Free Before I Let You In by Jenny Blackhurst Page B

just as Karen walked into the room. ‘Adam let me in – he’s just got home. Forget about what?’
    Eleanor cast a surreptitious glance at Bea, who looked about three shades paler. How much had she heard?
    Bea ignored Eleanor’s look and laughed. ‘All right, bat ears! I was just telling Eleanor about the latest in the saga that is the office. Gary is still acting like David Brent; Sandra said we should spike his coffee, but I reckon I should just forget about it. Get on with my work, you know – be all growed up and stuff.’
    Karen raised her eyebrows, and in that moment Eleanor was certain she had heard everything.
    ‘Sounds like a good plan – have you had a bump to the head?’
    Bea stuck her middle finger up in response and stood up to hand Noah over to Karen’s open arms, kicking a silver foil letter further under the settee as she did.
    ‘You’re just in time, Grandma – I need a glass of wine.’

17
    Bea
    She hadn’t had the dream for three days – hadn’t dreamt at all, in fact. She’d been scared to go to sleep at first; the thought of seeing his face when she closed her eyes had terrified her so much that she’d sat up on the sofa watching Doctor Who box sets until her head pounded with exhaustion and she’d barely made it to bed before she’d collapsed into the black void of sleep. It had reminded her so vividly of the past, of spending days and nights on Eleanor’s sofa after it happened, the three of them in pyjamas – Karen and Bea’s borrowed from Eleanor because they’d both left home in such a rush – that on waking the next morning she had resolved to snap out of the fug she was heading for if she wasn’t careful and get on with her life. She’d dropped the book round at Eleanor’s on the way to the gym – no sense in wasting a perfectly good book, after all – and attempted to forget ever opening it.
    When it had first happened, all those years ago, Bea had thought about nothing else but getting the justice she deserved. She’d fantasise about him being dragged from his warm, comfy bed in the middle of the night by SWAT teams and sentenced to public castration or hanging by the neck until dead like 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