A Thousand Small Explosions (33 page)

CHAPTER 98

BETHANY

Bethany spent much of her final day on the farm preparing for her trek around Australia’s east coast.

              By the time she returned from the local stores picking up food supplies, Susan had washed, dried and ironed all of Bethany’s clothes and left them neatly pressed by her suitcase. Dan took the keys to Kevin’s truck and made sure the tyres were full of air, that a spare wheel was in the boot and that the oil, water, coolant and brake fluids were all topped up. He loaded the vehicle with seven two-litre bottles of water just in case of emergencies and gave Bethany a spare phone charger to ensure her phone and iPad were always with power. And he made her promise to email them photos she’d take en route.

              Before leaving, Bethany took time out to visit Kevin’s grave and sat before the temporary wooden cross that’d been erected while his parents waited for the ground to settle and a headstone to be fitted. When she closed her eyes and became mindful of her surroundings, she could hear Kevin in the breeze and when she took a deep breath, she could smell him in the flowers. He was in the trees and a part of every sunrise she’d ever wake up early to see and he’d always remain inside her, no matter where her travels took her.

She scrolled through her mobile phone, reliving the hundreds of text message conversations they’d had over the six months before she’d travelled to meet him in person. DNA Match or no DNA Match, she missed him terribly. There was no-one else in the world who’d known her better than Kevin had.

              Eventually Bethany made her way back towards the farmhouse where Susan and Dan placed Tupperware boxes crammed with sandwiches and salads in the rear passenger footwells.

              ‘Are you all set?’ Susan asked.

              ‘Pretty much,’ Bethany replied.

              ‘I’ve put a roadmap in the back with your route plotted out just in case technology lets you down,’ said Dan.

              ‘Thank you,’ Bethany replied and leaned in to hug him.

              ‘No, thank you for everything,’ said Susan, ‘I know it’s not been easy, especially the last few days, but I’m glad we’re still friends. Now promise me one more thing will you?’

              ‘Of course, what is it?’

              ‘That you’ll look after my boy.’

              ‘Mum, I’ll be fine,’ smiled Mark and kissed her on the cheek before throwing his rucksack across the back seat.

              ‘I promise,’ Bethany added. ‘I’m not leaving this family any time soon.’

CHAPTER 99

NICK

‘How many times did it happen?’

‘A few.’

‘How many is a few?’ Nick repeated, more firmly this time.

‘I don’t know, I didn’t count,’

‘Was it just sex?’

‘No.’

‘What was it then?’

‘She was my Match.’

‘What?’

‘Sally was my DNA Match.’

Nick stopped pacing around the lounge in his apartment and stared at his visitor. He held a sleeping baby Dylan close to his chest, the child’s head resting on a towel draped across Nick’s shoulder.

It had been impossible for friends and family who’d visited Dylan not to notice the difference between his brown skin and Sally and Nick’s chalky pallors. So Nick informed them he’d been fully aware before the birth that the child might not be his. He lied when he revealed that while they were going through a brief split some nine months earlier, Sally had had a one-night stand with an un-named stranger and Dylan was the result.

Once Dylan was born and Nick had overcome the shock, his gut instinct was that the boy’s father was much closer to home than anyone else had thought. It wasn’t until he’d seen Sally’s best friend’s husband Deepak crumble at her funeral that he knew for certain it was him - he was not a man who had simply lost a friend, but a man who’d lost half of himself. Then when Sumaira arrived to meet Dylan for the first time, the penny dropped for her too as to why Deepak had taken Sally’s death even harder than she had.

Deepak perched stiffly on Nick’s sofa, his eyes bloodshot and underscored by dark bags; his head resting in his hands.

‘So all those months ago, the night it all kicked off between Sally and me, I was right when I said there was no Match between you and Sumaira?’ Nick continued.

Deepak nodded. ‘We did the test after we got married but she was too ashamed to admit it to anyone. You know how some people can look down on couples who aren’t Matched.’

‘So when did you realise Sally was your Match?’

‘Two years ago when she and Sumaira started working together and that first night we all met up for a Chinese … as soon as I saw her, I felt it. It was like all these lightbulbs had been turned on at the same time in my head. I can’t really explain how badly I wanted to be with her.’

