She glances back over her shoulder and listens for any sound that her husband may be stirring but the pounding bassline of the music in the flat above makes it hard for her to hear a thing. She was going to wait for Tom to wake up before she explained her strategy for relaunching SoulShrink. She was going to take him step by step through her plan. But this can’t wait. It’s been three hours since Tom was released from prison and #SoulShrink is trending on Twitter. Her phone, set on silent beside her, has been lighting up all day with call after call, but she’s let them all go to voicemail. She’s not speaking to a single journalist. Neither is Tom. She doesn’t want anyone putting words in his mouth when she’s perfectly capable of doing that herself. Her heartrate quickens as she right clicks on the photograph of Tom’s face then opens the SoulShrink 2020 folder on her desktop and double clicks on the file called ‘First tweet’. She’s lost count of the number of different versions she’s written over the last few months but this one, this final version, is as perfect as she’s ever going to get it. She pastes the sentences into a tweet then adds the photograph. She moves the arrow over the blue ‘Tweet’ button and sees it turn to a hand. She rereads the text. Tom’s first tweet as a free man is guilt-ridden, repentant, compassionate and human. It’ll either restart their lives or destroy them for good.

Kate clicks the mouse.

Chapter 4

Now

FRAN

As Fran opens the gate, Trooper, her parents’ ailing, arthritic Golden Retriever, hauls himself to his feet and barks twice. He makes no effort to move from the only patch of shade in the garden, the two-metre gap between the side of the cottage and the hedge. Fran casts an eye over her parents’ home in a leafy suburb of High Wycombe. The thatched roof of the cottage, replaced several years earlier, still looks thick and sturdy; the lawn, either side of the path, is pale and sun-bleached but striped from a recent mowing. The ornamental shrubs in their concrete tubs are neatly trimmed, standing either side of the front door like leafy sentinels. Orderly, that’s the word she would use to describe what she sees. Orderly, conservative and bland.

‘Hi troops!’ Fran calls as she makes her way down the path. The dog’s eyes follow her but its tail is the only part of him that moves.

She pauses as she reaches the front door. Her instinct, and thirty years living in London, makes her raise her fist. She pauses, then turns the doorknob instead. Her parents only lock the front door when darkness falls.

‘Mum?’ She steps into the cool, flagstoned kitchen. ‘Dad?’