The bathroom door opened and the click of a light switch was audible. Olivia emerged, blonde curls newly scraped back into a messy bun on top of her head and face now cleansed of make up. Where strands of hair poked out you could see the blue tips. Justin was stretched out on the bed in his boxers, eyes following her as she padded back towards him and delicately sat back down on the mattress.

The twisted thing was that he had been imagining this scenario all week. It was almost like he’d scripted the entire thing out in his head. He’d choreographed every move and already mentally held all their conversations. With her hair up like that and wearing his shirt, tanned legs stretching out from beneath the hem, she even looked the way he’d imagined. It had all been planned out as their first cosy night away together when he was finally free.

A good deal of it did look exactly as he’d envisioned, but in his mental picture it had been Friday and they were happy – victorious, even. Instead his first legitimate night with Olivia was passing not in passionate celebration but morbid gloom. The moment of triumph that he had been anticipating so long would never come to pass; he would never get to reclaim that power. He had waited so long for his opportunity to fight back, to tell her where to go, to win against her for a change… and she’d taken it with her to the grave.

It was almost like Vanessa had found one last way to spite him.

Even as he had that thought he felt guilty for it. They had been married and she had died tragically, he shouldn’t be acting like it was a personal affront to him. It had been much the same since the detective had uttered those fateful words; conflicting thoughts and feelings were ricocheting through his brain, colliding at brutal speed. One moment he was feeling almost relieved that it had happened, the next sad, the next angry. Then he was wondering what grounds he had to feel any upset when he’d been thinking only that morning of how much he hated her. How could he feel so torn up about a woman he’d come to loathe?

Olivia’s arrival at the hotel had been full of more contradictions. The last impulse he’d expected to have when she got through the door was to make love, but in the moment the physical need to reach out and feel something had been overwhelming. It was probably the strangest experience he’d ever had with a woman – slow, needy and almost consoling in a way. Like solace was only to be found in holding somebody close and breathing them in, a reaffirmation that life was in fact going on and the world hadn’t stopped when he opened the door to those police officers. Then the second it had been over he’d felt like the world’s most heartless and insensitive shit for having sex with another woman so soon after his wife had died.

Curling her legs up under herself, she leaned back against the headboard and watched him in return. She didn’t say anything, as she hadn’t said much throughout the evening so far. Though he’d requested company Justin was oddly grateful for that. Everything in his head needed to find a voice but it was taking its sweet time. All those people – the police, her parents, his parents, Trace – had asked too many questions, had needed too much feedback from him before he was able to even think straight. Olivia was quiet and still, eye of the storm, and he had sorely needed the silence for a little while.

She reached out to tweak his chin affectionately, and he gave her a strained smile in return. It felt like time to start talking.

“I can’t believe she’s gone. And not even gone in the way I’d been working for… really gone. I was all geared up to have the fight of my life with her and now I’m never gonna so much as hear her voice again.”

Olivia said nothing, merely gazed steadily at him.

“You’d think I’d be happy, right?”

“No.” She frowned at him, shaking her head firmly. “Of course not. You could never be that hard.”

“If this had all gone as planned, we would have been here three nights from now and I’d have probably been singing Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead or some shit. I’d have been talking about how glad I was. Isn’t that hard? Cruel even?”

Olivia’s middle finger jerked. In a few short words he’d managed to take her back a decade and she was experiencing his feelings as if they were hers. They had been hers. They still occasionally were, though she never said so to anyone. Not even to Rob.

When Deborah had died they had been stuck with all the arrangements and costs and probate. Of course the harpy had lied through her teeth to her friends about the situation, so they’d had to deal with all manner of people expressing sympathy and talking about how wonderful she was. They weren’t to know, Olivia didn’t blame them. It was still hard to stand there comforting grieving people when what you wanted to do was scream out that you’d hated the deceased’s guts and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. You felt like a fraud.

And what was worse was that it was all tied up with an odd sense that you were in fact grieving yourself. You shouldn’t be, had no claim to or wish to, and yet there it was. One minute you felt shame and like you should care more that this person you were so unavoidably connected to was gone, the next you felt like a hypocrite for caring at all.

“It’s not wrong that you would have been glad to be away from something painful, and it doesn’t make you mean. It’s not like you wanted her to be hurt, Justin, you just didn’t want her to hurt you any more. You’re not a bad person for that and you weren’t asking for this. This just… happened.”

