“Are you all right?” he said. “I got you, I caught you before you hit your head.”
I looked at the lofty ceiling, the broken molding, the decayed grandeur, and imagined it all collapsing on us, the stale air choking us.
“How dare you buy this house without telling me?” I asked. “Did you buy it with my money?”
“Lucy, I—” he began, but he sounded bossy, as if he was a teacher and I was a slow pupil, and I didn’t want to hear it.
“You’ve betrayed all the trust I put in you.”
“I—” he began again.
“I want to go home. Take me home, please.”
We drove into the city across the Suspension Bridge without speaking. When we got home to our flat, we unpacked the car in silence and put as much distance between us as we could in the cramped space.
I lay on our bed, still barely able to process what Dan had done. It was shocking, totally unexpected, frightening. We would have to undo it as soon as possible, sell the house, even if we took a hit. There was no other way and I would have to summon the courage to tell him so.
I checked my email, hoping for some good news to distract me. My heart leaped when I saw a message from Max, but it was brutally short: Nearly finished reading. I’ll call as soon as I’m done.
I reread the message, more than once, but it was infuriatingly hard to read between the lines. Max was good at that. I typed out a needy reply, then deleted it. I typed out another and sent it to myself. I read it and was happy I hadn’t sent it to Max. I deleted that one, too.
I gazed around our bedroom. It was too small, like the rest of this place, but I loved every inch of it. I understood the arguments about investing my money sensibly, and knew we’d buy a place eventually, but it should have been a joint decision, a gradual moving on, when both of us were ready.
Eliza said, “You have to talk to him sooner rather than later. Find out exactly what he’s done.”
I felt nervous. This felt bigger than me, somehow. I sensed it sharply, though even I could never have imagined where it would take us.
Dan was sitting at the kitchen table, doing something on his laptop. He shut the lid when he saw me. He had his wary expression on again.
“Why that house?” I said. “What were you thinking?”
“I thought you’d fall in love with it like I did.” There was something in the way he said it, a simplicity and a sweetness, that helped me let go of a little of my anger. He stood up and came to me, cupping my face in his hands, just the way he had earlier, but this time he kissed me, and my body relaxed.
“Are you hungry?” he said.
“Starving.”
“Let’s go out and get something to eat and we can talk. I want this to work.”
We walked to the restaurant but didn’t hold hands, as we usually did. Things felt strange. Not unpleasant, but off. Dan was overly solicitous, stepping behind me when the sidewalk was too narrow for us to pass other people. Triple-checking the road was clear before crossing. He seemed hypervigilant.
Eliza said, “Thinking about it, if he’s really bought this place, and I think he has, you need to play a long game. You can get out of this, but probably not right away, so be smart and don’t be angry. Pick your battles with him. If he went behind your back and used your money to buy it, and I think he did, you need to make sure your name is on the deed. Until then, it’s his decision whether you sell or not.”
She was right. I listened carefully. But she couldn’t resist adding, “I told you not to give him access to your accounts.”
I had trusted him, though, and hadn’t wanted to handle the money myself. It had seemed like a no-brainer. Now I felt stupid.
Dan held open the door of the restaurant for me. It was a new pizza place he wanted to try. Over mozzarella in carrozza, a dirty martini for me, and a lager for Dan, I said, as calmly as I could, “You should have talked to me before you bought the house. We should be making joint decisions about money.”
“But if I had, you’d never have agreed to buying it,” he said. A string of cheese dangled from his mouth and he sucked it up.
“I’d never have agreed to buying it anyway, because of where it is.”
“It was the chance of a lifetime. I didn’t want your past to stuff up our future. And no one is going to know who you are. The last time they saw you, you were—what?—ten.”
“I was thirteen.”
My parents moved away from Charlotte Close then. It took that long for them to believe, finally, that Teddy was not coming home, but it haunted my mother afterward, that we hadn’t stayed. She regretted the move because she began to have recurring dreams that Teddy had turned up at number 7 after we left and thought we’d abandoned him.
She couldn’t bear to remain on Charlotte Close, but she couldn’t bear to be anywhere else, either. That was the pain she lived with, until she died, only a few months after my dad.
“And you changed your name,” Dan said.
I had changed it twice. Once as soon as I became an adult. Lucy Bewley had been a recognizable name and I didn’t want my past to be evident to anyone who might care to search for it on the internet. It was a worry even back then, before I became a somebody. I’d chosen to become Lucy Brown because it was a perfectly, beautifully, bland and extremely common name. When I’d married, I’d transformed from being Lucy Brown to Lucy Harper. Nobody who unearthed my marriage certificate would be able to connect me with the disappearance of Teddy Bewley.
I’d reveled in the wonderful anonymity of my married name right up until the point when I’d gotten a public profile. After that, I knew I would never feel adequately shielded from the past and wondered how Dan could sit here in the restaurant now and behave as if he didn’t know all too well that this was one of my greatest fears.
I wanted badly to argue the point, but was afraid that I’d become upset, that he’d accuse me of being overwrought, or irrational, of making a scene, so I swallowed my frustration.
“How much did the house cost?” I asked.
He stalled. “I made a good deal,” he said.
“How much, Dan?”
“Just shy of two million.”
I let out a low whistle. “You should have asked me.”
“But then we wouldn’t have the house, would we?” Dan took a swig of his beer and I felt confounded, as if he’d flipped my argument against me, and any coherent train of thought I might have had evaporated.
“Exactly!” I said, but I was a bit confused over whether I’d just agreed or disagreed with him. I downed my drink.
“I just don’t think anyone’s a loser here.” He folded a slice of pizza over itself and inserted most of it into his mouth. I watched him chew.
“We should have ice cream after,” he added, and I could see the masticated dough and pepperoni in his mouth, and it made me feel a terrific distaste for him. I felt like saying I wanted to leave and denying him ice cream, but I badly wanted some myself so I agreed with him that we should and the conversation about money seemed to be over for now.
He got salted caramel and blackcurrant ice cream. I got chocolate and lemon sorbet.
When it arrived, Eliza prompted me and I asked, “Is my name on the deed of the house?”