When I saw his new woman I almost suffered Howard’s fate. She looked like me. Another black woman, dressed in a prissier way, smaller tits, skinny arse. But we could have been sisters.

That made me laugh.

I found out which gym she went to and signed up, stood on the cross-trainer beside her and struck up a conversation. She was eager to talk, which made me think she was lonely, lacking in friends. We even exchanged emails and Facebook messages during which she told me about her and Sean’s sex life, which sounded so different to the incredible sex Sean and I used to have. I made up stories about a pop star father and a glamorous life with a lucrative job and swanky flat. She talked about her daughter, Frankie, incessantly. I had seen Frankie, of course, watched from across the road as Sean and Helen took her out. She was perfect, beautiful. Seeing her made my ovaries ache. She was the child I had dreamt of all these years. The child I had left behind, the child I wanted in my future.

The injustice made me sick. Why should Sean get to have his perfect family while I was all alone? Frankie should be mine.

The universe owed me. And Sean, who had got off so lightly, deserved pain: to feel some of the suffering I’d been through.

I watched them, and I waited for an opportunity. I sometimes stood outside their house at night. Frankie saw me from her window once or twice, standing beneath the lamp post in my hoodie.

Then one night, while I was driving around, watching the house, I saw the other teenage idiot, the redhead, come out with Frankie.

I rescued her. And like I said, I wasn’t going to keep her, but the opportunity was impossible to resist. A child of my own at last. And for Sean to finally feel the pain I have endured. By keeping in touch with that fool Helen over the last week I’ve had a hotline to their pain. It was exquisite seeing her at the gym, the van containing a knocked-out Frankie, parked outside. Thrilling to read her moans about how she wasn’t getting any from Sean any more.

So here we are.

I leave Frankie sitting on the bench and walk to the edge of the roof, looking down. Anyone falling from here would be killed instantly.

I can hear commotion below. That boy, the one I had to shoot, using the gun I bought from a shady man in a backstreet pub, has brought the police running. But that’s OK, as long as I can see Helen and Sean.

It’s time for Frankie and me to say goodbye.

Chapter 45

Chapter 45
Patrick – Day 7