As he stood in the hallway, his phone buzzed. He checked the message. Bloom had made her choice. She’d have thought through every angle – he knew that – so why did he feel so sick?

Because whatever Hussain found behind the bathroom door was irrelevant. Sarah’s fate was sealed. He looked down at his phone and squeezed his eyes shut to hold in the tears.

Bloom

I choose Stuart, Grayson, Lana and Jane.

3:00pm

56

Bloom let her phone slide on to the floor of the loft. She hoped this gamble would pay off.

She removed a familiar white envelope from the file and took the note from inside. The paper felt thick and when Bloom held it up to the bare light bulb it shimmered. She read it for the first time in fifteen years.

I can’t be normal. And I don’t want to be a monster.

You told me to choose. I’ve chosen.

What did you choose, Seraphine? If Seraphine really had orchestrated her own fake suicide, it would not have been in a fit of teenage pique. It would have been logical, a rational decision, carefully planned for a specific purpose.

Bloom reached back into the expandable blue file and pulled out an A5 black notebook. It had arrived in the post the day after Seraphine’s mother had visited. There had been nothing with it, no explanation, but Bloom had always assumed it held some significance. Seraphine rarely acted without motive. And so she had studied it for hours and hours, looking for the message, trying to learn where she’d gone wrong, what she’d said to cause such drastic action.

Bloom opened it now and flicked through until she reached the final entry. It was longer than the others. Most of the entries were short paragraphs expressing anger at someone’s actions or smugly recording vengeance. But this one was more like a letter, and even though it began, as all the entries did, with Dear Diary, Bloom felt sure Seraphine had meant this one for her.