Harper couldn’t speak. She shut her eyes, hoping to dispel the image but no, it was all too real. She shook her head and went back out of the door, avoiding looking at Patrick, slamming the Tranters’ front door after she went through it and breaking into a run when she hit the pavement.

Back in the car, Harper rubbed at her temples and tried to forget she’d ever thought about Amy in any way other than professionally. The humiliation burned. She’d got it wrong, misread the situation, made herself look a fool. Amy was the flirty journalist she’d always been, but it was a shock to discover that she would go to such lengths for a story. She must have slept there. While the wife and children were locked safely away. She probably did this sort of thing all the time, made people think she was interested in them, when really it was all about the copy. That’s why she’s stringing me along, too, she thought, because I’m a bloody good source. And I fell for it.

Stupid to have let her guard down. To have let her professionalism be compromised. All those things she’d told her, that she thought were in confidence. Amy was probably planning to publish all of it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Chapter 38

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Dinner arrived, brown and glutinous, with the standard revolting dessert. Nurse Pauline didn’t need to be persuaded to slurp it all up, too quick to notice that the gritty powder added to the top was not all sugar: it also contained Lauren’s combined allocation of meds from the past four doses. Pauline placed the bowl back on the tray with a long mmmmm.

So far, so good. The next part of the plan was trickier: Lauren knew she had only about twenty minutes before the drugs started to work. She was afraid that because of her outburst with the doctor, she wouldn’t be allowed her usual supervised stroll in the grounds with the boys.

Thankfully, the routine of the post-dinner walk outdoors was considered too therapeutically important to miss. Pauline led the way, unlocking doors to the nursery, watching as Lauren strapped the babies into a double stroller. By the time they got outside, the nurse was slurring her words. They set off in a direction that led them away from the other patients walking the grounds, and towards the gate.

“Why are we going this way?” said Pauline, her eyes starting to droop shut and her gait weaving from left to right, like a drunkard.

“You said we should, remember?” said Lauren.

“I did?”

“That’s right.” She pulled the nurse with one arm, pushed the stroller with her other. Hopefully it looked to any onlookers as if they’d linked arms in a friendly way, that perhaps they were having a heart-to-heart.