Plenty of time to figure this whole mess out.

My plan is to simply be both of us. At least for a while. Until I can think of something better. I’m trying not to panic, not to think of the hundred and one ways this could go wrong. My professional life hinges on my ability to be cool and calm under pressure, to step back from the cliff edge and think things through properly. I’m good at my job as a management consultant, running workshops to turn around the fortunes of failing businesses. Even though I know my career choice has a bad reputation, that the companies I work with hate me, that their staff talk about me behind my back and probably disregard everything I recommend the second I leave their offices. But still. I have a nice salary. Lots of travel. The promise of a career trajectory most can only dream of. It will be helpful. I need the time for two lives now. For a month perhaps. Yes, a month should give me enough time to figure out what the hell I do next.

Can I really do it? Be both of us? After the mess I’ve been making recently of being just me? But there is no option now and I’ve always been better under pressure. You can do anything when your liberty depends on it. Or your life.

No one can know I killed her. Especially not Chris.

Leah and I are exactly the same height. The same weight. We have the same length arms, legs and torso. So why the hell can I barely reach the pedals in her car or see out of her rear-view mirror? It’s like she drives sitting on the edge of the seat, holding herself up by gripping the steering wheel. This may be why she’s had two minor car accidents—both her fault, she even admitted as much on Facebook—in the past two years, along with two speeding tickets. I’ll need to make sure I drive like a model citizen in her BMW coupé to ensure the police don’t pull me over. Would her fingerprints be in a database somewhere for those minor transgressions? Better to be safe than sorry, I suppose. I will have to go back up to the cabin by train in a few days to collect my own car; I add that to my growing mental list of things to do. I wish I could write everything down in that borderline obsessive way I make lists about my life, a nice detailed document of how I might manage to keep hold of all the strands. But I won’t risk it. What if Chris found it? I just have to trust myself that some things are too important for even me to forget.

I park the coupé in her garage and let myself in through the back door. The house smells like home. Like the house we grew up in. We had shared a tiny room for almost eighteen years and now I am met by the familiarity of her sweat, her vanilla candles, and something else that is so unmistakably her. It slaps me round the face, and I stagger against the wall.