The women turned as one and walked away.

Jess stood, aware only of her thundering heart and the sound of her blood in her ears. As if registering the sudden silence after all the vitriol and yelling, Leo’s eyes filled with tears and then he was screaming, his little chest heaving with great hulking sobs. With shaking hands, Jess unbuckled him and lifted him into her arms, kissing his damp curls.

“Shh, my darling boy. It’s okay. Those horrible nasty women have gone.”

Only Jess wasn’t certain who she was reassuring more—her son or herself.

Chapter Eleven

“Journal your feelings. It helps,” Alice suggested a week after Libby’s world imploded.

Libby doubted it. Besides, her feelings weren’t complex, they were glaringly simple: rage and despair. She’d spent the week being flung back and forth between the two and the energy required rendered her inert. The sensations battered her—pain, anger, heartache and hopelessness—and brought her as close to a premonition of death as she’d ever been before. Sleep was impossible, but constantly wondering why this had happened to her, how could they have done this to her and what else wasn’t she being told, made it agonizing to be awake.

Thank God for Alice. She was the unexpected blessing in this nightmare. Her twin, who so often hesitated and doubted herself, had walked unflinchingly into this house of pain. She’d surprised everyone by quietly taking charge. Although Alice did things in very different ways from Libby, the results were the same. The children were bathed and fed, cuddled and read to, and taken to all their activities. If the pictures in Libby’s room were anything to go by, the girls had been allowed unfettered access to the craft box, including free and liberal use of the glitter.

When they were children, Alice had been the physically weaker twin, struggling to execute tasks Libby had taken for granted, and she’d never been any good with bodily fluids. But she’d held Libby while she sobbed until she vomited and then she’d changed the bedsheets when Libby’s faithless uterus had added insult to her pain and distress by flooding and staining the bed with blood clots. Alice even cooked her their favorite childhood comfort food of soft boiled eggs with bread and Vegemite ‘soldiers’, coaxing her to eat after she’d spent days gagging on the thought of food and existing on milk and coffee.

Karen had provided practical help too, filling the cookie jars with baking, taking the girls on outings and scrubbing the bathrooms with potent rage. Karen’s anger at Nick was a licking ball of fire that heated every room she entered. It surprised Libby that her mother’s outrage hadn’t melded with hers and comforted. Instead it had buffeted and hustled, demanding answers Libby didn’t have.

“Libby, think of the girls!”

“I am! It’s why I’m still here.”