in bed tonight dreaming of what it would be like to fuck that Greek waiter. I saw the way you looked at him. Why don’t you just go back, go be with him . . .”
“Maybe I will,” Kate said, and knew immediately she shouldn’t have.
George grabbed her by the shoulders and started to push her toward the door. “Go, then,” he shouted, his fingers digging into her sunburned flesh. Not knowing what else to do, Kate stopped resisting and dropped to the uncarpeted floor. She began to sob as George repeatedly punched the wall until a crack appeared and his knuckles were bloody.
“Does Daddy get jealous?” Kate asked her mother the first time she saw her after returning from Greece.
“Jealous of what?”
“Of you, and other men?”
“God, no. Why?”
“What about when you were first together? When you were dating?”
“Maybe a little, but only because when I started dating your father I was still stepping out with Robert Christie.” She took a sip of her wine. Rain slashed against the glass of the conservatory.
“That must have driven him mad?”
“I don’t know about it driving him mad, exactly, but it spurred him to action. He asked me to marry him a lot sooner than I think he would have done otherwise. Not that Robert Christie ever would have asked me to marry him.”
“And since then?”
“We’re married, darling, and your father’s not the jealous type. Why are you asking all these questions?”
Kate told her mother about George’s jealous streak. She told her pretty much everything, only omitting the night in Heraklion that ended with him cracking the hotel wall with his fist.
“That doesn’t sound good, darling.”
“It isn’t. I love George, but I feel like I’m walking on eggshells all the time, making sure I don’t slip up and mention another man’s name.”
“That’s ludicrous, dear. What does he think, that just because you’re together you’re not going to find other men attractive?”
“That’s exactly what he thinks.”
“Good lord, Kate.”
“I know, I know. I think I need to end it.” It was the first time she’d said these words out loud, and saying them made tears start to roll down her face.
“I think you do, too,” her mother said.
It wasn’t easy. Kate decided to write a long letter to George, explaining her reasons in detail, and trying her hardest to ensure him about how much he had meant to her. She left the letter under his residence door before leaving for summer vacation. A week later she tried to call him and he didn’t pick up. She worried, but knew it was for the best. By August she still hadn’t heard a word, and that was when she made her mistake. She posted to Facebook that she was spending a week at her uncle’s cottage in Windermere. She simply wrote: “Walking holiday. Lake District. Bliss.”
George didn’t have a Facebook profile, and even though she did, she rarely posted. It never occurred to her that he might read the post. In retrospect, she knew that she’d been stupid, but what she had really been was hopeful. Hopeful that George was moving on, like she was. But George did read her post. He knew the cottage because they’d been there together before, on a minibreak holiday with her family. Years later, Kate wondered how long he’d been in Windermere watching her and following her before he made his appearance. She never sensed him, exactly, although it had been a blustery, dark-skied week, and Kate had had premonitions of death in her troubled sleep. For the first few days of the trip, Kate had shared the cottage with Sadie, her younger cousin, visiting from two villages over. George had probably been watching them, waiting for a moment when Kate was alone. He’d been sleeping rough in a wood nearby. Afterward, after all that had happened, they’d found his tent and a sodden sleeping bag hidden in a copse.
Midway through the week, and the first night that Sadie hadn’t slept over in the cottage, Kate woke at just past midnight to find George seated next to her bed, the rifle lying casually across his lap. Kate had opened her mouth to scream and George had leapt on her, his knees on her chest, and pushed the oily barrel of the gun hard against her mouth, splitting her lip and breaking a tooth.
He held her like that on the bed for over an hour, telling her in a strange, flat monotone how she deserved to die for what she’d done to