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Back Because She Loves Me Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication Page
  4. Contents
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Ninteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Thirty-eight
  43. Thirty-nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-one
  46. Forty-two
  47. Epilogue
  48. Letter From the Author
  49. Acknowledgements
  50. About the Author

I had barely taken this in when Charlie jumped onto Rachel’s back. My tormentor spun, sending Charlie flying backwards, colliding with the wardrobe. Rachel leapt on her with a yell, shifted the knife to her left hand and punched her in the face with her right. She grabbed Charlie’s cheeks and smashed the back of her head into the corner of the chest of drawers, a sickening cracking sound filling the room.

I tried to cry out. Charlie!

She didn’t move. Rachel stood over her, looking down, panting. Then she came back over and climbed onto me.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ she said, replacing the knife with the scalpel.

This was it. I was going to be blind. This was my punishment for escaping injury in the crash that killed my parents and paralysed my sister. A dark spirit had been stalking me, ever since that day. It had tried to blind me last year. Now it was going to happen. Justice was being done on behalf of the universe, of all the laws of fate, and there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.

Behind Rachel, I saw Charlie push herself onto her hands and knees.

I made a loud noise in my throat, thrashed my head, tried to make Rachel believe I was choking, swallowing my tongue.

Not wanting me dead, Rachel pulled the gag down.

‘Under the chest of drawers,’ I yelled to Charlie. ‘The knife!’

The knife that Charlie had thrown during her jealous rage about Sasha. It had spun under the chest of drawers. If fate really wanted me to go blind, it would have told Maria, my new, competent cleaner, to find it, remove it, put it back in the kitchen. If there was no such thing as dark spirits, the knife would still be there.

Rachel tried to get off me, to grab her butcher’s knife, and I used every shred of willpower I possessed to buck and knock her off balance as she got off. She stumbled and tripped over Henry’s body, landing face-first with a grunt, but still holding onto the knife.

It didn’t matter. Charlie had found my knife under the chest of drawers and scrambled to her feet with it. There was no dark spirit. No fate. No pre-destined blindness. Just luck.

Charlie stood over my attacker, over the woman who had tried to destroy our lives. Holding the knife in both hands, Charlie brought it down, with all her strength, between Rachel’s shoulder blades.

Forty-two

Forty-two

Hi Charlie,

I’ve wanted to email you for a while but have been putting it off. I suppose that’s silly, but maybe I’m right to be hesitant. I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to hear from me again, if you have blocked my email address or if you drag this straight into your junk folder.