Page 66 of The Girlfriend’s Secret

I twirl my hair with my left hand, and Frederik glares at me.

‘I don’t know what you want me to admit,’ I tell him. ‘Seriously, if this is some kind of game, you need to stop because it’s not funny now.’

I go to get up then, but Frederik blocks my way.

‘There it was again,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe I never noticed it myself in all our years of marriage. But Scott is right. You do twirl your hair with your left hand when you are lying.’

I laugh nervously again. Now what is he talking about?

‘You don’t realise you do it, do you?’ Frederik says, smirking slightly, though he still looks troubled, and deeply so. ‘You know you twirl your hair, of course. We all know it. But you don’t know that you change hands when you are lying. I didn’t even know it. But Scott noticed it. Many years ago, in fact. He figured out when his mother was lying to him. Now I know it, I can figure out when you’re lying to me too, and you’re lying right now. You did kill your mother, didn’t you?’

My hair. My left hand. My lies.

I didn’t realise I had a tell. If I had, I obviously would have corrected it. But now it’s too late for that, so what can I do?

I make a snap decision.

‘I did it for us,’ I say quickly. ‘I did it for the life we can have now. The life we deserve. You can see that, right? You can understand?’

‘Oh my god,’ Frederik says, taking a small step back from me, but I’m not trying to get away from him anymore. I have to stay and convince him to keep my secret or this is all over. Everything I have done will have been for nothing.

‘Think about it. Without my mother’s money, we would have both been working for decades. When would we have been able to afford to retire? What if Mum lived into her nineties or even older? She could have outlived us and then all that money she had stashed away would have gone to waste. But now we are free to enjoy it and we can do anything. We can travel the world. We can pursue our hobbies. We can help the boys when they start their own families. We can do anything and we can do it because I only sped up what would have eventually happened anyway. Yes, I killed my mother, but she had lived her life. We still have so much living of our own to do.’

How can that not convince Frederik that what I did was acceptable? How can the life we now have not be better than the one we had before my mum died? He has to understand this, right?

‘You’re a murderer,’ he says sadly, stepping back again. ‘You’re dangerous and me and the boys are not safe here with you.’

‘What? Of course you’re safe. I’d never hurt any of you! I love you.’

‘You loved your mother and look what you did to her!’ Frederik cries, and while I am worried about Scott and Joel hearing this, I need not be when my husband speaks again. ‘They both know what you did. We all know.’

That grim revelation prevents me from holding out any hope that my sons can be spared from what I did. But I should have known that anyway, given how Scott was the one who apparently noticed how I behave when I lie.

‘What did you think was going to happen?’ Frederik asks me. ‘That we were just going to live happily ever after with that blood money?’

‘It’s not blood money. It’s my inheritance. It’s my right!’

‘No, it’s murder and that’s all it is,’ Frederik snaps back, forcing me to go on the offensive.

‘So what if it is? What proof have you got? That I twirl my hair with a certain hand when I lie? Now that I know that, I’ll stop doing it and what else have you got? What other evidence? None? I thought so. Well then good luck getting the police to listen to this.’

‘I don’t think I’m going to have any problem getting the police to listen to this,’ Frederik replies in a disturbingly simple manner as he walks away from me.

‘What do you mean by that?’ I ask as I go after him.

‘Call the police, Haven,’ Frederik says, causing me confusion.

‘Haven? Why are you saying her name? She’s not here.’

‘Isn’t she?’ Frederik replies.

‘Why did you just say Haven’s name?’ I demand to know as we stand in our kitchen, the remnants of the lovely meal we had just enjoyed still all around us.

‘Because she has just heard everything you have said,’ Frederik explains, not gleefully, just plainly.

‘I don’t understand. How could she have heard what I just said?’ I ask, looking around the room as if expecting to see Haven hiding somewhere, having eavesdropped on this very private conversation.

‘You saw Scott carry this box in here,’ Frederik says as he nudges the cardboard box by his feet, the one he brought in before we started our meal. ‘But you didn’t bother to take a look inside it to see what was in there.’