I smiled. “Of course you did.”
He shrugged like it was no big deal, but it was. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor, perhaps, but he was a hero all the same, and I loved him for that, even when his methods of protection were on the dark side.
My smile faded as I remembered we were headed to a grim ending. “Then what?”
“Not knowing what I was walking into, I drove myself instead of taking a driver. It was late afternoon when I got to her house. She was waiting at the gates with an overnight bag, wouldn’t even let me pull into the driveway. She got in, urged me to drive, and refused to say anything more until we were somewhere ‘safe.’ I didn’t know what safe meant, of course. I should have taken her to London, and I would have if I’d understood, but I didn’t. So I took her to Brayhill, which was nearby, and flat out told her I’d take her nowhere else until she explained.”
He took a sip of my wine then set the unfinished glass down beside him. Sitting forward, he rested his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands together in front of his face. “I didn’t believe her at first. Which I regret very much. But she’d put on that show for so long. They’d been married for ten years, and I’d never had any clue. I’d even forgotten about the times I’d seen bruises until I really thought about it later on. In the end, she had to peel off her shirt and show me the scars. Camilla’s always stayed covered up. She’s self-conscious about the marks her foster father left, and I’d known about those, of course, as well as other scars, but I hadn’t seen so much of her skin in nearly a decade.”
His torso expanded as he took a long breath in. “It’s not my place or my story to comment much on what I saw,” he said, breathing out. “Let’s just say it convinced me.”
I ran my hand up and down his back, not sure if it was meant to comfort him or me. He accepted it for longer than I thought he would. Then, when he glanced over his shoulder at me, I pulled my hand back into my lap.
“What happened that finally pushed her to call you? Something worse than usual?” It probably wasn’t relevant, but the question came out anyway. A sick sort of curiosity, and I braced myself for details of an altercation that had to be horrendous. Being beaten at all was appalling. Yet my mind ran away with all the possibilities that would make it worse—did he burn her like her foster father had? Cut her? Break her bones?
In the profiled position, I could easily see Edward’s jaw tense, mirroring the dread that I imagined. “She’d tried to leave him before, apparently. Without success. He always tracked her down, made her feel like it was impossible to get away. She’d been too embarrassed to involve me, she said. Can you believe that? Embarrassed.”
Yes, I could believe that. I’d felt the same about Ron.
“As for the fight that day, she didn’t say much about the details except that it had been a typical row. Apparently his violent streaks came in cycles, and there’d been a fairly good reprieve before that morning. The reprieves always ended eventually, according to what she told me, and she’d been half prepared for it this time, but was hoping beyond hope that he’d meant it this time when he’d said he’d changed. She thought if there was any chance that he would, this would be it.”
Putting together what I already knew about Camilla at the time of her husband’s death, I realized why she’d put so much stock in him. She’d been six months pregnant. “She wanted to protect Freddie.”
“She did.” Retrieving the glass of wine, he stood and paced over to the window. “Freddie was the only reason she called me,” he said, looking out into the night. “She didn’t care enough about herself on her own, but for him…”
He washed the thought away with a swallow of wine, then turned back to me. “To be fair, Frank had really made it difficult for her to see any other path. He’d ostracized her from her friends. He’d taken complete control of her life—her accounts, her daily schedule. She couldn’t even get access to her car without going to him, which was why she’d needed me that day. She had no money, no vehicle. She’d only been able to phone because he’d been in the shower. She managed to call me and take her bag down to hide by the side of the road during that time. Then she spent the next hour placating his every whim and praying he wouldn’t check her call log, which he often did. She got away to meet me by telling him she was going for the mail.”
It sounded similar to every account of domestic abuse I’d ever heard, which made it no less horrifying. I pulled my feet up to the sofa and hugged my knees to my chest, needing the support to hear more.
Edward’s support was the wine. He finished it off and set it down on the side table. “Obviously, once I was convinced, I was ready to tear the man apart with my bare hands. I fantasized doing so for much of the evening, in fact. Planning all the ways I’d destroy him when we should have been headed back to London. They were brutal, believe me. Ways in which he truly suffered. Who knows what I would have done. I would have started legally, though. I called my lawyer that night to request a meeting the next day when we got into town. I believed we had time, see. I didn’t think that he would come after her so quickly or know to come looking for her at Brayhill. Stupid, right? Where else would she go? I suspect things would have gone quite differently if I hadn’t thought I was so invincible.”
He sank down in the armchair. “I never did figure out how he got past security. She’d left her mobile behind. My best guess is that he found where she kept the system code saved in her contacts, but he may also have lured her to let him in some other way. I’d given her my laptop when she’d gone to bed. He might have emailed her there or messaged her through a social app. I didn’t want her to ever think I blamed her, so I never asked. All I knew was that, in the middle of the night, I was woken with shouting from the guest wing. I didn’t even think about it—I grabbed my gun.”
My skin prickled with foreboding, but I tried to remain expressionless as he went on, the way he always was when he listened in my sessions. It was harder than I’d imagined.
Whatever my face said, he went on. “Camilla and I were the only ones in the house. I was ninety-nine percent sure that Frank was our intruder, but I had no plan. I just went to the safe, took it out, loaded it with a full cartridge, and went to her room. The door was open when I got there, and I must have arrived just after it happened because they were both by the fireplace, Camilla standing with the poker in her hand, Frank swaggering as blood gushed from a wound at his head. Whatever threat he’d been, he was outnumbered now. We could have dialed 111, had him arrested and taken to hospital. He may have survived. Though she’d hit him pretty hard. There was a good chance the injury was fatal on its own. Either way, I didn’t let us find out. As soon as I registered what I was seeing, I aimed my gun and shot. Three times, to be sure.”
There it was. The terrible truth, not quite as terrible as I’d imagined, gruesome as it was. No premeditation. Self-defense, most likely, according to the law. Potentially hard to prove, but with Edward being who he was...
Except.
“Frank died in a fire,” I said, remembering the accounts I’d read. The entire estate had burned down.