‘There is something you could do for me,’ she said as he kissed her neck. She loved the way he kissed her. The pleasant scratch of his stubble on her throat.

‘Anything,’ he mumbled.

‘Do you think you could find out where he’s keeping the gun? He still trusts you.’

‘Consider it done.’

Grace watched his dark head disappear under the covers as he trailed kisses down her body. Thirteen years they’d been doing this dance together. It would be kinder to let him go and allow him to find a woman who could give him everything he deserved. But she couldn’t. As unfair as it was to him, she couldn’t let him go. A wave of guilt washed over her, leaving a sour taste in her mouth. She wondered sometimes what their life could have been like together if only she’d have been brave enough to tell Ben the truth …

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Twelve Years Earlier

The plastic chair creaked as Grace shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She looked around the small waiting room. Its pale green walls were festooned with posters and pamphlets, each one as incongruous as the next. It was empty except for a young couple who fidgeted nervously, making idle small talk with each other, as though it might detract from the awful thing they were about to do. Grace was there to do the same thing. Although she had no one to have such banal conversation with. It felt right that she was alone though. She had made this decision alone. She would carry her guilt and shame alone.

She often thought about the other baby she lost, and wondered what he or she, who’d have been almost two years old by then, would have been like. Lost! It was such an odd term to use in the circumstances, wasn’t it? It sounded careless. Like she’d left it on a bus or forgotten to take it out of the supermarket trolley. It was too casual a word to use for such a precious little life. Nathan had kicked it out of her stomach before she could even tell him she was pregnant.

She supposed that whenever she thought about this baby, she wouldn’t be able to claim to have lost it at all. She was choosing to end the poor child’s life, to destroy it before it even had a chance. She couldn’t bear the thought of having another child of Nathan’s. What if it turned out like him? What if the monster was in his DNA? She had been lucky with Jake, he’d escaped it, but another child might not be so fortunate.

She was being selfish too. She didn’t want anything else to tie her to that bastard; she was already chained to him more than she could bear.