Chapters (50)
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication Page
- 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
Everyone told me I would adjust to living with one eye. The human body is clever like that. It overcomes obstacles, it adapts. And I could cope with the physical damage. It was everything else Rachel had done that kept me awake, tormented by nightmares. I had PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. I was seeing a psychotherapist, and just like the counsellor who had eventually helped me after my parents’ death, it was doing me good. It was early days, but the vivid flashbacks – the scalpel, Rachel’s leering face – were growing slightly less frequent. Harder to deal with was the lingering sense of guilt. Everybody told me that it wasn’t my fault I had attracted a murderer, a psychopath. But I was the hub that connected the victims: Karen, Sasha, Kristi, Harold, Henry. I could only thank God that Rachel had never targeted Tilly, who was also in shock after everything that had happened. I guess Rachel didn’t see my sister as a threat. Maybe, somewhere in that twisted mind, she was genuinely fond of her. Who knows? Any chances of finding out for certain had died in a pool of blood on my bedroom carpet.
We, especially Tilly and I, had been all over the papers and TV for a week or so. Rachel’s face was on the front page of every newspaper, and the case was inevitably linked by the media to the Dark Angel case. Another carer gone bad, though Rachel’s death count was far lower than that of the Dark Angel, Lucy Newton. Then Lucy Newton herself knocked Rachel off the front page when her appeal against her sentence reached the court. They say she could get off on a technicality. Something to do with botched DNA evidence.
But I digress.
‘Hi Charlie,’ I said.
‘Hey.’ She didn’t smile.
I sat down opposite her. I wanted to kiss her cheek, give her a hug. No, actually I wanted her to give me a hug. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Not after everything I’d done.
‘Thank you for agreeing to meet me, to talk to me.’
She had replied to my email several days after I sent it, three days when I drove myself half-insane checking my inbox.