“Claire?” I say, but she interrupts.
“Don’t speak,” she says. “Just try to relax.” She leans forward and strokes my hair, and whispers something in my ear, but I don’t hear what. It sounds like “I’m sorry.”
“I remember,” I say. “I remember.”
She smiles, and then she steps back and a young man takes her place. He has a narrow face and is wearing thick-rimmed glasses. For a moment, I think it is Ben, until I realize that Ben would be my age now.
“Mum?” he says. “Mum?”
He looks the same as he did in the picture of him and Helen, and I realize I remember him, too.
“Adam?” I say. Words choke in my throat as he hugs me.
“Mum,” he says. “Dad’s coming. He’ll be here soon.”
I pull him to me, and breathe in the smell of my boy, and I am happy.
I can wait no longer. It is time. I must sleep. I have a private room and so there is no need for me to observe the strict routines of the hospital, but I am exhausted, my eyes already beginning to close. It is time.
I have spoken to Ben. To the man I really married. We talked for hours, it seems, though it may only have been a few minutes. He told me that he flew in as soon as the police contacted him.
“The police?”
“Yes,” he said. “When they realized you weren’t living with the person Waring House thought you were, they traced me. I’m not sure how. I suppose they had my old address and went from there.”
“So where were you?”
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been in Italy for a few months,” he said. “I’ve been working out there.” He paused. “I thought you were okay.” He took my hand. “I’m sorry…”
“You couldn’t have known,” I said.
He looked away. “I left you, Chrissy.”
“I know. I know everything. Claire told me. I read your letter.”
“I thought it was for the best,” he said. “I really did. I thought it would help. Help you. Help Adam. I tried to get on with my life. I really did.” He hesitated. “I thought I could only do that if I divorced you. I thought it would free me. Adam didn’t understand, even when I explained to him that you wouldn’t even know, wouldn’t even remember being married to me.”
“Did it?” I said. “Did it help you to move on?”
He turned to me. “I won’t lie to you, Chrissy. There have been other women. Not many, but some. It’s been a long time, years and years. At first nothing serious, but then I met someone a couple of years ago. I moved in with her. But—”
“But?”
“Well, that ended. She said I didn’t love her. That I’d never stopped loving you…”
“And was she right?”
He did not reply, and so, fearing his answer, I said, “So what happens now? Tomorrow? Will you take me back to Waring House?”
He looked up at me.
“No,” he said. “She was right. I never stopped loving you. And I won’t take you there again. Tomorrow, I want you to come home.”
Now I look at him. He sits in a chair next to me, and although he is already snoring, his head tipped forward at an awkward angle, he still holds my hand. I can just make out his glasses, the scar running down the side of his face. My son has left the room to phone his girlfriend and whisper a good-night to his unborn daughter, and my best friend is outside in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. No matter what, I am surrounded by the people I love.
Earlier, I spoke to Dr. Nash. He told me I had left the care home almost four months ago, a little while after Mike had started visiting, claiming to be Ben. I had discharged myself, signed all the paperwork. I had left voluntarily. They couldn’t have stopped me, even if they’d believed there was a reason for them to try. When I left, I took with me the few photographs and personal possessions that I still had.
“That was why Mike had those pictures?” I said. “The ones of me, and Adam. That’s why he had the letter that Adam had written to Santa Claus? His birth certificate?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Nash. “They were with you at Waring House, and they went with you when you left. At some point, Mike must have destroyed all the pictures that showed you with Ben. Possibly even before you were discharged from Waring House—the staff turnover is fairly high and they had no idea what your husband really looked like.”
“But how would he have got access to the photographs?”
“They were in an album in a drawer in your room. It would have been easy enough for him to get to them once he started visiting you. He might even have slipped in a few photographs of himself. He must have had some of the two of you taken during… well, when you were seeing each other, years ago. The staff at Waring House were convinced that the man who had been visiting you was the same one as in the photo album.”
“So I brought my photos back to Mike’s house and he hid them in a metal box? Then he invented a fire, to explain why there were so few?”
“Yes,” he said. He looked tired, and guilty. I wondered whether he blamed himself for any of what had happened, and hoped he didn’t. He had helped me, after all. He had rescued me. I hoped he would still be able to write his paper and present my case. I hoped he would be recognized for what he had done for me. After all, without him I’d—
I don’t want to think about where I’d be.
“How did you find me?” I said. He explained that Claire had been frantic with worry after we’d spoken, but she had waited for me to call the next day. “Mike must have removed the pages from your journal that night. That was why you didn’t think anything was wrong when you gave me the journal on Tuesday, and neither did I. When you didn’t call her, Claire tried to phone you, but she only had the number for the mobile phone I had given you, and Mike had taken that, too. I should have known something was wrong when I called you on that number this morning and you didn’t answer. But I didn’t think. I just called you on your other phone…” He shook his head.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Go on…”
“It’s fair to assume he’d been reading your journal for at least the last week or so, probably longer. At first Claire couldn’t get hold of Adam and didn’t have Ben’s number, so she called Waring House. They only had one number, which they thought was for Ben but, in fact, it was Mike’s. Claire didn’t have my number. She called the school he worked at and persuaded them to give her Mike’s address and phone number, but both were false. She was at a dead end.”
I think of this man discovering my journal, reading it every day. Why didn’t he destroy it?
Because I’d written that I loved him. And because that was what he wanted me to carry on believing.
Or maybe I am being too kind to him. Maybe he just wanted me to see it burn.
“Claire didn’t call the police?”
“She did,” he nodded. “But it was a few days before they really took it seriously. In the meantime she’d got hold of Adam and he’d told her that Ben had been abroad for a while and that as far as he knew you were still in Waring House. She contacted them and, though they wouldn’t give her your home address, they eventually relented and gave Adam my number. They must have thought that was a good compromise, as I am a doctor. Claire only got through to me this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?”
“Yes. Claire convinced me something was wrong, and of course finding out that Adam was alive confirmed it. We came to see you at home, but by then you’d already left for Brighton.”