Sharon looked at the man she had alternately loved and hated over the years, but who she knew would always be a true friend to her and her kids. She had been duped twice in her life and each time by a man she had adored with all her heart. Was it her? Did she attract this trouble to her door? She had slept with two men who had both been living fucking lies. God, what was wrong with her?

She grabbed the front of Reggie’s shirt and said seriously, ‘I want to be there. This time, I need to be there. He destroyed my boys – Lenny’s boys – and his own daughter. He blamed her, not fucking Barton. I want him dead, I want him fucking gone from our lives. I need him gone now, before he infects us even more with his viciousness and his fucking hate.’

Reggie nodded and she could see that he understood her. He kissed her gently on the forehead and said quietly, ‘You can have that, darling. You deserve it.’

Then, calling Kathy down to look after her mother, he slipped out of the house. He had had to tell her; she had a right to know the truth about the man she had been married to for sixteen years. He had been the cause of her living a lie once – Reggie was not going to be the cause of that again. He owed her that much.

Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Six

Sharon had waved her daughter away eventually and gone to her bedroom where everywhere she looked there was evidence of Ray and their life together. She made it into the en suite just in time to throw up into the toilet, heaving up everything she had eaten and drunk that day. She really did feel as if her heart had been irrevocably broken. How could he have lain with her, played with her sons and laughed and joked with them, all the while knowing that he had taken Lenny away from them? That was the hardest thing for her to understand. How he could have loved those boys. And he did love them, she knew that much. Yet he had beaten their father to death with a crowbar. He had murdered him without even any malice. He had been paid to do it.

She remembered reading about women who had found out that their husbands were rapists or paedophiles and she had always thought: how could these women not know? How could they not know the men they lived with, slept with? But now she understood that it was quite possible to live a lie and not be in the least bit aware of it.