‘I’m trying to picture your parents allowing you to get drawn in to the wrong crowd. Or didn’t they have any say in the matter? Maybe they were too busy projecting to happy times ahead in Australia...?’
‘There is no Australia.’
‘Sorry, but I’m not following you.’
Chase nervously tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. She wondered what hand of fate it was that had returned Alessandro to her life, only to have her fall in love with him all over again. Instead of getting him out of her system by sleeping with him, by putting that unfulfilled fantasy to rest, she had managed to well and truly cement him into every nook, cranny and corner of her being.
‘My parents don’t live in Australia. In fact, I have no parents. I was a foster-home kid. I was shuffled from family to family, never staying anywhere for very long. I never knew my father. My mother died when I was very little from a drugs overdose. I pretty much brought myself up. So, you see, everything you think you know about me is a lie.’
Of all the things Alessandro had been prepared for, this was not one of them. ‘Lyla...?’
‘Was the name I chose when I met you. When I thought that I could create...make myself out to be...’
‘You fabricated everything.’
‘No. Not everything!’
Alessandro slammed his hand on the side of his chair and vaulted to his feet. He felt tight in his skin. He needed to move. Energy was pouring through him and he was at a loss as to how to contain it. This must be what it felt like to imagine your feet were planted on solid ground only to discover that you were trying to balance on quicksand.
‘Everything about you has been a lie from beginning to end. God. Why?’
‘I made stuff up. I was young! I met you and I wanted to make a good impression.’
‘Not only were you married, not only did you choose to conceal that fact from me eight years ago, but you also chose to conceal everything else. So your husband was...what, exactly? And how did you manage to make it to university? Or maybe you weren’t a student at all. Were you? Or was that another lie?’
‘Of course I was!’ Chase cried, half-rising to her feet in an attempt to halt the flow of his scathing criticism. She sat back down as quickly as she had stood up. What else might she have hoped for? That he might have been understanding? Sympathetic? Why would he be? To him, she was now a confirmed liar and, if she had lied about everything, all those significant details, then what else might she have lied about? Her emotions? Her responses? It felt as though she had built a relationship on a house of cards and, now the cards were all toppling down, she had no idea how to start catching them before they all fell to the floor.
‘Really? What strands am I supposed to start believing now?’
‘I was a student at university,’ she said with feverish urgency. ‘I never did a lot of studying...’ At this she laughed bitterly. Studying, when she was growing up, had not been seen as something worth wasting time doing. They had all known where they were destined to end up: out of work and on the dole, or else in no-hope jobs earning just enough to scrape by with a little moonlighting on the side.
‘But I discovered that I barely needed to. I had a good memory. Brilliant, in fact. I would show up at school after a couple of days doing nothing, playing truant, and somehow I’d still be ahead of everyone in the class. I’d skim through a text book and manage to have instant recall of pretty much everything I’d read...’
The handful of teachers who had noticed that remarkable ability had been her salvation. Because of them she hadn’t become a quitter, although she had learned to study undercover. There had never been any mileage in standing out.
She looked at him and held his inscrutable gaze. ‘I guess you must find all of this completely alien. I don’t suppose you’ve ever known anyone from the wrong side of the tracks...’
The chasm between them had never seemed wider, now that she was revealing the truth about her background. Even if she had been the person she had once claimed to be, the middle-class girl with the normal parents, there would still have been a chasm between them. Of course, he would have been attracted to her because of how she looked. Sadly, physical attributes were not destined to last; she accepted that, in an ideal world, he would have dumped her sooner or later anyway. He had been born into privilege, whatever his disruptive background, and he would always have ended up looking to settle with a woman from a similar background.
Not only had she lied to him, but she had lied to herself for ever thinking otherwise. And she had. When she had met him again and when she had fallen in love with him again. When she had nurtured silly dreams of ‘what if?’s...