My backside hit the floor with a heavy thud when Anderson pushed at me, his large hands shoving me so hard that I thought he’d squashed my heart with my breastbone.
The laugh that left him crushed me when I stared up at him.
“You stupid, stupid woman. Are you really that desperate? You think this is love? You think I’m even capable of love?” His sneer incinerated the air in my lungs and his face blurred with the swell of tears. “I don’t love you. I don’t even want to love you. You’re here because I want to ruin you. I want to witness your heart shatter into a million fucking pieces. I want you to feel the pain that I felt when you left!” His anger was uncontrollable and I scurried back when he bent over me, his hatred thick in the air between us. “And by the look on your face right now…” the cruel smile I knew all too well curved the edges of his sinful lips. “…I didn’t fail!”
I didn’t watch him leave. I couldn’t see past the massacre of my soul bleeding out around me, its thick desolation taking anything I had left and annihilating it.
I sat, staring at the floor for over two hours.
Then I dragged on some clothes.
And walked out of the front door.
IT TOOK FOUR DAYS FOR Richard – or anyone for that matter - to find out I was back. He walked in quietly, sighed, and picked up the mail from my doormat. His feet were loud as they padded across the carpet and I squinted when he pulled open the curtains and light spilled into my lounge. Turning, he jumped and gasped as his eyes widened on me.
“Jesus, Klo!” I hated that he called me Klo. Hated it. “What the fuck?”
He stood regarding me quietly as if he was frightened to come any closer – that was mainly because I had a gun pointed at his head from where I sat on my sofa.
Point and click, he’d said. Point and click.
“Hello, Richard.”
He paused, his brow pinching as he tried to get a read of me. “What’s going on?”
Clicking my tongue, I smiled, but it wasn’t at all welcoming. “How did you get in?”
His eyes flashed as he tried to think on the spot. How stupid was I? “You gave me a key, remember?”
Slowly shaking my head at his lie, I chuckled. “That all you got? I gave you a key? Try again, Richard… or should we even the odds? You call me Samantha and I’ll call you Robert.”
Fear caught his breath and he licked his dry lips.
Point and click. Simple, he’d said. Just point and click.
“Where is he?”
Shaking his head, he frowned, “I don’t know…”
He didn’t say any more. His blood sprayed across my lovely cream curtains when I forced a bullet straight through the middle of his forehead.
Apparently it was as easy as just point and click.
Four days earlier
THE HOUSE WAS TOO QUIET. Loneliness crept in as soon as I slung my keys and bag onto the sideboard and shut the door behind me.
The fact that there was no mail on my front doormat after three weeks baffled me. The only explanation was that someone had been letting themselves in. But no one had a key other than me. I did wonder if Anderson had been coming round regularly, but that didn’t fit; surely he wouldn’t want to risk been seen.
Every part of me hurt, but not through physical pain. My soul was aching and my body hurt in sympathy with it. After finding my bag and phone near Anderson’s front door, I’d been checking my phone since I’d walked out. The only messages I received were ones from my friends, work and the police, wondering where I was. Oh, and a telemarketing message regarding an accident I hadn’t been involved in. Nothing from Anderson.
‘I don’t love you. I don’t even want to love you.’
Tears bubbled in my eyes and I swept them away. I needed Dave, his cuddles and his fierce love for me. But Dave wasn’t here anymore, and I had to learn to suck it up.
‘I want to witness your heart shatter into a million fucking pieces.’
I should have alerted the police to my return but what would I say? I had to think of a story first and my brain wouldn’t work, my mind unable to process anything but Anderson’s cruel words.
‘You’re here because I want to ruin you.’
Well, he’d succeeded.
The coffee tasted bitter in my mouth and I shovelled another heap of sugar in, needing the sweetness to break me from my thoughts.
Checking the food stock in the pantry, I sighed in relief when I found it full, and then carried my coffee to the kitchen table and sat down.
‘Jesus Christ, have you learnt nothing?’
Obviously not. Although what I was supposed to have learnt was beyond me. Other than Judd Asher haunted Anderson Cain every single fucking day. Much like Samantha Rowan haunted my days – and nights.
‘One thousand pounds they sold me for.’
Closing my eyes when my stomach twisted, I gripped onto the cup in my hand and forced back the vomit that burnt my throat.
‘I can’t move on until it stops. For twenty-five years all I have breathed for is vengeance, to watch their faces when I come back, and for the one day when I can get an answer for the question that haunts my dreams.’
The question being ‘why’. But they had both died a year after selling their own son, and now Anderson couldn’t get an answer to that question.
‘I can’t move on until it stops. For twenty-five years all I have breathed for is vengeance, to watch their faces when I come back, and for the one day when I can get an answer for the question that haunts my dreams.’
My heart beat stuttered.
‘For the one day when I can get an answer for the question that haunts my dreams.’
‘Can.’ ‘Can.’ Present tense. He still thought he could get an answer. But why, how?
‘To watch their faces when I come back.’
My skin prickled with goosebumps.
‘Jesus Christ, have you learnt nothing?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this! Everything is changed, wrong!’
The cup slid from my hand and the air froze in my chest before it reached my lungs.
Fuck!
FUCK!
Why hadn’t I seen it? How could I have missed it?
‘You were supposed to help me finish this…’
My knees rattled against the table when I shot up and ran through to the lounge. Grabbing the laptop, I fired it up, my fingers drumming impatiently as I waited for the damn icon to stop spinning.
‘“Do you remember your parents?” I asked.
Tension poured from him, suffocating me in its potency. It swallowed the air in the room, so caustic that it ate at my breath like acid, and I shrank back into the bed when he sharply spun around.
“Get some sleep,” he barked before he took off up the stairs at a velocity that left me swaying.’
Google fired up. My fingers hovered over the keys, my hands shaking so violently I wasn’t sure I could type in the words. I wasn’t sure I was even breathing.
Bringing up various newspaper clippings from the time Anderson had been found, one jumped out.
‘Twenty-one years ago Judd Asher, aged four, was snatched after playing in his front garden. The largest search in the history of Derbyshire police was finally called off after three years, the mysterious disappearance of the young boy one of the police forces most heart-breaking unsolved crimes.