information is stored about what he’s done. It’s a shame that doesn’t seem to make me hate him. I should. I should despise what he did to those women. I should be able to distinguish between right and wrong, but I can’t.
I know what needing answers is.
And I know what pain is.
Sighing at the conundrum I’m in, I look upwards at the stars and try to counter the rationale that tells me to ignore it all and call him, tell him I love him, too. I think I do anyway. I still feel it, deep down where truths live and life begins. But all this, and the fact that he’s married, make the confusion unbearable. Frankly, being under those pills was easier to deal with.
“Open the door for her, Jackson.”
Gray’s gravelled voice interrupts my musing, and I look over sharply to see if he’s really here or not. He is, one of his hands on the bannister as his body stalls on the last step to this floor. Everything in me that was questioning, that was trying to analyse rather than feel, falters. He looks exhausted, barely a flicker of life on his features other than irritation.
The door slides open beside me before I’ve realised Jackson’s moved.
“You said you wouldn’t come until I called,” I whisper.
“I didn’t want to give you the chance not to without hearing it all.”
Jackson coughs in the background and walks between us, probably waiting for Gray to step out of his way on the stairs. He does after a few more beats of us staring at each other, and then we’re alone. Just two. Nothing in the apartment but feelings and trepidation again.
“What do you want to go in there for?”
“I don’t know. I just …” I look at the open doorway, unsure. “I wanted to see the files on the women.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to know.”
“What more do you need to know?”
“I need to know if it’s real or not. These feelings. I could be like them.”
A low smile breaks out on his face. “Believe me when I tell you, you are nothing like them. Never were. This is very real.”
“But how do you know that?”
“Because you’re not still on meds. You’re clean. They’re not.”
Right.
I look at my coffee and swill the dregs of it around the cup, part desperate to go to him and follow instincts that seem so strong, and part worried that if I do, if I make that step into him again, I’ll be nothing more than another test case.
“You don’t believe me,” he murmurs.
“I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know who you are.”
“Yes you do. I’m the man that fell in love with you. The one who, regardless of trying to dismiss you, couldn’t find it in me to deny a reality I’m now fucking lost without.”
My toes curl into the carpet, shoulders scrunching in at the thought he might have said that to those other women. He steps forward, closing the distance down. “I love you, Hannah. I am less of a man without you. If you know anything, know that.”
