in the good old days. Sometimes she dreamed that they were standing on a cliff in the dead of the night and Bea was the only thing between him and the rocks below. Live or die – she decides. When she woke from the dream, screaming and crying, she could never quite bring herself to tell her friends which decision she’d made.
Karen and Eleanor had been amazing, but the one thing they’d never managed to do was convince her to go to the police. As much as she wanted to see Kieran Ressler suffer, the thought of everyone at university, her mum, her sister and worse still her dad knowing what he had done – what she had let happen – was a nightmare beyond the one she had been living. The fact was that it would be her word against his, and there would be plenty of people to attest to the fact that she had been in the kind of state where plenty of women had done things they regretted.
The other thing that scared her, even more than telling the police, was that one of these days, in one of these dreams, she would remember what had actually happened after he’d taken her home. Which would be worse? If he’d done what he’d done after she had passed out unconscious, or if she’d been awake the entire time, so terrified that her inebriated mind had chosen to blank it out? What would happen to her on the day it all came screaming back? And – something that haunted her waking moments as well as her sleeping ones – what if she’d said yes? What would happen to her on the day it all came screaming back? How would that memory rewire what had become of her life since that night? Her entire existence had been split into two – Before the night and After. Going out into the night with her friends, dressed in a black playsuit that skimmed the ample cheeks of her arse and with a neckline that ended at her navel, as someone who firmly believed that bad things only happened to other people – stupid women who were careless and walked home on their own after dark, dragged into bushes with knives held at their throats; and waking up the next day in her own safe, comfortable bed, her naked body bruised and aching, as a victim.
Now, sixteen years later, she could think of nothing worse than the truth coming out, or justice being served. These days, even the thought of him walking into a police station (though that wasn’t really possible, was it?) and confessing his sins, dragging up the past, letting everyone know what a stupid little girl she’d been, could stop her heart in her chest. She’d spent a long time, after all, cultivating her tough-cookie, good-time girl image; no one could ever know that she’d been acting her way through life ever since that night.
Bea wondered sometimes what it was like to live without despising yourself. To know exactly who you were and be proud of that person. It was funny; people automatically assumed that what her life was missing, what she must desperately be in need of – after all, wasn’t every woman? – was a husband. When in actual fact she wasn’t desperate to be loved by another person; all she wanted was to feel the slightest bit of affection for herself.
Bea wanted to be a success at something. Anything. When people talked about Eleanor, they always spoke with awe about how much she loved her family, and how lovely Toby was, and now she was thinking about starting her own business with a three-month-old in tow. Karen had her own beautiful home that she’d mortgaged without Michael’s help, and a career that was only headed upwards. What did they say about Bea? How much fun she was, always up for a laugh and a joke, another pint or a glass of wine. How her shoes were always killer and she never left the house without make-up. How was it that all she had to show for over three decades of living was an ability to match the right shoes to an outfit and drink the same volume of alcohol as a seventeen-stone rugby player?
She didn’t blame her whole life on him. It would be easy to think that what had happened to her that night had made her incapable of giving or receiving love, or that she