“It’s so screwed up, Liv.” He tipped his head back and closed his eyes, sighing. “I can’t process this. Part of me feels relieved, part of me feels sick, and then part of me kind of feels like I still had shit I needed to say. I can’t seem to keep my own story straight for more than thirty seconds, even to myself.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“Really? I’m a cheating husband who was about to blindside his wife with a divorce and now she’s just conveniently let me off the hook by dying, the first thing I do is call my mistress over. Maybe I should be a little harder on me.”

“Stop it.” Olivia scooted over to him, moving to straddle his lap. She didn’t reach forward to hug him, simply sat back on his legs and picked up his hands. “It’s hard e-fucking-nough as it is without punishing yourself for shit that isn’t your fault.”

“You don’t understand, Liv.” His thumbs rubbed the backs of her hands.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Really? What do you know about it?” Justin hadn’t meant to sound quite so curt; it had been intended more as a straight question. He regretted his tone immediately when he saw the flinch pass over her face.

“I know what it’s like to hate someone and love them at the same time. Every messed up, conflicted feeling you’re having right now? She was your wife, you loved her, she treated you like shit and now suddenly she’s died and with her she took any chance you had of confronting her or getting closure. Hell, she even took any hope you had of making it up with her, which sounds crazy when you know full well that Hell would’ve frozen over before she decided to be a decent person or apologise but somehow the hope doesn’t die. Until she does and then you know she’s just always going to be that person who should have loved you and never did. You’re not wrong for any of it, babe, feeling fucked up is a pretty reasonable response here.”

There was that rhythm again, her slim fingers tapping out it against his hand where he held hers. One, one two, one, one two, it was becoming as familiar to him as the lines of her face or the curve of her body.

Olivia’s voice had become more strained with every word. Towards the end of her speech she was practically spitting them out. In the space of a heartbeat she became brittle, looking five years older with a simple shift of expression. A deep furrow was set between her eyes, which looked haunted. Justin was taken aback. As he looked her up and down she appeared smaller to him somehow, like her body had folded and shrunk in on itself. She didn’t normally hunch like that.

He recognised this demeanour - he’d seen it in the mirror enough times.

Now he saw it, it seemed ludicrous that it hadn’t struck him sooner. Heck, he had been the beneficiary of her encyclopaedic knowledge of emotional abuse – how could he not have seen the link? Too busy wallowing in his own mess, he surmised.

“Who was it, Liv?”

She was dangerously close to crying. Wordlessly she released his hands and removed herself from his lap, returning to sit back against the pillows. For a moment she didn’t look at him, merely stared down at her hands. Justin waited with baited breath, not wanting to push but somehow feeling that he couldn’t change the subject.

Eventually Olivia pulled her head up and slowly, hesitantly drew her left foot towards herself. She picked it up in her hands and turned it towards him. On its sole were a number of raised, roughly round-shaped scars where the skin was a little shinier and darker. Justin ran his finger across three of them which ran in an almost ruler straight line.

“What are those?”

“Cigarette burns.”

Justin felt a little bit like he wanted to be sick.

“I think she did it there because nobody would see it. She never did anything where people would see it. It hurt like freakin’ hell trying to walk on them, probably didn’t help that the shoes were two sizes too small anyway.”

“Who’s she?” He asked tentatively. It was tough to imagine what kind of individual put their cigarettes out on another human being.

The twitching began again in earnest as she set her foot back down. “Deborah. Our egg donor, as we like to call her.”

The bile was coming up in his throat again. “Your own mother did that to you?”

“Yep. We ruined her life, apparently, so I guess it was only quid pro quo that she returned the favour.”

Deborah was the woman who had given birth to them, given Rob the nose he couldn’t stand to look at – and she was a malignant witch if ever there was one. She never got referred to by any maternal terms. She hadn’t earned them. Most people would have been devastated to lose their mother at twenty; the two of them had felt like they’d been released from a life sentence.

“But…” He didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. It had genuinely never occurred to him before that the only family she talked about was her brother. “What about your dad? Didn’t he realise?”

Olivia’s lips curved in an ironic smile. It was amazing, the way people so innocently assumed that if somebody else had been around they would have done something about it. They couldn’t imagine seeing and doing nothing, and yet her grandparents certainly had.

“Fuck knows who our dad is. I guess we must look like him since we never resembled her much, but that’s about as much as we know. Rob and I used to pay this game where we’d imagine who he was and why he hadn’t come to get us yet. He was usually a pilot or a soldier or something, but we stopped that once we got old enough to realise he was probably just some drunk from the bar like the others she brought back.”

