Christchurch.” She swallowed. “I had to get things straight in my head first. I couldn’t deal with my father telling me what to do while my sisters organized my life.”
Anahera sat back and let Jemima talk, and she learned that Vincent had chosen the most soft-spoken and submissive of four sisters, the woman least likely to question his actions.
“I went along with everything,” Jemima whispered. “The nights when he just disappeared, the days when he’d shut the door to his basement workroom and ignore me and the children, the way he’d be so cold to me when we were alone and so warm and affectionate when we were out in public—I pretended that was the real Vincent. Because that was the Vincent who courted me. Who married me.”
Anahera nodded. “I understand.”
The other woman’s expression fractured, her lips quivering. “You’re the only person who can say that and that I know actually does understand. Thank you for sharing your secret with me. I won’t tell anyone.”
It was such a stark thing to say, stripped of all pretense. “And whatever you tell me,” Anahera replied, “it stays between us. No matter what.”
“You’re with that cop.”
“I’m my own person.” She also understood the ugly truth that long-term abuse had an insidious impact on the psyche; no one who hadn’t walked in Jemima’s shoes had the right to judge her. “My father beat my mother for most of their life together. And she stayed. She even stuck up for him against people who called him a bully. She told them he was a wonderful husband and father.”
Jemima stared at Anahera. “Did she ever get away?”
“Five years before she died. The first time he punched me.” Anahera could still feel her head snapping back with violent force, her body flying back. “I got into the middle of a fight between them and he went for me. I never knew before that day why he’d never once touched me even in the worst of his rages. Because that was my mother’s bright line.” The one thing Haeata would not forgive.
Jemima frantically wiped away the tears rolling down her face, shooting a quick look toward the children to make sure they hadn’t seen. “I was getting to that point,” she whispered. “He’d started to ignore the children more and more except when he needed to bring them out for a photo op.
“They’d run to him for hugs and…” She stared at nothing for long minutes. “Vincent never yelled, but he’d be so cold, like our babies were stray animals who had nothing to do with him.” Her fingers clenched again around the takeout cup. “At night, in the darkness, I lie awake and I wonder if I would have left him if he’d carried on that way. Or if I would’ve stayed while my children suffered.”
Glancing at the two frosting-smudged kids currently sitting with their elbows braced on top of the coffee table while they drank their hot chocolates, Anahera said, “As far as I can see, they’re happy and well-adjusted. Whatever Vincent withheld, you gave them in spades.”
A tremulous smile. “You think so?”
“I’ve never lied to you.”
The smile brightened then disappeared. “I didn’t know,” the other woman said, her voice hollow. “Those nights when he disappeared, I thought he was going out and sleeping with other women. Maybe prostitutes. It was the worst thing I could imagine.”
“I don’t think murder is the default assumption for any wife when her husband goes missing overnight.” Anahera leaned forward. “The media are going to hound you. If you decide to do an interview, control it.”
“I won’t be talking to reporters,” Jemima murmured. “My oldest sister, Catherine, is a lawyer. She’s always been the strongest and mostly, I try to keep out of her way, but I called her and I asked her if the children and I can disappear.”
A long exhale, traces of her South African accent slipping back into her words as she continued. “Catherine said it’ll be next to impossible in a small country where every news channel and outlet is going to be carrying this story for months, maybe years, along with photos of Vincent and me. At least they’ve been decent enough to spare the children.”
She took a gulp of the tepid coffee. “It’s also a huge story in South Africa because of my family’s standing there.” More whispers of the accent, more cracks in the veneer of perfection demanded by Vincent and produced by this woman who’d loved him. “My face is apparently everywhere.”
“You