‘Will you excuse me, Anna?’ Fran turns away, heading back up the stairs towards what was her and Dominic’s room, and now I suppose is only hers. Slowly I close the door, leaning my back against it and feeling at least something is solid around me. I feel as though I’m walking through a flood, unsteady and unsure of everything around me. Dominic. It’s hard to believe, and yet all the evidence stacks up. So why can’t I shake off the feeling that something still isn’t right?

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 24

The next few days pass in some kind of weird, twisted blur, where nothing is right, and everything feels dirty and squalid. I think of all the time Dominic spent holed up in his office in the evenings, until well past midnight, after he finished his list at the hospital. Times that Fran and I both assumed that he was working. Was he really looking at images of children on his computer? The thought makes me feel sick, and I have developed an unnerving habit of washing my hands frequently throughout the day, so now they are chapped and sore, the skin so dry it has cracked across my knuckles. As I wander past Laurel’s closed bedroom door, I think of all the times Dominic would go and tuck her in, on the rare nights that he was home in time to do so, and the laughter that would pour out from under the door as he read her Dr Seuss stories. I’m finding it tough to match up the man who would read story after story after a long day in the operating theatre, with the picture that the press is painting of a monster who abducted, and possibly murdered, his own daughter.

The press is another matter altogether. They have been back with a vengeance since the police turned up that morning to search the house, returning to the doorstep to call out and snap photographs the minute the front door is opened. It is a constant invasion of privacy and we’ve taken to using the back gate as an attempt to fool them, not that it’s worked. The front page every morning has some take on Laurel’s abduction. I made the front pages very briefly, once the story broke that I wasn’t really Anna Cox – I’ve never been so thankful that I’d already confessed, to my family and to Fran.