I couldn’t help but thinking it was only fitting that Harry’s whore would die in the exact same place that he did. They couldn’t be together in life, and they would have to settle for in death. I’d imagined this moment for so long, and I desperately wanted to savour every emotion. I kept on applying pressure without a single shred of remorse. She wasn’t content with taking my husband from me; she felt the need to wedge herself into my life and start manipulating it from within. Tighter. I bared my teeth, and my hands started to ache under the constant strain I was putting them under. Even tighter. I could feel my fingernails almost drawing blood because I was pressing them so hard against her throat.
“Good riddance, Kim,” I whispered.
Just as her eyes closed, I was grabbed from behind, pulled away from Kim, and thrown onto the rocks on my back. Kim immediately inhaled as much air as she could and started spluttering violently. When I turned to look at the person who grabbed me, I realised it was Yvonne and Poppy standing above me. Poppy was holding a can of pepper spray pointed directly at my face, and Yvonne ran over to Kim to help her back on her feet. Kim was fighting for every breath; if I had managed to hold onto her for a few seconds longer, I would have had my revenge.
“Fucking psycho,” Kim gruffly uttered.
“Whore,” I spat bitterly.
Kim looked like she was going to run over to me and start hitting me violently, but Yvonne restrained her and whispered something into Kim’s ear, which seemed to subdue her slightly.
“She isn’t worth it, Kim,” Yvonne said loudly for my benefit.
“I didn’t realise we were planning a reunion,” I joked.
“Funny. You are finally going to tell us the truth. Stand up,” Poppy ordered.
I rose to my feet and took a few steps back away from Poppy and her can of pepper spray. I remained standing and thought about the truth, which, honestly, I didn’t know what it was. I tried killing Harry; that was true. But I never found out if he actually drank the poison I’d prepared for him. For the longest time, I couldn’t face the thought that he decided to take his own life and step off that cliff face.
That would have been his decision, and he didn’t deserve to choose.
I suppose the other version of the truth wasn’t palatable either. The last exchange I had with Harry when he called me from the Brigg was so ambiguous that I’d replayed it in my head a thousand times over. For all I knew, he could have been standing on a slippery rock like I was, trying to get a signal and fell. Or my drugged water took hold of him, knocked him unconscious as I planned, and he plunged to his death.
As soon as I found out when I was pregnant, I wished I’d never touched those bottles of water. I wanted to fight for him and in the right way. I bitterly regretted what I’d done, but in my mind, it was never confirmed whether he died by my hands or by his own. I was willing to let it go, but when James had told me his death was suspicious, I had to find out what truly happened. Partly out of self-preservation to keep myself out of prison, but I also needed to know what his final decision was.
However, in my quest of the whole truth, I‘d bitten off more than I could chew. I started to find out the kind of man that Harry had become, and the more I dug into his past, the less I started to regret what I’d done. With each transgression I discovered that he’d committed, my remorse paled further into insignificance. By the time I was cornered by those three women on the Brigg, I was absolutely convinced that he deserved everything I’d done to him.
He was a liar, a criminal, and, worst of all, a cheat.
Harry plotted and schemed behind my back and didn’t at least have the common decency to tell me to my face. In the end, my journey to uncover the truth had left me with more questions than answers. I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t want to know anything else, and I would have gone home happily and never spoken a word about it ever again.
The three women standing in front of me were demanding answers. Poppy was already crying, Yvonne was tearing up, and Kim could barely breathe. As far as I was concerned, they deserved everything that had happened to them, too. They all had their parts to play in Harry’s death. Regardless of whether I was the one to make the final decision, each of them had contributed to it in their own way.
Yvonne’s constant underhanded scheming made Harry feel totally utterly hopeless and trapped, thinking he had a son that he didn’t know about. He was terrified of telling me, so he didn’t even come to me for help. When he found himself being blackmailed and taken advantage of, he probably didn’t envisage another way out of the predicament he’d got himself into. Not to mention the way Yvonne had treated him his entire life and, on top of everything else, the inexcusable fact that she was responsible for his father’s death, which was the most traumatic experience he’d gone through.
Poppy spouting her mindless optimism made Harry think he could leave me and have a better life without me. I must admit she just thought she was being supportive, but she should have known it would have caused an inner conflict within Harry. She ought to have given him the space to make his own decisions, but instead, she felt the constant need poke her nose into our marriage and, as a result, get involved where she was never welcome.
And last but not least, Kim. The final nail in the coffin. She was the lowest of all of them; she used her body to corrupt Harry, and when he was at his weakest, she went ahead and stole him from me emotionally. Even though he knew I was pregnant with his child, Kim’s allure was too powerful for him to resist. She saw a husband and wife going through a rough patch in their marriage and decided to take advantage of that. I didn’t feel sorry in the slightest for trying to take her last breath, as she knew she had taken everything else from me.