Nick nodded his head slowly. ‘That was the evening we had to leave early because Sal said she wasn’t very well. She’d felt the same thing as you, hadn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you started sleeping together.’

‘No, not for a long time after that. We became friends on Facebook first, then we started Instant Messaging and met for the occasional lunchtime coffee or dinner once every couple of weeks. But that wasn’t enough so gradually it escalated.’

Nick knew how hypocritical it’d be for him to feel animosity towards Sally for her lies, when his and Alex’s relationship had followed almost the exact same pattern.

‘I know how powerful it feels when you meet your Match,’ Nick conceded. ‘But how the hell did you two deal with not being together? It’s been five months since I last saw Alex and it still kills me not to be around him. How could you be so close to her yet so far away?’

‘She was going to leave you,’ Deepak replied hesitantly. ‘And I was planning to leave Sumaira a couple of months later, then a year or so after the dust had settled, we were going to start telling people we were dating. But Sumaira got pregnant with the twins and I knew I couldn’t just walk out on her. So in answer to your question, over time, I gradually learned to live with not being with Sally. You grab your moments where you can, and when you do they are the most intense feelings ever and you have to hold on to them so they tide you over until the next time. But I had to put my wife and the girls’ needs before my own.’

‘Not completely though, because you were still screwing my fiancée.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

‘And now that she’s gone, how are you dealing with it?’

Deepak wiped his eyes and nose on the cuff of his jumper. ‘I’m numb. I’m functioning because I need to for the sake of my family, but it feels like somebody’s ripped out of me everything that’s made me who I am.’

Against his better judgement, Nick began to feel sympathy for the man he used to call his friend. The man before him was not the quick-witted, laid-back Deepak of old; he was a shell of the man whose spark had been extinguished.

‘There’s something else that’s been bothering me,’ Nick continued. ‘If Sally knew she was Matched with you, why did she want both her and me to do the test? She knew what the results would say.’

‘I think she wanted to give you an “out”… it was her way of saying that you would always be second best to one another but she’d be willing to stick it out if that was what you’d wanted. I know that she loved you, so please don’t think she didn’t.’

‘She told me she didn’t have a Match.’

‘I know, she lied when she read out the email with her results. It had my name on it. ’

‘It seems like she lied about a lot.’

‘She was in an impossible situation.’

‘You don’t have to make excuses for her. When did you know the baby was yours?’

‘We didn’t know whose it was. She left it too late to take the morning after pill so she got drunk and seduced you when you were in Bruges.’

Nick rolled his eyes, stunned by the lengths Sally had gone to in her desperation not to get caught out.

‘What does Sumaira have to say about you fathering a child by her best friend? Your wife has an opinion on most things.’

‘She’s devastated. She hasn’t kicked me out but she doesn’t want to see the baby.’

‘What about you? What kind of future do you want with him?’

As Deepak paused and looked away, Nick held firm, desperately trying to disguise how concerned he was about the answer to come. He knew that many men would’ve discarded a child that wasn’t biologically a part of them but Nick had sacrificed too much already to give up on Dylan. The delicate little boy who slept so peacefully in his arms had lost his mother within minutes of his birth and Nick would not allow him to lose the man who had hoped to be his father. He felt an overwhelming amount of love for a son that wasn’t his.

‘I don’t think the boy and I have any future together,’ Deepak eventually replied.

‘You don’t
think
, or you know for sure?’

‘I know for sure. I’ve lost the love of my life and I’m struggling to keep everything together. I can’t cope with a baby my wife has already rejected.’

‘Do you feel anything for him at all?’

‘No, and I’m ashamed to say that. Ever since he was born, I have willed myself to feel something, but I don’t and each time I think about him, I think it’s his fault Sally’s dead, which is a horrible, horrible thing to admit. He reminds me too much of what I’ve lost and it kills me.’

‘So you’re not going to fight me to keep him?’

‘No. If you want him to stay with you, I’ll sign whatever papers you need me to sign to make it official.’

Deepak rose to his feet and walked towards the front door. ‘Nick,’ he said, without turning around, ‘I am sorry for everything and I hope you believe me. And thank you for being there for Dylan.’

When the door closed, Nick held his son tight and planted a long, gentle kiss on his forehead.

