She was starting to see what was happening, and it filled her with a sense of dread. There was something deep and longstanding and powerful and immensely troubling behind all this, and, although she didn’t fully understand it, she could tell it was out of control.

Guy was in love with her, and it seemed like it had been that way for a long time. That alone was flabbergasting, but on top of that he thought she loved him. And the reason was her books.

He was mentally ill, she realized, and in the way that some people heard voices or saw secret codes all around them, he saw in her books a secret message, and his belief it was the truth was so profound that he was prepared to do all this as a result.

She tried to think through what he was seeing in her books.

Still Waters, in which a woman marries a man she doesn’t want to because he knows something secret about her and she has to resort to desperate measures – involving another man – to escape him. Deep Cover, a love story in which a young couple fail to recognize they are meant to be together and marry other people, only to find each other when they are much older. The Knot, in which a wife, suddenly ill, discovers that her husband is not who he said he was, a discovery which changed everything for her and put her in danger. Danger she is rescued from when an old friend helps her out.

And then This Is Not the End, her most recent book, about a new mother suffering from post-natal depression, and, in the deepest stretch of her depression, questioning whether she even wants her child.

But deciding she does.

Evidently, Guy thought they were about her. He thought they were autobiographical. But there was more than that.

He thought they were a message from her to him. A woman forced into marriage, a wife in danger, a mother who questioned her motherhood. A coded plea. A cry for help.

A call to arms.

And he had responded by rescuing her.

But that left a question. Why kidnap the kids? Why not just abduct her?

She didn’t know; she was sure he would tell her in time. For now she needed to be calm and figure out how to get away.

Annabelle looked out of the window at the lake. It was visible through a stand of tall trees. Pines maybe, but certainly evergreens. All the other trees around were deciduous.

She wondered if the pines had been planted to provide a year-round screen, shielding the house from the lake. Surely Guy had not gone to that much trouble?

She pictured a boat slowing to a stop by the shingle beach and rocking gently as two people got out for a picnic, then looking up at the window and seeing her frantically waving.