Back Perfect Ten
Chapters (45)
  1. Chapter One
  2. Chapter Two
  3. Chapter Three
  4. Chapter Four
  5. Chapter Five
  6. Chapter Six
  7. Chapter Seven
  8. Chapter Eight
  9. Chapter Nine
  10. Chapter Ten
  11. Chapter Eleven
  12. Chapter Twelve
  13. Chapter Thirteen
  14. Chapter Fourteen
  15. Chapter Fifteen
  16. Chapter Sixteen
  17. Chapter Seventeen
  18. Chapter Eighteen
  19. Chapter Nineteen
  20. Chapter Twenty
  21. Chapter Twenty-one
  22. Chapter Twenty-two
  23. Chapter Twenty-three
  24. Chapter Twenty-four
  25. Chapter Twenty-five
  26. Chapter Twenty-six
  27. Chapter Twenty-seven
  28. Chapter Twenty-eight
  29. Chapter Twenty-nine
  30. Chapter Thirty
  31. Chapter Thirty-one
  32. Chapter Thirty-two
  33. Chapter Thirty-three
  34. Chapter Thirty-four
  35. Chapter Thirty-five
  36. Chapter Thirty-six
  37. Chapter Thirty-seven
  38. Chapter Thirty-eight
  39. Chapter Thirty-nine
  40. Chapter Forty
  41. Chapter Forty-one
  42. Chapter Forty-two
  43. Chapter Forty-three
  44. Chapter Forty-four
  45. Acknowledgements

‘Some more have been posted. Of your sister. And a video of another woman.’ I’ve never been good at acting. But I summon up the horror I felt when I first saw Paula’s pussycat face pouting at Jack. Katy puts her arm around me.

‘He slept with my sister?’ I rush over to my own laptop, which has been dormant since I was last here. I make a show of switching it on and logging onto Facebook with my password. I load the history. ‘Here. You can look. I haven’t even been on Facebook.’ We all sit there in front of the laptop in silence. I push it as far as I can. ‘So where is it, then? Where is it?’

DS Percy leans forward and finds Monica’s profile. All the photographs load, with Paula’s at the bottom. It’s a complete triumph. He’s there, in all his #cheatingbastard glory. Katy is horrified.

‘Oh my God. I’d only seen the other page. The one with the hashtags. I hadn’t seen this. Bloody hell.’ She looks more closely. ‘Are there any of me?’

I want to tell her that I spared her because she came clean, but I don’t. I let DS Percy scroll up and down through the women. She’s seen the journal so she knows exactly what he recorded about Katy. While she scrolls and Katy and DC Lincoln watch mesmerised, I wonder who this stalker guy is.

From time to time something happens that makes me wonder if I really am mad. If he was right and I’m just deluded. Like when he left. I was sure that it was just a blip. That he would call me and tell me that he was sorry and that it had all been a mistake. When he didn’t, I knew that I had seriously misjudged what was going on. That I was completely wrong.

Now I realise that I was more wrong than I thought I was. He left me long before we Officially split. I’m fairly sure that we were still together when we married, but even that is hazy now. I can’t be sure that he wasn’t seeing someone for the whole of our relationship.

He left me almost as soon as we got together. We probably never even made it past the three-month honeymoon period – he was ogling Paula Pussycat well before that. Even before Christine fucking Dearden and the Chanel incident, he was distracted. I told myself that it was OK to look but not to touch. That all men look at women, but he had chosen me. I suppose he had really. Chosen me to be his mug.