CHAPTER 100

ELLIE

Ellie felt like she was suffocating, like someone was kneeling on her chest, restricting each breath and refusing to allow the air to escape.

Each of her body’s ten pulse points vibrated like the woofers in a stereo speaker. Only there was no noise in her office, just the echo of Matthew’s confession.

              “Pull yourself together Ellie,” she told herself. “He’s lying to you.”

‘What does it feel like, knowing you’ve been duped?’ Matthew asked softly, like a therapist to his patient. He arranged his fingers in a steeple-like formation in front of his mouth to add to the fake sincerity of his question. ‘How does the puppet master feel having her strings pulled by someone else?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Ellie replied, ‘because nobody pulls my strings. Everything you’ve said is a lie.’

‘How can you be so sure of that?’

‘I’ll ask my IT department to prove it.’ Ellie reached for her phone but there was no signal. She grabbed the telephone on the table that separated them but could hear no dial tone. She glared at Matthew.

‘What have you done?’

‘A signal blocker and two phone jammers.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘Believe it or not, absolutely nothing. Not a single penny, not an apology, not an explanation. I’ll get enough gratification over the next few days when this becomes public and people across the world begin doubting whether the person on the other side of their bed really is the one they’re supposed to spend the rest of their lives with.’

Something inside Ellie suddenly snapped. She rose to her feet with such ferocity, it took Matthew by surprise.

‘I’ll deny it and who’s going to believe you?’ she snarled, and pointed her finger at him. ‘Some little crackpot bedroom computer hacker versus me and my organisation? We’ll eat you alive. My press department is built for damage limitation and we’ll spin this so you come across as a desperate, two-bit systems analyst who wasn’t qualified enough to get a job here. We will find everything there is to know about you to discredit what you have to say. I’ll ruin your dead mother’s reputation if I have to by dragging her and her paedophile boyfriend’s names through the mud, alongside any friend or acquaintance you have who’ll also be caught up in the onslaught. Then I’ll tie you up in court with so much litigation and private, malicious prosecutions that you’ll be penniless for the rest of your life. By the time you have left this building, we’ll have found whatever wormhole you claim to have discovered and seal it up. There will be no proof you ever broke into our system.’

‘I’m your fiancé,’ Matthew replied confidently, ‘that’ll give me a lot more credence. Especially when I tell everyone that the woman who’s amassed a personal fortune out of predetermined love is willing to hide the fact there are two million people out there who have been Matched with people they have no DNA connection with. There’ll be an investigation at the very least. There is no way out of this for you, Ellie.’

‘They won’t believe you.’

‘Ah well I hate to disappoint you but I think they might. I have everything I’ve done saved on back-up hard drives and memory sticks and hidden on files all waiting to be sent to WikiLeaks who’ll expose the story to the international media. They love a whistleblower especially when it’s about corporate misconduct, don’t they?’

‘I am not going to lose everything I have built because of you,’ Ellie spat.

Matthew smirked as he rose to his feet, straightened his tie and winked at Ellie.  ‘Let’s see about that, shall we Ells? For the rest of your life, people will be queuing the length of the River Thames to sue you for your flawed results and the failed relationships they’ve been in because of you. Then when everything you have cherished has been taken away from you, you’ll know how my mother and countless others have felt.’

It was the clear, crisp, venomous way in which Matthew delivered his final statement that convinced Ellie everything he’d told her was true. In an instant she saw all she’d accomplished being yanked away from her; she’d survived a decade of abuse and criticism and sacrificed so much but now it was all for nothing and all thanks to the man standing before her who’d tricked his way into her life.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

As he made his way towards the door, his head turned to look at Ellie one last time, only he wasn’t able to deliver his parting shot as planned. He couldn’t dodge the lead crystal decanter in Ellie’s hand as it collided with his temple and knocked him from his feet and down on to his knees. His eyes rolled as he glared at her in disbelief and clutched the side of his head. He watched, helpless and disorientated as she swung it again in a white hot rage, hitting him square in the same spot.

This time his skull cracked open and the decanter shattered, spraying fragments of bone, glass and whisky across the floor.

Ellie was motionless as she watched Matthew’s blood seep into the rug and his body convulse, before his eyes opened wide and her Match was gone.