I have made sure she’s hidden under a layer of random frozen goods: peas, sweetcorn, that kind of stuff. Just in case Yasmin does come in here to have a little poke around. Although if she does, I will just offer to find space for her husband in there too, and I’m pretty sure we could come to an agreement.

I brought my laptop with me and it is balanced on a box in front of me, playing a rerun of an old comedy show my mother liked. The loneliness of lockdown gets to us all in the end. I hadn’t thought about my parents much before all of this. But now that I couldn’t see them, I wished desperately to be back in my childhood home. Stupid for an almost forty-year-old isn’t it, to long for the warmth of his mother like a clueless boy?

A noise behind me causes me to swing round. She stands in the door, dressed in black leggings and a hoodie.

“Megan, what the fuck are you doing here?” I move toward her, expecting her to flinch and pull away.

Instead she smiles. A lazy feline smile. “Oh, Chris.” The “s” drawn out. There is only one person who has ever said my name like that. “Did you really think I was Megan?”

Part Three

Leah

Chapter Nineteen

I look at him and narrow my eyes. “You’re a fucking idiot, Chris.”

“Megan? What are you doing?”

I laugh. “Megan’s dead. Lying right there. You never even realized it.” I am staring at the humming freezer. He is staring at me. I grin and take a little curtsy. “Did I do a good job? All those acting classes over the years. I think they finally paid off.”

“But…”

“But what? You always thought you were so clever. Pegged yourself as this big genius.”

“I saw you. At the cabin…”

“Oh, sweetheart.” I smile. “And that was only your first mistake. Like putting Nytol in my drink, for Christ’s sake. Did you really think I wouldn’t be able to taste it? You got sloppy and you fucked up, Chris.” I made sure to lengthen the “s” in his name.

I can see him starting to sway a little, unsteady on his feet. He’s probably feeling like he’s spent too long on a boat, lost his land legs, nausea and queasiness creeping up on him. I kept the doses small at first. The poison builds up in the system though, the rates in the blood steadily increasing over time. Although I was drinking Koskenkorva laced with Nytol—which was actually only enough to make me a little tired, you’d need a whole bottle to knock someone out cold like I was pretending to be—he was drinking Koskenkorva laced with something much worse. It’s a funny poison. You feel OK, then if your heart rate goes up too high, the effects begin to accelerate. If he took deep calming breaths and maybe sat in sukhasana for a while, he’d be fine. But of course he’s panicking. His lovely well-laid plan has just turned to shit in front of his stupid face, and he has no idea what is happening. For a control freak like Chris this is the worst thing in the world. Well, actually that’s about to come, but he doesn’t know that yet.