“So now I am some kind of abuser? Anything else?” I screamed mockingly.
“Amelia, calm down. I’m just repeating what I’ve been told,” Poppy said, backing away from me slightly.
“I will not calm down. I’ve done nothing but love and honour Harry. How would you feel if someone accused you of that?” I shouted.
“Disgusted. Absolutely disgusted in myself,” Yvonne answered.
“Well, it isn’t true. You don’t know what happened behind closed doors,” I said.
“Agreed,” Yvonne said, looking increasingly more agitated the longer the conversation dragged on, “I think you should leave.”
“Oh, I’m leaving. I don’t have to put up with this,” I reviled.
I got up, burst through the front door, and slammed it as hard as I could on my exit. I strode back to my car and screamed into the steering wheel as loudly as I could. Everything they’d said was gratuitously over-exaggerated and twisted. I fully admit to having arguments, but show me a marriage that doesn’t have disputes. I never set out to isolate Harry from his loved ones, and I would never do that to him. I hated them all, all of his family and friends. I wanted to line them up and scream the truth in each of their faces.
The comment about alcohol was really grating at me. When you looked at Harry’s mother, I was teetotal in comparison. The most I’d admit to was liking an occasional drink. Did it turn me into a domestic abuser as soon as I’d had a drop? No. And in the months leading up to Harry’s death, I’d barely touched it. Was I misremembering our marriage, and I really was abusive? If Harry did decide to jump off Filey Brigg, did I contribute to that decision? I found myself carefully going back through every single argument and counting each time it got physical.
I stopped when I ran out of fingers.
XI
STRENGTH
HARRY - BEFORE
Drowning described it best. Every time I got my head just even slightly above the water, I was dragged back to the brink of bankruptcy by something else. Our offer on the house had been accepted, and we had a few weeks until completion day. I was almost back in the same position as I started, and the Broadhead bag grew emptier by the day. It was meant to be a one-time thing with Becky, but every few days, I’d receive a text asking for more. The amounts were insignificant at first, but it was starting to mount up. I still hadn’t met Joshua, and I started to question if he even existed. It got to the point where she didn’t even want me to come into the house anymore; she would instruct me to post it through the letterbox.
I endured the constant barrage in survival mode, putting out financial fires where I found them, and continued to conceal the whole thing from Amelia. The weight on my shoulders was massive. I was desperate to tell her what was going on just to get it off my chest, but I knew it would only make matters worse. The first Broadhead repayment was due soon, and I’d be paying it back with the money I loaned from them in the first place. I was so anxious and nervous all the time that I even toyed with the idea of taking a few of Amelia’s pills to take the edge off.
We’d completed the first round of IVF, and Amelia was excited that this would be the time we would finally become parents. I should have been excited, too, but I wasn’t. I was in a state of perpetual terror. Scared stiff by every knock at the door or incoming phone call. Each time Amelia had a notification on her phone, I found myself checking it, just in case Becky had decided to come clean to her. Everything was just hanging in the balance, and I waited for the day that it would all come crashing down. I could tell that Amelia knew something was wrong, too. The way she started looking at me whenever my phone made a noise, or if I took it into the bathroom with me. She’d always been so paranoid that I might be cheating on her, but I wasn’t sure the truth would be any less upsetting. I did the only thing I thought I could, and I carried on lying about everything in a drastic attempt to keep the peace. I dreamt of threading the needle and somehow making everything right before I was exposed, but it was starting to seem impossible.
I was still working as a financial adviser, albeit over the phone from Manchester. Geoff, the owner, was really understanding about it all and continued to let me work remotely. The clients didn’t mind either; I’d actually built up a really good relationship with some of them, and I’m sure they would actually miss me when I left.
I’d given up stashing the Broadhead money at my mother’s house, and it sat in the compartment underneath the boot mat in my car. The fortune seemed to dwindle by the day. I stopped planning for the future. I could barely plan twenty-four hours in advance. I just dealt with each day as it came, waiting for the inevitable landslide. I should have felt hopeless, but I actually didn’t. I was so wrapped up in frantically trying to hold everything together with my bare hands that I didn’t stop to process just how dire my situation was.
Thud. Another five hundred pounds was posted through Becky’s letterbox. I didn’t even know how much I’d given her at this point or what she was spending it on. Every text request came with its own excuse, each more fantastical than the last. I’d be more content with just a pounds and pence figure from now on; I started to feel ridiculous that she thought I believed her lies. I had only seen Becky a few times since I’d first met her, and at first, I thought I was almost doing a good thing, but it quickly became evident I was being taken advantage of. During the previous few deliveries, I could tell from outside that Becky couldn’t even be bothered to get up off the sofa. I dutifully continued the cash drops without hesitation because I would have done anything to keep Amelia from knowing about it.
I got back in the car and started to drive back home. Just as Becky’s excuses were becoming implausible, so were mine to Amelia. I kept saying I needed to nip into the office of my new job to complete some paperwork or meet someone. But the reasons I was giving were becoming increasingly thin. It was probably my paranoia talking, but I was convinced she knew exactly what I was doing, and she was just waiting for me to admit it.
When I returned home, Amelia was crashing around in the kitchen. She had been getting increasingly agitated with the time it was taking for the house to complete, but I was grateful for every day it got delayed. Every day was another day to try and magic up some funds. I had no idea where to get the rest of the money from; I was just hoping there would be some kind of miracle, and the whole thing fell through.
“Amelia?” I shouted whilst kicking off my shoes.
She responded, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying from the kitchen. I came in and found she had emptied every cupboard and set of drawers onto the floor. The kitchen looked like it had been looted by a pack of monkeys. Amelia was violently swaying from side to side, and she was clearly drunk. I was standing there open-mouthed, waiting for some kind of explanation.
“We are dry!” she slurred, shaking an empty glass in her hand.
“Dry?” I asked.
“No more booze left, duh!” she responded.
“Amelia, you said you were going to stop drinking. It makes it harder to conceive, remember?” I explained.
“Oh, calm down, killjoy. I did a test, negative, again.”
“I’m sorry, Amelia. But you shouldn’t get like this regardless.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do whilst you are out, doing god knows what?”
“I had to nip out to the office. I can’t help that,” I said.
Amelia came over to me, aggressively pulled my face closer to hers with my cheeks, and smiled.
“The office, right,” she slurred.
I pulled away. “It’s the truth, Ames,” I argued dishonestly.
Amelia seemed to be satisfied by my response for a few seconds and started almost dancing around the kitchen, smiling. But all of a sudden, the smile slipped from her face sinisterly, and she gave me this really maddened look. She stopped dancing and ran into me, gripping me by my throat and pinning me ferociously against the fridge. It rocked violently, knocking over all the contents inside when I impacted it. I could barely breathe under her grasp; her grip increased the pressure as her disturbing smile widened.
“Bullshit,” she laughed, her grip still strengthening, “who is she, Harry?”
I tried to pull away from her, but the more I flailed, the more her hold around my neck tightened. I started to struggle even more, and I accidentally stood on a discarded wine glass on the floor. It smashed, slicing into the bottom of my foot. The noise distracted Amelia enough for her to temporarily lose her grip, and I managed to escape, dropping to my knees and breathing desperately.
“What the fuck, Amelia?” I gasped.
She looked alarmed at what she had done at first. The blood had already soaked through my sock and began pooling on the kitchen floor. I saw the expression on her face change as if she’d decided I deserved what had just happened to me. She casually threw a tea towel by my feet for me to soak up the blood. I obediently picked it up and wrapped it around my bleeding sole. The wound wasn’t nearly as bad as the amount of blood suggested, but the pain was staggering.