We—as in Leah, Mum and I—were my father’s “second family,” the dirty little secret kept hidden from his “real life” with his pretty wife and two rugby-obsessed sons. Mum didn’t officially find out until we were ten. Although I suspect she knew far earlier. The book drove Mum over the edge though, and I’d had to find her a place in the home a week after she read it. I guess ruining the lives of those around you was something we Pattersons inherited. My father’s legacy.

My mother’s legacy, however, is a combination of self-denial and delusion. She spent the first part of our lives deluding herself that everything was fine and the second convinced that someone, or something, was coming for her, looking over her shoulder at every sound and shadow. She had been struggling for a while but had just about managed to keep her head above water. Until the book came out and the press camped on the little patch of scrubby grass Mum called the front garden as they waited for a glimpse of her. As the “second wife,” she had been the one whose life and morals were raked over the coals in the court of public opinion. My sweet little mum, who had met Dad when she was only twenty-three, had fallen head over heels in love with the man who promised her the world. When had she begun to suspect who he really was? When they got married? When she told him she was pregnant? When he failed to be there for the birth of his twin daughters? When he was never there for birthdays and holidays and Christmases? When he told her he didn’t have any brothers, or sisters, or aunts, uncles, cousins? When he told her both his parents had been killed when he was a boy, without even a shadow of emotion crossing his face?

The gutter press, with their zoom lenses and insatiable desire to paint her as the enemy, had hounded her over her lack of intuition that something wasn’t right with the man she married. They said she should have seen it, and that because she was blind she was therefore just as culpable as he was. So easy to demonize, to point a finger at someone and say it must have been their fault. To ignore that she was young and impressionable and in love, and a sudden mother of two tiny twin girls who needed nappies and wipes and onesies and who she could never dream of supporting on her own. They painted her as a hussy and burned her at the stake. I remember the headlines, the ones that called her a harlot. And a particularly vicious article, accompanied by a poor-quality photo in which a scarlet letter “A” had been photoshopped on to the breast of the white sundress she wore.

That fucking book and those fucking journalists. And my fucking sister who took my mother’s last shreds of sanity and threw them to the wolves so she could buy some fancy house. I wish I’d killed her then.