I openly admit that I’d made mistakes, too, but everything I did was out of my undying love for Harry and my desire to make our marriage the best it could be. Should I be blamed for loving him too much? No. Sure, my passion turned to anger on occasion, but it was born of frustration more than anything else. I could feel him slipping away, and I would have done anything in my power to keep him. I’d lost everything that I had ever cared about, and my unsuccessful attempt on Kim’s life was witnessed by the manipulative matriarch and her submissive daughter. I glared at Kim, and the longer the deafening silence prevailed, the more upset she became. That should be me, I thought. I should be upset, but I wasn’t. I didn’t feel guilty about anything, and I was too busy thinking about how I could get away from this situation without facing any consequences. But that wasn’t possible, and I’d finally lost control over my own life. And the only semblance of control I could keep hold of was not giving them the answers they so desperately pleaded me for. I had to give them something, so I decided to give them the version of the truth, which would keep me from behind bars.
“What are you yammering on about? What truth?” I said defensively.
“Did you kill my son?” Yvonne screamed.
“No, he killed himself. Because you all got involved in his life when you weren’t welcome, you could have just left us alone to be happy.”
“He wasn’t happy!” Kim screamed, “You choked and pried every last gram of happiness right out of him!”
Anyway, I didn’t think they deserved the truth. Only I deserved it, and if I couldn’t get it, I’d make sure they couldn’t either. I reached deep down inside, and instantly knew what would really hurt them. It was fictitious, of course, but I wanted Kim to suffer exactly how I suffered when he told me he was leaving me. I wanted her to have a taste of the despair and anger I experienced every single day. I needed to see her entire world implode because of something I’d whispered to her.
“In the end, Kim, he chose me. I spoke to him before he jumped. But he couldn’t live with what he’d done,” I explained coldly.
Kim looked stunned at what I had said at first but shook her head and managed a faint smile in disbelief. Was she really that deluded that she could actually say, without a doubt, that Harry would choose her? Even I couldn’t have made that assumption definitively, which is why I started this whole investigation in the first place. I could see Kim picking her words very carefully.
“Harry didn’t kill himself. And he didn’t choose you. He chose us,” she said.
“Us?” I asked.
Kim looked down and gently patted her stomach, and I immediately knew exactly what she was getting at. Harry had gotten her pregnant. It took me months of trying and thousands of pounds worth of medical interventions, but to Kim, it had just happened. There was no feasible way that child was planned, and it was just an unfortunate after-effect of their grimy fumbling. I had fought with everything that I had to conceive my child. I did it for Harry, like I did everything. For this deluded whore to claim some kind of ownership over him because she got knocked up by accident made me feel a degree of fury I’d never before experienced.
Was it some cosmic sign that they should have been together? What if Harry and I were never meant to be, and I was always just kidding myself? No. I wouldn’t let the paranoia get the better of me. Harry and I were in love, and I felt it in my bones. Kim had been sent to us as a test, and unfortunately, my husband was too weak to pass it. Kim began to nod triumphantly as she could see the penny dropping, and the wrath grew in me to a bursting point. I could feel the prickling at the back of my neck grow, but instead of fearing it, I used it. The adrenaline coursed through my veins violently, and every muscle in my body vibrated with a burst of rage.
I exploded into a sprint towards Kim, and Poppy was too slow to react as I knocked her to one side with ease. I just wanted to reach Kim and both of us be knocked from the Brigg to the rocks below. Yvonne wasn’t as slow to react as Poppy and landed a punch square in my jaw. I lost my balance on the slippery rocks below my feet and careered off the edge of the cliff, only managing to cling on by my fingertips. Kim immediately grabbed my right arm to try and pull me back up, and Yvonne grabbed my left.
I didn’t intend to fall on my own, but when I was presented with the option of letting go, I wanted to. And I’d take the truth with me. I wanted to be the second person they forced to their death at the Brigg, and I wanted them to feel the guilt for the rest of their lives. I released the grip from my fingertips, but they continued to hold my weight. Poppy joined them, and they dragged me from the cliff face and left me curled up on the floor a few feet away from the edge.
“You don’t get to take the easy way out,” Kim said breathlessly.
“You really think he would choose you just because you have his bun in your oven?” I laughed.
“He didn’t know I was pregnant. He was dead before I’d found out. He chose me regardless.”
“He used you. It was a bit of fun because we were going through a rough patch. That’s all. You really think you could break up a marriage as strong as ours?”
“No matter what you say, Amelia, I know exactly how he felt. He loved me. He might have believed your gaslighting bullshit, but it won’t wash with me.”
Just the look in Kim’s eyes made me believe her. She did love him, and she genuinely believed he loved her. But it was nowhere near as powerful as my love for Harry. I devoted my life to him, and I fought every day for him. It didn’t matter what anybody else said, and no one else deserved Harry. Only me. The thought of him loving another woman wasn’t something I could process, but the look in Kim’s eyes was so intense that it started to chip away at my defences. I could see what she was doing. She was trying to force my emotions out and, along with them, my confession.
