Who the hell was I? This wasn’t Hilary and it definitely wasn’t the old Rhiannon. I was stuck in some hellish limbo where nothing felt good. I’d never felt this way before, even when I was pregnant and stymied by Ivy’s little do-gooder voice – I’d still wanted to kill. I’d been desperate to. Now, I didn’t even want to kill. I didn’t know what I wanted. It was all Ivy’s fault. She’d done this, trying to make me a good person. Now I was neither one thing nor the other.

Serena Williams was never the same after she had a kid. Jess Ennis stopped winning gold medals. Amy Schumer stopped being funny. Now it had happened to me. What a waste of time and effort. Liam had been my US Open, except there was no umpire to rant at. There was nobody at all.

Saturday, 5 January – Valencia

1. Celebrities who endorse weight loss products
2. Celebrities on cruise ships who still think they’re the big I Am
3. Flip-flops, the people who wear them, make them and who will one day, eventually, die in them if I get my way
4. Ken, Gloria, Dennis, Lynette, Shona and Eddie – aka The Gammons. They’ve dubbed themselves ‘The Crazy Gang’. The ‘craziest’ thing they’ve done is order a shared pudding with a sparkler in it. And the sparkler had gone out by the time the waiter brought it over.
5. Talking of gammon, Jon Hamm

I googled some true crime podcasts when I got back on the ship that evening, taking out another mortgage for twenty-four hours of WiFi. Everyone listened to podcasts these days, I didn’t think that would signal a red flag to authorities. On one podcast the discussion was Do serial killers ever simply stop killing?

One criminologist concluded that it may be possible for some killers to find alternative outlets and killing becomes less of a necessity. They may indeed become dormant. See The Golden State Killer, The Green River Killer and BTK…

Interesting but I had no other outlets, aside from the odd line dancing lesson, film marathon and scenic tour with septuagenarians. She continued:

The killer may have found a worthwhile occupation or started a family and the sources of stress that once were may have disappeared…

I had no worthwhile occupation and though I had started a family, I’d abandoned it. The sources of stress – my friends, my boyfriend, my in-laws, my job – had all gone, along with my dog. I had nothing and nobody left. So this was what it was going to take to make me stop killing? An empty life?

Some serial killers diminish their fury when they form happy human bonds, as in the case of The Green River Killer when he got married…

I sat at the computer in the Business Centre, watching the clock ticking down. Craig took my ‘happy human bonds’ and blew them up Lana Rowntree’s fart box. He had been my chance of a normal, happy life but the second he’d got with her, everything collapsed. It was her fault. His fault too.