Mum’s care was another of the things Leah and I had argued about. I wanted the best for her, for her to be comfortable, peaceful, even pampered a little. Leah said it was a big old waste of money, that Mum had no idea who she was, who we were, where she was. Even though Leah made all that money from selling our story, she still wouldn’t pay.

“Why bother?” She had shrugged her shoulders as she said it, barely glancing up from her phone. “What’s the point if she doesn’t even realize?”

But what if she did? And even if she didn’t, I wasn’t going to let her sit in her own mess, eating the same old gruel day in and day out as she withered away to nothing. She is still my mum.

Chris had agreed with me, at first at least. Told me that of course he didn’t mind if some of my salary went to help her. Note how I say my salary. When he wanted nice things, it was our money. When it was for Mum, it was mine.

Two years ago, I was offered a promotion with my company. We don’t really have job titles per se, at least not ones that show our seniority. I am simply a “consultant.” But we have a complicated banding system that is used internally to show hierarchy, and which determines the salary and perks we can enjoy. I didn’t bother to tell Chris that I had leapfrogged two tiers and was now technically the second most senior person within my division. Nor did I tell him that my salary had jumped by over forty grand a year since then. That extra money I siphoned off into a separate savings account. The bonus I’d had last year I had squirreled away too. The fund was there just in case. Just in case the Patterson curse does catch me. Perhaps there would be some comfort for me if I, too, ended up at the Jonas Institute.

I write a check to the manager of the Institute, instructing him to take it as an up-front payment for Mum’s extras for the next two years. I will mail it from Heathrow as Megan’s parting gift before she flew away. At least Mum won’t suffer when her daughter vanishes into thin air.

There is a huge stumbling block to my plan, one that I have racked my brain to find a solution for. What do I do about the body?

Ideally, I want it—her—to disappear and never be found.

Could I use acid? I worked with a company once that stored chemicals in these huge great tanks in a scummy industrial area. There was a story doing the rounds about this company at the time, and I was never sure if it was an old wives’ tale or actually true. Apparently, this guy who worked there had found out his wife was having an affair and had killed the boyfriend. To hide the body he stuffed it into one of these tanks, which held hydrochloric acid, figuring the body would dissolve over time. Then he got made redundant. Five years later, the tank was emptied for decommissioning. Inside was the perfectly preserved body of a man, looking pretty much as he did on the day he had died. The idiot had stuffed the guy into the wrong tank and put him in a preservative instead.