Page 84 of The Soulmate

‘Oh.’ Gabe took a moment to process this. ‘May I ask why?’

‘Because I just discovered video footage of her and Max in his office. Pippa was half-undressed.’

‘Footage?’ Gabe’s face expressed his shock and disbelief, which I expected. It was part of the reason I’d brought the USB. But then he said, ‘Max filmed it?’

I stared at him. ‘Wait – you knew about this?’

‘Pippa told me. It happened over a year ago, before we moved away. But I had no idea it had been filmed.’

And there it was, the confirmation. I hadn’t realised how much I’d been hoping that it was all a misunderstanding. That when the footage stopped, Max stopped too. My head began to spin.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gabe said, softer now. ‘You must be upset.’

I laughed. ‘Upset? Max is the great love of my life. The only thing I ever asked of him was fidelity.’ I threw up my arms. ‘It’s bad enough that he would betray me at all, but to do it with . . .’

It was because I was so upset that I nearly said it. But I stopped myself. How ridiculous that was . . . even while freshly wounded by Max’s betrayal, I couldn’t repress my instinct to protect him.

‘I’ve spent my life keeping his secrets. Protecting him. And forwhat?’ I held up the USB. ‘This contains the contents of his secret computer. I could send it to the media. Or the police! I could ruin him! Maybe I will . . .’

Gabe, I noticed, was watching me warily now. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Amanda.’

‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Amanda.’ Gabe took a step towards me. ‘Take a breath. Take a minute to think about this.’

‘Max didn’t think twice before he betrayed me!’

I was talking a big game. It felt amazing. Suddenly I felt powerful – like I had control in a situation where I’d previously had none. But I knew, even then, that I would never turn over the USB to anyone. No matter what Max had done, I couldn’t do that to him. Loving and protecting him had become part of my DNA.

Gabe’s stance had changed now. Rather than the calm neutral man who’d appeared on the cliff, he appeared almost . . . predatory. It prompted a realisation. The type that comes out of nowhere and hits you forcefully. Ofcourse. Max wasn’t the only one who could be hurt by what was on this USB. There was information on here that would incriminate Gabe. By the look on Gabe’s face, he’d realised this too.

He lunged for the USB.

For a moment, we both had it. I pulled it towards me, and Gabe pulled it back. I gripped it tightly and leaned back, all my weight in my heels. I really thought I had it. Then Gabe ripped it free, and suddenly I was falling.

Gabe tried to help. He lunged forward, his arms outstretched. He almost caught me. Then he stopped. He held his palms up flat; he stood upright. Perhaps he thought it was too late? Or perhaps he’d realised that if I went over the cliff, everything became simpler? I guessed I’d never know.

And so I plunged to my death. It’s probably a cliché, the fact that I was thinking about Max as I fell. Even though he’d betrayed me, I felt proud that, as I fell, I was taking Max’s biggest secret with me to the grave.

It served Gabe right that now he’d never know it.

84

AMANDA

AFTER

When Max told me about Gabe, it was late, and we were having one of our cheese platters. I don’t know why he chose that particular time to tell me. Perhaps it was because Gabe and Pippa had recently moved away and it felt safe to say it out loud. Maybe it was because, by that point, we’d never trusted each other more. At least that’s how it felt to me.

‘A few months after Harry died,’ Max said, ‘a young woman named Marina came to see my dad and stepmum. She was a girlfriend of Harry’s, apparently, although not one they’d met before. That wasn’t so strange; Harry had a lot of girlfriends. Anyway, she told them she was pregnant.’

Max was sitting in his armchair, holding a glass of red wine, but his gaze was far away. I sat forward and put my own wineglass on the table.

‘My parents were very wealthy, as you know, and Marina was . . . not. This is all second-hand information, of course; my parents only told me about it years later. They said she had no proof that the baby was Harry’s, and with Harry dead, she had no way of getting a DNA test to prove that it was his. It was determined – by my father, I guess – that she was angling for money. They sent her away.

‘It took me a year to track her down after they told me. That was before the days of social media. By then, Gabe was a teenager. I met Marina at a cafe and proposed we do a DNA test now. We could use my DNA to determine whether Gabe and I were related. I don’t know why I bothered, though; from the moment I saw his photo, I knew that Gabe was Harry’s son. The fact that he was already showing signs of mental illness made it even more obvious.’ Max stared into his wine, lost in the memory. ‘I wanted to meet him, of course, but since my parents had refused to acknowledge his existence, he wasn’t interested. According to his mother, he didn’t even want to know our names.

‘I offered financial support, and Marina accepted it. When she died a few years later, I quietly paid off the mortgage on her house so Gabe could keep living there. But it wasn’t enough. I should have done more.’