Sweat pours from my head. I was wrong. She is a monster. They both are.

My brain is a jumble of thoughts that slowly start to arrange themselves. So Ross was one of the “noisy urchins” my dad used to complain about. My parents were an older childless couple when they lived on Riley Road. No wonder they were irritated by all the kids on the estate. Mum and Sheena’s friendship was already on its last legs when Mum tried to talk to her about Catherine’s feral behavior. Meanwhile, Sheena was getting close to the woman next door. Ross’s aunt Jessie. So when she found out about Mum and Mick, I can only imagine what the fallout was like and the sort of things the young Catherine and Ross might have heard.

Catherine leans over me. “I only ever wanted the truth about how Alice died. And then I wanted Ross to break your heart in two, like you broke mine. And my mum’s.” She points to the beads of blood soaking into the carpet between my feet. “All this is a bonus,” she says. “You might have Ross, but you’re not going to have this baby. Soon you’ll know what it’s like to lose someone precious. Not that it’ll come anywhere near the pain you’ve caused me. I had thirteen years with Alice.”

I want to punch her in the face. I want to pull her hair out and claw at her eyes, but that tearing sensation is back. I double over in pain.

“Call a fucking ambulance!” I scream, but she just laughs. A vile, hateful laugh.

“You think that little twinge is bad. You wait till the big ones start rolling in.”

Oh dear God. She’s unhinged. She must be. Something Mum said comes back to me. She said Sheena was always blowing hot and cold and that it wasn’t her fault—she was ill. What if she was ill long before Mum betrayed her? What if her demons came from something a lot more serious than heartbreak? The betrayal would have been devastating, of course it would, but surely her depression wouldn’t have lasted all those years? Did she have some kind of personality disorder, too?

Does Catherine suffer from the same thing? My brain frantically searches for the right words to reason with her. The words that will make her help me.

“But this is Ross’s baby, too,” I say. “You might hate me, but you love him, don’t you?”

“He’s made his choice,” she says. “And it wasn’t me.” Her voice almost breaks. Is this the chink in her armor?

Her shoulders slump. All that righteous anger she’s been holding in her body, all that venom, has drained away as if a valve has been opened. She wrings her hands and sways backward and forward on the balls of her feet.