“So that’s how you knew about Nessa?” He asked. “She used to act the same to you?”

“Yeah. Same kind of shit, lots of insults and blaming us for everything and acting like if we breathed it was a terrible crime against her personally. Lots of evil little things she did just because she could, making us feel like we were worthless. One time, she left us alone in the house for three days and the only thing in the pantry was this box with all these homemade jams she’d been given. When she got back she got a switch and whipped us for eating them, Rob got beat on twice because he tried to stop her hitting me. He’s still got the scars on his back.”

“God…” He was clueless about what to say.

“She really hated when either of us did that for the other. She was forever trying to play us off against each other, she’d be nicer to one and then extra evil to the other to try and cause resentment. Never worked, so instead she just got mad. People either didn’t believe us or they just took it to mean we were awful kids who she was trying to discipline. She finally kicked us out when we were fifteen. We had to drop out of school; we couch surfed for a little while before we managed to get jobs and some dive apartment, but she’d still sometimes track us down and sabotage shit for us. Then she had a heart attack when we were twenty. So… yeah. That’s how I know what it’s like to be grieving for somebody you despise.”

Justin remained silent.

“I felt exactly the same as you do and to be honest I still do every time I think about it. I hated her, she was evil and sometimes I’m scared that I share DNA with her. When she died, it was like… I was her daughter, wasn’t I supposed to be upset instead of relieved? But then at the same time part of me was honestly grieving. Not for her, but for everything that she should have been. The mother I never got to have, all the love I wasted on her because whatever else I was a kid who wanted a mom to love me.”

Olivia was now holding her fingers rigid, trying with all her might to stop herself from tapping.

“And even though I know she was just a vile person and she never would have even realised how wrong she’d been let alone admitted it, I still had this dumb fantasy that one day she’d get treatment or whatever and come around looking to make it right. When she died, all of that went with her. Now all she can ever be is the nasty bitch who used to stub her cigarettes out on me just to watch me cry, and I’m relieved to know that I’m never going to answer the phone or open the door to her again. So if that’s how you feel about Vanessa right now, I get that completely.”

“Is that why you do that thing with your fingers?” He asked after a long pause.

“It…” She bit her lip. “Rob and I worked out that if we pinched ourselves when the switch hit, it kind of helped as a distraction. Guess we just picked up her rhythm.”

“Liv, I… Jesus fucking Christ.”

Olivia anxiously yanked her hair out of its bun, suddenly wanting something to hide behind. If she looked at him right now she was going to cry and she thoroughly disliked wasting any tears on Deborah. It was time for the moment she’d warned him about – that horrible moment where you laid it all out for somebody you desperately needed to understand. You were open and bare to them, and they had the power to stomp on you. It was doubly nerve wracking since when she told this story she was by default spilling Rob’s guts as well as her own. Here was that horrible moment of not being sure whether the person you’d told was about to devastate you.

Justin shifted over and pulled her body to his, wrapping his arms around her a touch too tightly. One cradled her head as if he was trying to retroactively protect her. Olivia exhaled the breath she’d been holding and buried herself into his embrace, hooking her leg over his and returning the hug with a tight grip.

It wasn’t as if he could somehow make any of that better by kissing her face and rubbing her back, but Justin did it anyway because there was little else he could do. This woman was starting to make Vanessa sound positively delightful. Somehow it felt worse hearing about this even than dealing with it himself – he’d been a grown ass adult who had up until that point enjoyed a very privileged life. Olivia and Rob had been children, neglected and physically abused as well as all the rest, tortured by the same sick individual who should have been caring for them.

It was funny. Somehow hearing her say those things actually made him breathe a little easier, his own wildly paradoxical feelings seeming less oppressive. As she spoke about the things she felt they made perfect sense to him. He completely understood how she could feel like that. He’d never say she was a bad person for any of it and would probably punch the lights out of anybody who expressed such sentiments. Yet what she was talking about shared some ground with his own situation. So if he could understand her then maybe he should cut himself some slack there too?

His next words surprised her.

“I’m sorry I never asked earlier.”

She was confused. “Huh? Why would you? How could you know?”

“I must have wondered about what you do with your hand a million times, I know you have stress issues, and you and I must have talked about the habits of abusive assholes enough to fill several consecutive days. If I hadn’t been caught up in all my own shit I could’ve connected those dots.”

