Cover

Dedication

For Jesse

Epigraph

‘The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men’

Henry David Thoreau

Mirror

In my mother’s house

is the friendly mirror,

the only glass in which I look

and think I see myself,

think, yes, that’s what

I think I’m like,

that’s who I am. The only

glass in which I look and smile.

Just as this baby smiles

at the baby who always

smiles at her, the one in

her mother’s arms, the mother

who looks like me, who

smiles at herself in her

mother’s mirror, the friendly

mirror in her mother’s house.

But if I move to one side

we vanish, the woman I thought

was me, the baby making friends

with herself, we move to one side

and the mirror holds no future, no past,

in its liquid frame, only the corner

of an open window, a bee visiting

the ready flowers of summer.

Maura Dooley

Prologue

The woman’s lips were blue, the same shade as the evening sky that shone in through the window, calm and unbroken.

The knot around her neck had been pulled tight. The note, propped against the hallway table, was short.

‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. I love you both, please forgive me.’

Chapter 1

Gabriela

It is hardly warm enough to warrant an evening in the garden, but something about the house is pushing her out. After all these years, and all the memories she made here in her teens and early twenties before Tom had so much as set foot inside its four walls, their home is already taking his side. So when he goes out for a smoke, savouring the single roll-up he still allows himself each day now that he is staring down the barrel of forty, she follows him into the starless night.

Pulling on a jacket, she brings with her the slightly too warm bottle of Sauvignon she picked up at the off-licence near Dartmouth Park Hill on her way home, partly to calm her nerves, partly for the excuse to partition off this section of her life, to annex it safely away from the day she has just left behind. The beginning of the end.

‘Ten ninety-nine?’ Tom takes a swig of his beer, incredulity written in the lines above the bridge of his nose. She follows his gaze to the bottle she is clutching by the neck and for a moment she feels herself on the cusp of laughter that will mutate into sobs if she is not careful. Screams that will reverberate through the house where their children sleep.

How the hell are they talking about the price of a bottle of wine? But he has no reason to suspect this is anything but an ordinary evening, the end of a day just like any other.