OTHER TITLES BY THE AUTHOR

The Magpies

Kissing Games

What You Wish For

WITH LOUISE VOSS:

Forward Slash

Killing Cupid

Catch Your Death

All Fall Down

Title Page

Copyright Page

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2014 Mark Edwards

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781477824863

ISBN-10: 1477824863

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935332

Dedication Page

For Archie and Harry

Contents

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Ninteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Epilogue

Letter From the Author

Acknowledgements

About the Author

One

One

‘Look up.’

Over the past three months my eyes had been poked, stretched and lasered. They had endured brilliant light and foreign bodies, had air and liquid puffed and squeezed into them. They’d been stared at and discussed and invaded, clamped open and taped shut. They’d endured pretty much everything an eye can endure. So when the nurse asked me to look upwards so she could apply the drops, told me this might sting a little, I – well, I didn’t bat an eyelid. This was nothing.

One summer night, I almost went blind. It was only the skill of a surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital, where I sat now, waiting to be seen, that saved my sight. Even then, after the 2 a.m. emergency surgery, they told me it was unlikely the sight in my left eye would return fully. When it did, I saw it as the first sign that my luck was changing.

The second sign – or so I thought, in those breathless, heady first days of our relationship – was meeting Charlie.

I was the youngest person in the waiting room by thirty years and the only person on my own. The white-haired man in the corner was accompanied by his wife, who kept reading out excerpts from her magazine, one of those real-life mags, full of stories about unfaithful spouses, child abuse and kids with cancer. There was a gang of three elderly ladies opposite me, hunched beneath the glaucoma poster, and an Indian man with a young woman who I assumed to be his daughter. Two old men in dark glasses walked past, one of them cracking a joke about the blind leading the blind.