“Babe, you’ve had enough on your plate without expecting yourself to be psychic.” She traced a finger over his collarbone.

“No, I…” Justin let out a frustrated grunt. It was one more reason that he needed to take a little more control and stop relying on her to save him all the time. “Like I didn’t already know that you were cut up over us sneaking around, this all must have been a real painful reminder for you. If I’d got my shit together earlier I could’ve spared you some of it. It’s like I said - I feel like you haven’t had enough from me, and noticing something this huge when it’s staring me in the face is exactly the kind of basic thing that should be happening. Focusing on you instead of it being all me all the time.”

The idea of reciprocal focus in her romantic relationships was sadly novel to her. There was a four letter word sitting on her tongue in that moment, tapping on the inside of her head asking to be let out. She couldn’t quite bring herself to it yet.

“Justin, you’ve been going through a marriage break up and now you have this death to deal with. You’re allowed to need to focus on yourself, you know. I get it.”

“Yeah, well sometimes I think you could do with being a little less understanding and a little more selfish.” A trio of kisses trailed across her hairline.

“I kicked your ass about leaving. I think that’s enough for now.” With that thought came a great sigh. “Though I suppose as it turns out that was redundant.”

Well, maybe that wasn’t especially true. If he hadn’t shown any signs of leaving and had then come to her after Vanessa had passed away, she’d probably have accused him of picking her as some kind of default or second choice. In that respect it was good that Justin had made his choices first; neither of them would have to wonder whether he’d ever have left if she hadn’t died. In some ways the death made things less tricky, since she was no longer around to be combative. In other ways it had made the whole thing immensely complicated. On balance maybe it was going to be just as hard in a whole new way, Olivia didn’t know.

Taking their relationship public relatively soon after news of the divorce hit probably wouldn’t have raised much discussion - it would have been clear that the marriage was likely in trouble for a while prior to the actual filing. So long as they hadn’t slipped up and been linked together too quickly then nobody would have suspected. But after a death when nobody had any idea that there had been as much as a bad word between Mr and Mrs Timberlake? That was different. For Justin to swan around with a new girlfriend looking untroubled by becoming a widower could cause comment.

All of that on top of her pre-existing worries about becoming a real couple was a recipe for overload. Though she’d been pushing for him to leave and commit to a future with her, she wasn’t naïve. Clandestine liaisons were one thing and a real relationship in the cold light of day was another. It made her nervous. The secrecy had been a big strain on both of them, he’d had to lean on her very heavily for support (she guessed he would have to again, with all this), and that was a lot of pressure. Adjusting to being together full-time might not be as easy as her romantic fantasies would have her believe and Vanessa’s death had only complicated the situation further.

He laid his cheek against the crown of her head and echoed her sigh. “Do you think it’s really possible somebody did that on purpose?”

Olivia frowned. “On purpose? You said it might be hit and run but are they really thinking that it could have been on purpose?”

“They said that they had to check for definite that there was another vehicle and then work out how the crash happened, where the cars would have been in relation to each other and stuff. Exact words were they’d ‘try and work out if it was accidental or not’ but they didn’t give a lot of specifics.”

“But when they say ‘accidental or not’… then ‘or not’ would have to mean intentional?” That took a moment to sink in. “Oh boy.”

“Irony being that you and I would immediately become top suspects, there.”

“Usually I’m all for gallows humour but… don’t.” Her lips pursed in a tight, worried pout.  “God. I can’t even wrap my head around it being a possibility. What type of person does that? Runs someone off the road and leaves them to die?”

“The guy was trying to be nice and all ‘we’ll find out who did this,’ but Trace was eavesdropping on some of them and it sounds like there’s not a lot to go on. There are no cameras in the area, and if they haven’t heard from a witness by now when it’s all over the news it probably means there wasn’t one.”

“So even if they decide there was another vehicle we’ll probably never know?”

“Sounds like it. You know, I still can’t even figure out what she would have been doing on that side of town. She said she was going to the gym.”

Justin tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. It was actually playing on his mind even more than the idea that somebody had intentionally killed her, though you might have expected that to be the other way around. (Maybe that was because contemplating the prospect that she had been murdered was too much to cope with and better pushed to the back of his brain). Accident or not, how had she even wound up in the path of this mystery vehicle? Where was she going? He supposed it was one more on the list of questions he had for Vanessa that she would never be answering.