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“No,” Ned said. “She tricked me, Dad, she tricked me into marrying her. She was after my money, so she made up a story about being pregnant.” His voice rose to a whine. “Do you see now, do you see what it’s like for me?”
“Are you serious?” Jethro Hawthorpe thundered. “You let yourself be taken in by some slip of a girl?”
Ned’s voice hardened. “You’re missing the point. When I tell the press why we’re separating, they’ll realize what it’s been like for me, they’ll see that women will try anything to get money out of me, whether it’s pretending I sexually assaulted them, or pretending that they’re pregnant. Don’t you see, that accusation against me—it will go away. The press won’t be gunning for me anymore, they’ll be sympathetic.”
I clapped my hand over my mouth to smother my gasp of shock. Even though I had guessed it, to hear Ned actually admit that he used me to protect himself against Justine’s accusation of sexual assault, to hear his vicious lie about my character, was brutal.
“You did sort out a postnup with Paul Carr, I hope?” Jethro Hawthorpe said.
“Yes, of course I did, I’m not stupid.”
“How much? How much did she want?”
“I offered her fifty thousand if we separate but she refused it,” Ned said. “She said she only wanted a pound for each day that we stayed married.”
“Hold on.” I imagined Jethro Hawthorpe holding up his hand, his palm facing Ned. “That doesn’t make sense. If she tricked you into marrying her to extort money from you, why would she only ask for a pound for each day of your marriage? Even if you separated in two years’ time, that adds up to little more than seven hundred. There must be more to it than that.”
“It’s not exactly a pound for each day,” Ned said. “There’s a doubling thing involved.”
“What do you mean, a doubling thing?”
“Well, it’s a pound for the first day, then doubled for every day after that,” Ned explained. “You know—she gets a pound for day one of our marriage, two pounds for day two, four pounds on day three, eight pounds on day four—”
Jethro Hawthorpe cut him off. “You didn’t agree to it, did you?”
“Of course,” Ned said.
“Are you completely crazy? Did you even bother to work it out?”
“No, but don’t worry, she only wants it for the first month of our marriage.”
“The only thing I’m worried about is how I raised such an imbecile! You could end up owing her millions!”
The door to the study opened, then slammed shut. I heard Jethro Hawthorpe stride past the library door, his footsteps loud and angry. I stayed where I was, in case Ned decided to go after him. But there was a crash, the sound of something smashing against the wall.
“BITCH! FUCKING BITCH!”
I recoiled, ran from the room. In my bedroom, I paced up and down, seething at the way Ned had used me. There was no last-minute trip to Vegas, he had planned our marriage before we left. He had found my Achilles’ heel and used it to protect himself from the fallout of his assault on Justine. In the eyes of the world, if Ned and I had been in a secret relationship for the last few months, if he’d been about to propose to me, would he really have assaulted one of his employees the day before we left?
I thought for a moment, then crept downstairs to the kitchen and took a knife with a long, pointed blade from the drawer. I ran back to my room, closing the door behind me. It was almost dark. I waited for Ned to remember that he hadn’t locked me in, but he didn’t come. Good. Soon, he would go to bed, and once he was asleep, I would find his bedroom, I would hold the knife to his throat, I would take his phone and call the police. And if he so much as moved, well, I would kill him. I would kill him for Justine and Lina, and for Hunter.
But before I could do any of those things, I was kidnapped.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
PRESENT
I walk to the bathroom, trailing the blanket behind me. When will they come for me? Since Ned was taken from the room downstairs, there have been strange noises, sounds of things being moved around, furniture perhaps. It’s put me on edge, this change from static to fluid.
I lock the door, activate the light. It jars my eyes, and I hold onto the wall a moment. I stoop to open the cupboard, take the nail from the toiletry bag, and gouge a final line on the wall. And below the line, I scrape9/14,the date at which our kidnapping has come to end, exactly four weeks from the day we were taken.
I return to my mattress. I don’t have to wait long before I hear the door opening.
“It’s time,” a man’s voice says.
It isn’t the usual man, it’s the other.
I stand up. He puts the hood over my head, but maybe because I’m holding my blanket, he doesn’t tie my hands, but leads me from the room with his hands on my shoulders.
