The four by four shone on the drive. It had been perfect when she bought it, but now the number plate was six months behind. It would have to do. Richard wouldn’t hear of her getting a new one on lease until it was at least a year old. She had considered getting a new number plate instead, so at least the people in the village thought that she had the newest of everything, but she would know it wasn’t the best, even if the rest of them didn’t.

She locked the door behind her and walked up the driveway. When she reached the gate, she turned back and looked up at her home.

Her life had been years in the making. She had designed the house down to every minute detail, from the type of stones on the gravel drive to the shade of red in the stained glass on the front door, and had even pursued her husband with equal determination and precision.

And now someone wanted to tear it all to pieces.

She knew what it was like to have nothing. Her parents continually told her that they did their best, but Amber grew up aware that she was the poorest child in the class. When the teachers pitied her and the children teased, the hate for her parents grew until even the sight of them boiled a deep, harboured rage that refused to dissipate, even now, as they lay dead in the ground. As young as twelve, she vowed never to let her child go through the same ordeal, and to make something of herself to show those who judged her that they had underestimated her. With her parents dead, she was free of any connection to the past, and got away with the lie of a middle-class upbringing and private education. She had told so many lies over the years that it had become difficult to differentiate between her real memories and the ones she had fabricated along the way. But that was what made a good liar: for someone to believe a lie, the liar must believe it too.

Amber looked across the street at number forty-two. Through the open door, she spotted that the inside of the house had been gutted. Fresh plaster had been packed onto the walls and the new kitchen had been fitted, which had been delivered the week before in a lorry that took up the whole of the lane for the afternoon. The outside of the house was covered in scaffolding where men in hard hats dropped roof tiles into a skip below. Each tile made a nerve-wringing crack as it landed. She winced at the sound of the blows and clenched her hands into fists.